I have a disorganised pile of assorted letters, statements, etc., that I need to keep and may or may not need access to at some point in the future.
I have ordered a scanner with the intention of scanning them and putting them in the cloud. Now my problem is how best to organise them. My initial thought was just to create PDFs and drag them into folders, and that might well be the best way. It also occurs to me that AI may be the way to go and there may be a ready-made solution somewhere.
A search brings up a number of commercial products aimed at businesses that are too expensive and too complicated for a strictly domestic problem. Can anyone point me in the right direction, please?
This is one of those things that are really up to you. However you decide to organize them, make sure you can understand it, and hopefully someone else can figure it out after a bit of thought.
I do a lot of genealogy, and I help others too, and there can be a lot of documents. Here’s how I sort and store my work:
I do scan each document as a .pdf, unless they are a photo and I will scan as a .tiff, downloaded things are usually .jpg
I name my files buy SURNAME First what the document is
so if I have a letter I might do:
HEAD Edward letter from Head Bruce 14 Aug 2026
A photo would be:
HEAD Edward family [year if known, and other people]
A document:
HEAD Edward 2020 census
It does take a bit of time at first, but I can find thing pretty quickly. I also have folders for each person, so if I’m looking for something I know pretty much were to find it.
I suppose you could do something similar:
letters: ToName FromName Date
statements: Company Name Date
I don’t think there is a consensus on how to name files and people ask on genealogy sites all the time.
Yes, that’s more or less what I had in mind. Pretty much a computer version of a filing cabinet. I just wondered if there was a “magic” solution that would save time and effort, especially at the start.
if you’re going to have dates in the file names, use YYYY-MM-DD format so things sort when listed.
Also, decide if you want to organize by date, in which cases nested folders by year and potentially month can work nicely, or content, in which case see my suggestion about date format.
I suggest first considering how you will need to find the papers in the future, then working back from there.
For example, if you want to archive papers “just in case”, but expect to rarely search them, then I wouldn’t organize them at all (or organize very, very lightly).
This might sound counter-intuitive, but you spend less time searching for one file per year than organizing everything up-front while scanning.
Or a hybrid approach might make sense where you split your pile into a small set of things you will need frequently and want organized and a big set of things you won’t need and just want archived. Then use different approaches.
If you scan in as PDF, there should be good index/searching software out there. You might be able to get by with searching for “electrical bill 2020”.
I’d do it in FileMaker, which lets you embed a PDF into a container field. Add fields for date and description and category and you’ve got a combo filing system and searchable index.
I do that, except I use YYYYMMDD (i.e., the same thing without the dashes). For my the various bank and investment accounts, I have separate folders, with each containing the monthly statements named YYYYMM. So the folder for my savings account has files named 202607, 202606, etc.
The advantage, of course, is that an alphanumeric sort puts the bank statements in date order.
Aside from the file organization issue, you need to control the size of your pdf files. Any scanner you get will probably default to settings that produce big files that will gobble up too much memory. You’ll need to explore the settings and run test scans till you get a good balance between quality and file size.
Another point: getting a flatbed versus automatic document feeder scanner. The flatbed would probably be cheaper but scanning all that stuff one page at a time is soooooooo tedious. It makes sense to scan documents in groups: say a year’s worth of electric bills, for example, or a tax return, into one pdf file, which goes way faster with an ADF.
Another size and quality issue: Anything black and white should be scanned in the grayscale setting rather than black and white. Try scanning a B&W photo on each setting and you’ll see what I mean. Also, if you’re scanning two-sided documents, in B&W any text on the reverse side might bleed through enough to degrade the image.
Absolutely, and our OP would be well advised to go that route before getting started, but if some of the stuff (e.g., letters) aren’t downloadable, then my advice stands.
You want to organize them so YOU can find them later. So think about when & why you will want to look for them later, and then organize them to make that easier. Whatever organizing makes sense to you is what will work best.
Spend some time coming up with names that will be useful clues later. Make patterns so that similar things have similar names. For things that repeat regularly (like bank statements, bills, paychecks), include the date in the name (always CCYYMMDD format).
Expect that you will get partly thru this, and decide on a better naming pattern – so you might have to rename a bunch of files. Do it! Takes much less time than you will spend searching otherwise.
While there are many batch renaming utilities out there, it’s fairly easy to do with the standard DOS Batch commands: DIR /B for a file list, redirect via >“filename.bat”, then text edit that file to RENAME commands for each desired file, and run the batch file.
This will take a while, but in the end should be worthwhile. I did this a while ago for many years of records, and since I have found I can find things much easier on my computer than finding the original document. A recent legal issue was made much easier because I could retrieve my bank statement for August, 1979. There is also the advantage of freeing up a lot of storage space – once these records are safely digitized, you can discard the originals. Surprising how much room that gives you!
This probably shouldn’t even need saying, but [donning my Captain Obvious uniform] store every file in more than one place, so a hard drive failing or other disaster doesn’t wipe it all out.
In which case it is easy to log in to their system to see the statements. The documents I want to keep are from organisations that don’t allow this kind of access. For example, I have a number of letters relating to tax that emphasise that they should be retained. I haven’t had printed bank statements for years - it’s all online.
In my experience, the companies only store prior statements for a few years, so by downloading them, I am able to store them going back twenty years, in the case of some accounts.
A slightly more geeky solution, but I run Paperless NGX on my local storage server. It does things like OCR indexing, populates metadata (like date uploaded and source), and allows tagging documents.
It has a nice app that lets me quickly scan receipts/letters/statements with my phone, and catches attachments to a defined mailbox.
Much easier than manual processing. There are a number of options for implementing Paperless, but YMMV. For me, the value is that all the data is local, not in the cloud. But that is also an option.
Boy, howdy (as they say in Texas). I finally purged most all the correspondence and only kept mostly official documents like birth certs and the like. My niece was kind enough to upload all of my family photos and documents to Ancestry and link them to the appropriate family members. It’s a relief to know they’re safe and accessible. Speaking of helping others, I helped a few people on this board years ago via the messaging feature.
As for home document filing, like car maintenance, house maintenance, appliance instruction booklets, etc., I just used a standard filing cabinet and labeled the folders appropriately. Easy access, and even my wife can find them.
For things like user manuals for appliances and other things in my house, I try to download the PDF versions, which I keep in a folder called manuals. If your appliances are from the last decade or so, the instructions booklets and manuals are almost certainly available in this form. My goal is to minimize the amount of paper I need to store.
