6 ms·

What I don't really understand is, do people really have than many physical documents that they need to keep track of, that such a system is worth it? E.g. to f

What I don't really understand is, do people really have than many physical documents that they need to keep track of, that such a system is worth it? E.g. to file my taxes (in Belgium), I think I only ever need a few (maybe even only 1 or 2) digital documents. Or is this more a mentality thing? I know my parents have folders and folders, e.g. my father kept all expense notes from his work even after retirement... I throw everything away once it's handled.

kristofferR 3y ago
In some countries like Germany, the government still communicates with its citizens by snail mail. Important documents are usually physical there. They are one of the least developed countries in Europe with digitalization, they are far behind.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
viraptor 3y ago
It's not just for physical documents. I have payslips which may be useful in the future, but are would be really hard to recover when I leave the company. Any invoices which come to my email. Any bank documents which exist in a vaguely named "account updates" email. And many other things which could be possible to find in the future, but are much better in paperless with appropriate tags and OCR. But yeah, then there are for example the bank account contract updates which come by physical mail only. > expense notes (...) I throw everything away once it's handled. Don't know about your location, but I need to keep the tax related documents for 5 years in case of an audit.
_frkl 3y ago
Can't speak for physical documents in general, but personally I really appreciate paperless-ngx for it's general document indexing/storage. Being able to scan and ocr physical documents (usually using the camera on my mobile phone) is very nice, but I mainly use it with pdfs that paperless automatically fetches, ocrs (if necessary), and tags from my email inbox, or which I copy into a specific local folder which gets synced with paperless. Getting all my invoices from last year to prepare taxes is now just a simple query in the paperless UI, the result would be about 95% digital and 5% physical documents, probably. Of course I could do all that old-school using filesystem folders, but having all my documents indexed and searchable in a single place was definitely worth the (small) effort of setting it all up and keep it running.
- kristofferR 3y ago
  I don't understand what you mean with prepare taxes. I just add all purchases/sales right when they happen in my accounting app and attach the invoice PDF. Then when I have to file taxes, I export the correct numbers. Are you doing your bookkeeping in Excel or something?
  - _frkl 3y ago
    This is just for my personal taxes, no accounting involved. I just get all the relevant stuff together once a year. Of course it's not 10s of 100s of documents, but still enough so it would take me some time to get everything together manually. Also it was just meant as an example, paperless is generally useful (to me) in situations where I need to access somehow related documents, like traveling and such, or searching my documents for some information. As I said, there are other systems and ways to do this, but for me this is the one that stuck.
dividedbyzero 3y ago
Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real. That makes for folders upon folders of documents and it's actually worse than back in the 20th century because generating and mailing documents has become way easier and cheaper, so things that would have been a one-page typewritten letter back then now are five ten-page ones full of automatically generated crap. One lengthy illness in the family alone filled hundreds of pages and it can be very hard to know what can be thrown away at which point.
- schlowmo 3y ago
  > Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real. I'm sorry to tell you that is a an oversimplification and especially for documenting expenses as a company/freelancer it's kind of worse. Last time I checked if you want to follow the tax law to the word you're not allowed to change the medium: If an invoice came as a paper copy (e.g. by snail mail), this paper copy is the original. If you scan it the digital version isn't. If an invoice came as a digital document (e.g. a PDF by email), this digital document is the original - a printed version of that digital document isn't. So if a tax inspector asks for "originals" it's technically almost impossible to provide them in the sense of the law. If even a tax inspector would care is another question.
  - germanier 3y ago
    It's perfectly legal (and common) for a decade now to scan documents and destroy the paper original as long as you follow some guidelines. Keyword is "ersetzendes Scannen". And yes, they care about those rules and that you provide "originals" according to that definition - in particular that you didn't modify digital documents in any way. You can (and should) comply with that and there are service providers to help if you are to small to set that up yourself.
    - schlowmo 3y ago
      Thanks, today I learned about "ersetzendes Scannen". I just checked and it's exactly a decade (2013) since it's allowed which coincidetally is the year when I started working as a freelancer (and I have to care about such rules). I admit that my last paragraph was kind of hyperbole, but I never heard (at least from other freelancers) of a tax inspector which wasn't happy with either everything printed or everything digital. I guess they really start to care if they suspect something fishy.
NoboruWataya 3y ago
I'm quite paranoid about throwing stuff away so for me it's at least partly a mentality thing. I probably save a lot more than I need but it gives me piece of mind to know that it's all there. There are some things that it is very helpful to have easy access to, like utility bills and bank statements (which I occasionally need for KYC stuff) or ID documents.
yunohn 3y ago
In the Netherlands, government bodies are regularly pushing everything they can to a digital inbox - which I vastly prefer. My simple, single-employer yearly income tax is all pre-calculated. Further, deductions for mortgage interest, healthcare, studies, etc are all pre-filled as much as possible. I think you only need to upload documents for complicated sitations or audits? Of course, I still quickly download my year-end bank/salary/mortgage statements and cross-verify the tax departments numbers. The whole process takes at most a few hours. IME Germany has significantly more hard-copy requirements.
- t0mas88 3y ago
  You never need to upload the documents in the Netherlands, their software doesn't have such an option. But technically you're expected to keep the documents at least until you receive the "definitieve aanslag" and if you're nitpicking I think there is a 7 year term for the tax services to come back on your filed taxes and change things or demand proof. Practically that doesn't happen if you accepted their pre-filled numbers and they match your employers. But if you're a freelancer or other non-standard case I would keep digital copies for a few years just to be sure.
  - yunohn 3y ago
    > You never need to upload the documents in the Netherlands, their software doesn't have such an option. Ah, interesting. I just assumed my situation never triggered it.
t0mas88 3y ago
Depends on your tax situation. For my private taxes it's maybe 3 or 4 documents and those from the bank etc have all gone PDF anyway. But when I was a freelancer I used a document scanning system provided by my bookkeeper. It worked similar to this open source thing, scan to PDF, automatic OCR and classification. Needed it because many invoices still arrived on paper, and receipts for restaurants etc I usually took a picture to upload.
Macha 3y ago
So here's an example where it came in useful to have back documents: I recently purchased a house. As part of the process, I needed to apply for a mortgage. The bank wanted a statement from my employer about my income from them, along with my last 2 complete years tax documents. The bank had an inquiry. My employer had said my salary + bonus was X, but in the first of these two years, my tax documents said my income from my employer that year was 2.5X. The extra 1.5X was due to the employer being bought out and some change of control terms in the RSUs causing immediate payout of what would normally have been paid out over 4 years. Since I kept the documents of the RSU terms and the payslips, I could provide these to the bank to clear the matter up. Notably, had I not kept my own copy of these documents, I could not have gone back to my employer for new copies. Due to the change of control, they had changed payroll vendors, and had eventually terminated the contract with the old vendor, so I could not have gotten a payslip from 1.5 years ago. Similarly, in the move to the new owner's HR system, the company had lost many of their records of agreements with employee's, including contracts etc., so it's not clear they would still have the terms of the RSUs, especially since the change of control payout rendered this a "completed" transaction. And later events made it clear that they did not have, e.g. a copy of my employment contract. Similarly, if I ever had had a dispute over the terms of those contracts - if I hadn't kept a copy of the contract, and the company definitely hadn't kept theirs, any dispute would have been my word against theirs.
- iamwpj 3y ago
  Companies are legally required to keep payroll records for multiple years (depends on where you live, though I doubt most places are less than 3-4). This is ok advice, but these systems don't just work like this. If you didn't have the documentation the bank would likely take your approved tax filings as evidence and move on with their day. In a real contract dispute your copy of a contact from your documents isn't notably different in the eyes of the court than one from your employer. They're both notarized and if there's a dispute between them there is established processes. Aside from some titles or etc., historical filing ownership is typically relegated to the document originators.
kstrauser 3y ago
I guess it’s partly a mentality thing for me. I’ve had numerous cases of sadness that I couldn’t produce a necessary document, and gladness that I was able to pull up something presumed long lost. For me, it’s easier to save everything “just in case”. It all adds up to less than 50GB so it’s not an enormous amount of data to store by current standards. Seriously, a couple cases of “sorry, I don’t have proof to back up that tax deduction” or “hey, here’s the receipt proving that our TV is still covered by warranty!” make it all worthwhile.
krupan 3y ago
In my experience, no, you don't need this. The few things I keep just go in folders named for the year under my Documents folder, and they are given descriptive filenames like paystub-2022-10-15.pdf, or companyA-w-2.pdf. In the rare cases where I need to go back to those (like for a loan application or doing taxes) it's easy enough to find them.
esafak 3y ago
I would be in favor of not scanning them, forgetting about them, then throwing them away when I eventually see them again and deciding I did not miss them.
catlover76 3y ago
Seriously. People in this thread are describing some setups that momentarily seem cool in theory, but are almost certainly overkill for personal use.
- whateveracct 3y ago
  Luckily, running paperless-ngx on my NixOS desktop is trivial. And it was also trivial to make it accessible over an avahi name on my local network. So it was kind of a "why not" sort of thing.
  - nh2 3y ago
    Indeed, the NixOS module works well. I just tried it: services.paperless.enable = true; In contrast to Docker, it composes well with other things on the same system (e.g. the Samba server already set up to receive documents from my scanner), and I get automatic security updates for it.
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  It depends. We had this ridiculous money-making scheme from the Federal Government a few years back called "Robodebt", which basically amounted to sending demands to pay back welfare money that they claim was incorrectly claimed ... long after the retention period for the paperwork. Conveniently they declined to show their working for the so-called incorrect claims. Most people didn't keep their timesheets and records, and then couldn't prove they weren't overpaid, and were supposedly liable for the "debt". Some people comitted suicide over it. If you had your records, you probably wouldn't have lost any sleep over it, much less your life.
ipsi 3y ago
Kinda - at the moment I'm receiving _a lot_ of documents, mostly as PDFs via E-Mail (some the original digital version, some scans of physical copies), but some via post as well. I've only added documents I've received this year (plus a couple of dozen documents going further back), and I've got ~250 in there, with a total of ~2.5m words (although I think word-count is a fuzzy concept in German). I've posted a top level comment in more detail, but yeah, it's helpful to me.
faiD9Eet 3y ago
You are right, you do not want to lookup documents that old, it is a waste of time... ... unless you are a German and the state asks for your time sheets three years in the past because you've gotten child support and are requested to prove your working hours. ... unless you happen to have an accident and your insurance is fighting with another insurance who's gonna pay and they ask you about the incident two years later ... unless you end up in a contract fight with the postal operator, that can take a year of mailing before being settled. Some correspondences take years and only add a mailing every few months. You would like to have a thread-like view -- as in an electronic mail. That is the strength of document management systems.
djbusby 3y ago
I have a small business in USA. For federal business taxes I need 6-7 documents. Then that process creates other documents I need for personal taxes, which also requires 6-8 more documents. So, I'm roughly 20 important documents per year for federal taxes. Nexus in 3 states, adds more. And save them all for 7 years. The other end of the spectrum in USA is filling with the 1040-EZ which is like a 3-4 document process.
whateveracct 3y ago
It's nice to throw papers away without worrying about it. Or to archive instruction manuals for stuff I own - paperless is the first place I look (its search is nice).
SoftTalker 3y ago
> I throw everything away once it's handled That's the Marie Kondo approach. I feel the same way. I'm not sure that digitizing everything really removes clutter. It removes the physical paper, yes. But not the mental overhead of knowing that you have all those documents. Some people obviously have a need to retain documents for things like business expenses that will be deducted from income. I don't have any of that. I get my W2s and 1099s and do my taxes. I throw all that in one folder and put it in a box in the closet. That's good enough for my purposes; I see no need to expend the time and mental energy necessary to scan and tag (even automatically) every receipt, utility bill, and other statements I receive. Why? I'll never look at them again.
bradknowles 3y ago
In the US, the IRS can audit your taxes going back at least seven years. So, you should keep at least seven years worth of the documents that you might need to produce during an audit. And there are some important documents you want to keep longer than that -- birth certificates, wedding certificates, death certificates, documentation around the house you buy, documentation around your car, any personal health documents you keep, etc.... So, you'll want to have electronic copies of all that, and ideally backed up to an offsite location, in case you have a fire in your house. If you at least have electronic copies of those documents, even if you lose the original document in a fire, there's a good chance you can use that information to get new certified copies sent to you by the appropriate city/state government in question. So, yeah, this can become a thing that needs to be carefully monitored and managed over the decades.

kristofferR 3y ago

In some countries like Germany, the government still communicates with its citizens by snail mail. Important documents are usually physical there. They are one of the least developed countries in Europe with digitalization, they are far behind.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

viraptor 3y ago

It's not just for physical documents. I have payslips which may be useful in the future, but are would be really hard to recover when I leave the company. Any invoices which come to my email. Any bank documents which exist in a vaguely named "account updates" email. And many other things which could be possible to find in the future, but are much better in paperless with appropriate tags and OCR. But yeah, then there are for example the bank account contract updates which come by physical mail only. > expense notes (...) I throw everything away once it's handled. Don't know about your location, but I need to keep the tax related documents for 5 years in case of an audit.

_frkl 3y ago

Can't speak for physical documents in general, but personally I really appreciate paperless-ngx for it's general document indexing/storage. Being able to scan and ocr physical documents (usually using the camera on my mobile phone) is very nice, but I mainly use it with pdfs that paperless automatically fetches, ocrs (if necessary), and tags from my email inbox, or which I copy into a specific local folder which gets synced with paperless. Getting all my invoices from last year to prepare taxes is now just a simple query in the paperless UI, the result would be about 95% digital and 5% physical documents, probably. Of course I could do all that old-school using filesystem folders, but having all my documents indexed and searchable in a single place was definitely worth the (small) effort of setting it all up and keep it running.

kristofferR 3y ago
I don't understand what you mean with prepare taxes. I just add all purchases/sales right when they happen in my accounting app and attach the invoice PDF. Then when I have to file taxes, I export the correct numbers. Are you doing your bookkeeping in Excel or something?
- _frkl 3y ago
  This is just for my personal taxes, no accounting involved. I just get all the relevant stuff together once a year. Of course it's not 10s of 100s of documents, but still enough so it would take me some time to get everything together manually. Also it was just meant as an example, paperless is generally useful (to me) in situations where I need to access somehow related documents, like traveling and such, or searching my documents for some information. As I said, there are other systems and ways to do this, but for me this is the one that stuck.

dividedbyzero 3y ago

Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real. That makes for folders upon folders of documents and it's actually worse than back in the 20th century because generating and mailing documents has become way easier and cheaper, so things that would have been a one-page typewritten letter back then now are five ten-page ones full of automatically generated crap. One lengthy illness in the family alone filled hundreds of pages and it can be very hard to know what can be thrown away at which point.

schlowmo 3y ago
> Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real. I'm sorry to tell you that is a an oversimplification and especially for documenting expenses as a company/freelancer it's kind of worse. Last time I checked if you want to follow the tax law to the word you're not allowed to change the medium: If an invoice came as a paper copy (e.g. by snail mail), this paper copy is the original. If you scan it the digital version isn't. If an invoice came as a digital document (e.g. a PDF by email), this digital document is the original - a printed version of that digital document isn't. So if a tax inspector asks for "originals" it's technically almost impossible to provide them in the sense of the law. If even a tax inspector would care is another question.
- germanier 3y ago
  It's perfectly legal (and common) for a decade now to scan documents and destroy the paper original as long as you follow some guidelines. Keyword is "ersetzendes Scannen". And yes, they care about those rules and that you provide "originals" according to that definition - in particular that you didn't modify digital documents in any way. You can (and should) comply with that and there are service providers to help if you are to small to set that up yourself.
  - schlowmo 3y ago
    Thanks, today I learned about "ersetzendes Scannen". I just checked and it's exactly a decade (2013) since it's allowed which coincidetally is the year when I started working as a freelancer (and I have to care about such rules). I admit that my last paragraph was kind of hyperbole, but I never heard (at least from other freelancers) of a tax inspector which wasn't happy with either everything printed or everything digital. I guess they really start to care if they suspect something fishy.

NoboruWataya 3y ago

I'm quite paranoid about throwing stuff away so for me it's at least partly a mentality thing. I probably save a lot more than I need but it gives me piece of mind to know that it's all there. There are some things that it is very helpful to have easy access to, like utility bills and bank statements (which I occasionally need for KYC stuff) or ID documents.

yunohn 3y ago

In the Netherlands, government bodies are regularly pushing everything they can to a digital inbox - which I vastly prefer. My simple, single-employer yearly income tax is all pre-calculated. Further, deductions for mortgage interest, healthcare, studies, etc are all pre-filled as much as possible. I think you only need to upload documents for complicated sitations or audits? Of course, I still quickly download my year-end bank/salary/mortgage statements and cross-verify the tax departments numbers. The whole process takes at most a few hours. IME Germany has significantly more hard-copy requirements.

t0mas88 3y ago
You never need to upload the documents in the Netherlands, their software doesn't have such an option. But technically you're expected to keep the documents at least until you receive the "definitieve aanslag" and if you're nitpicking I think there is a 7 year term for the tax services to come back on your filed taxes and change things or demand proof. Practically that doesn't happen if you accepted their pre-filled numbers and they match your employers. But if you're a freelancer or other non-standard case I would keep digital copies for a few years just to be sure.
- yunohn 3y ago
  > You never need to upload the documents in the Netherlands, their software doesn't have such an option. Ah, interesting. I just assumed my situation never triggered it.

t0mas88 3y ago

Depends on your tax situation. For my private taxes it's maybe 3 or 4 documents and those from the bank etc have all gone PDF anyway. But when I was a freelancer I used a document scanning system provided by my bookkeeper. It worked similar to this open source thing, scan to PDF, automatic OCR and classification. Needed it because many invoices still arrived on paper, and receipts for restaurants etc I usually took a picture to upload.

Macha 3y ago

So here's an example where it came in useful to have back documents: I recently purchased a house. As part of the process, I needed to apply for a mortgage. The bank wanted a statement from my employer about my income from them, along with my last 2 complete years tax documents. The bank had an inquiry. My employer had said my salary + bonus was X, but in the first of these two years, my tax documents said my income from my employer that year was 2.5X. The extra 1.5X was due to the employer being bought out and some change of control terms in the RSUs causing immediate payout of what would normally have been paid out over 4 years. Since I kept the documents of the RSU terms and the payslips, I could provide these to the bank to clear the matter up. Notably, had I not kept my own copy of these documents, I could not have gone back to my employer for new copies. Due to the change of control, they had changed payroll vendors, and had eventually terminated the contract with the old vendor, so I could not have gotten a payslip from 1.5 years ago. Similarly, in the move to the new owner's HR system, the company had lost many of their records of agreements with employee's, including contracts etc., so it's not clear they would still have the terms of the RSUs, especially since the change of control payout rendered this a "completed" transaction. And later events made it clear that they did not have, e.g. a copy of my employment contract. Similarly, if I ever had had a dispute over the terms of those contracts - if I hadn't kept a copy of the contract, and the company definitely hadn't kept theirs, any dispute would have been my word against theirs.

iamwpj 3y ago
Companies are legally required to keep payroll records for multiple years (depends on where you live, though I doubt most places are less than 3-4). This is ok advice, but these systems don't just work like this. If you didn't have the documentation the bank would likely take your approved tax filings as evidence and move on with their day. In a real contract dispute your copy of a contact from your documents isn't notably different in the eyes of the court than one from your employer. They're both notarized and if there's a dispute between them there is established processes. Aside from some titles or etc., historical filing ownership is typically relegated to the document originators.

kstrauser 3y ago

I guess it’s partly a mentality thing for me. I’ve had numerous cases of sadness that I couldn’t produce a necessary document, and gladness that I was able to pull up something presumed long lost. For me, it’s easier to save everything “just in case”. It all adds up to less than 50GB so it’s not an enormous amount of data to store by current standards. Seriously, a couple cases of “sorry, I don’t have proof to back up that tax deduction” or “hey, here’s the receipt proving that our TV is still covered by warranty!” make it all worthwhile.

krupan 3y ago

In my experience, no, you don't need this. The few things I keep just go in folders named for the year under my Documents folder, and they are given descriptive filenames like paystub-2022-10-15.pdf, or companyA-w-2.pdf. In the rare cases where I need to go back to those (like for a loan application or doing taxes) it's easy enough to find them.

esafak 3y ago

I would be in favor of not scanning them, forgetting about them, then throwing them away when I eventually see them again and deciding I did not miss them.

catlover76 3y ago

Seriously. People in this thread are describing some setups that momentarily seem cool in theory, but are almost certainly overkill for personal use.

whateveracct 3y ago
Luckily, running paperless-ngx on my NixOS desktop is trivial. And it was also trivial to make it accessible over an avahi name on my local network. So it was kind of a "why not" sort of thing.
- nh2 3y ago
  Indeed, the NixOS module works well. I just tried it: services.paperless.enable = true; In contrast to Docker, it composes well with other things on the same system (e.g. the Samba server already set up to receive documents from my scanner), and I get automatic security updates for it.
MrVandemar 3y ago
It depends. We had this ridiculous money-making scheme from the Federal Government a few years back called "Robodebt", which basically amounted to sending demands to pay back welfare money that they claim was incorrectly claimed ... long after the retention period for the paperwork. Conveniently they declined to show their working for the so-called incorrect claims. Most people didn't keep their timesheets and records, and then couldn't prove they weren't overpaid, and were supposedly liable for the "debt". Some people comitted suicide over it. If you had your records, you probably wouldn't have lost any sleep over it, much less your life.

ipsi 3y ago

Kinda - at the moment I'm receiving _a lot_ of documents, mostly as PDFs via E-Mail (some the original digital version, some scans of physical copies), but some via post as well. I've only added documents I've received this year (plus a couple of dozen documents going further back), and I've got ~250 in there, with a total of ~2.5m words (although I think word-count is a fuzzy concept in German). I've posted a top level comment in more detail, but yeah, it's helpful to me.

faiD9Eet 3y ago

You are right, you do not want to lookup documents that old, it is a waste of time... ... unless you are a German and the state asks for your time sheets three years in the past because you've gotten child support and are requested to prove your working hours. ... unless you happen to have an accident and your insurance is fighting with another insurance who's gonna pay and they ask you about the incident two years later ... unless you end up in a contract fight with the postal operator, that can take a year of mailing before being settled. Some correspondences take years and only add a mailing every few months. You would like to have a thread-like view -- as in an electronic mail. That is the strength of document management systems.

djbusby 3y ago

I have a small business in USA. For federal business taxes I need 6-7 documents. Then that process creates other documents I need for personal taxes, which also requires 6-8 more documents. So, I'm roughly 20 important documents per year for federal taxes. Nexus in 3 states, adds more. And save them all for 7 years. The other end of the spectrum in USA is filling with the 1040-EZ which is like a 3-4 document process.

whateveracct 3y ago

It's nice to throw papers away without worrying about it. Or to archive instruction manuals for stuff I own - paperless is the first place I look (its search is nice).

SoftTalker 3y ago

> I throw everything away once it's handled That's the Marie Kondo approach. I feel the same way. I'm not sure that digitizing everything really removes clutter. It removes the physical paper, yes. But not the mental overhead of knowing that you have all those documents. Some people obviously have a need to retain documents for things like business expenses that will be deducted from income. I don't have any of that. I get my W2s and 1099s and do my taxes. I throw all that in one folder and put it in a box in the closet. That's good enough for my purposes; I see no need to expend the time and mental energy necessary to scan and tag (even automatically) every receipt, utility bill, and other statements I receive. Why? I'll never look at them again.

bradknowles 3y ago

In the US, the IRS can audit your taxes going back at least seven years. So, you should keep at least seven years worth of the documents that you might need to produce during an audit. And there are some important documents you want to keep longer than that -- birth certificates, wedding certificates, death certificates, documentation around the house you buy, documentation around your car, any personal health documents you keep, etc.... So, you'll want to have electronic copies of all that, and ideally backed up to an offsite location, in case you have a fire in your house. If you at least have electronic copies of those documents, even if you lose the original document in a fire, there's a good chance you can use that information to get new certified copies sent to you by the appropriate city/state government in question. So, yeah, this can become a thing that needs to be carefully monitored and managed over the decades.