Behind the Scenes at Paperarchive

I have a main job, run a small business, and handle most of the back office for our family household. That means documents. A lot of them. Invoices in email, contracts as PDFs, letters on paper, forms photographed on my phone. Some belong to the business, others to our family, others to taxes, investments, or rental properties. In Germany, this is made worse by the ongoing mix of analog and digital bureaucracy.

I tried to get this under control. First with Evernote, then with Dropbox, later with Google Drive, and eventually with Paperless-ngx, an open-source paperless solution. Different tools, same outcome. The documents were stored, but still hard to find. Going paperless wasn't enough - I needed intelligent document management. Search was limited to keywords, not to what I actually wanted to search for.

At the same time, document management itself was effort-heavy. Maintaining metadata, setting categories, adjusting folder structures. This takes time, and in a family household, that time realistically only exists in the evening, once the kids are in bed. That time is limited and valuable. It was not something I wanted to spend manually managing documents. In the end, I still could not simply search for a document using natural language. When I once spent an entire evening looking for a single insurance document, it was clear this could not continue.