Learn how to turn your paper clutter into a searchable digital archive with Paperless-ngx.
Think of it as your personal, private Google for all your documents. It takes your scanned papers, receipts, letters, and digital files (like Word docs and PDFs) and makes them fully searchable. Your data is always stored locally on our server, never shared with anyone.
The magic is that it automatically reads the text on every page, so you can find what you need just by typing a keyword, a date, or a name.
The key to a useful archive is good organization. Paperless gives you three main tools to do this:
This is the person or organization the document is related to. Be consistent! For example, always use "Bank of America" instead of sometimes using "BofA".
Examples: "AT&T", "City of Irvine", "Dr. Smith's Office", "IRS".
This describes the kind of document it is. You can create any types you want.
Examples: "Utility Bill", "Paystub", "Medical Record", "Car Title", "Recipe", "Manual".
Tags are flexible labels you can add to group related documents, even if they have different correspondents or types. You can add as many as you want!
Examples: "taxes-2024", "house-repairs", "vacation-italy-2025", "important".
Once you're comfortable, you can explore some more powerful features.
The search bar is very powerful. It auto-completes words it finds in your documents and highlights the matches in the search results. You can even search for "More like this" to find similar documents.
If you often search for the same thing (e.g., all utility bills from this year), you can save that search as a "View". This view can then be added to your dashboard for one-click access.
It's possible to have Paperless automatically pull in attachments from your email. If this is something you're interested in, let me know and I can help set it up for your account.