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.