# How do you manage your (financial) documents?
**URL:** https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106
**Category:** Life Hacking
**Created:** [September 23, 2021, 3:08pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106 "2021-09-23T15:08:28Z")
**Posts on this page:** 13
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Mobius](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/Mobius)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2021, 8:57pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/24 "2021-09-26T20:57:57Z")
FWIW in my personal case I favor a self-hosted approach and scan paper documents as they come in using the [CamScanner](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intsig.camscanner) Pro Android app, share the resulting file to the [Syncthing app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.catfriend1.syncthingandroid&hl=en_US&gl=US) which uploads it to a specific folder on my NAS, which will then leverage the [OCRmyPDF](https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF) Python script to automatically OCR the PDF and move it to a year/month-based directory. I am then able to use the [Ambar](https://ambar.cloud/) software to do full-text search on any document I have on my NAS. The quick scanning/OCR procedure makes it a no-brainer to scan the documents, and having full-text search makes it very easy to find documents when I need them (in a question of seconds). The software stack on the NAS is configured using docker-compose.
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### Author:  [@Ed\_Waadt](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/Ed_Waadt)
#### Post date: [September 27, 2021, 7:52am UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/25 "2021-09-27T07:52:44Z")
> [@Mobius](#):
>
> leverage the [OCRmyPDF](https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF) Python script to automatically OCR the PDF and move it to a year/month-based directory
Thank you!
Now I have a new project thanks to you š
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### Author:  [@SwissDan](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/SwissDan)
#### Post date: [September 27, 2021, 12:37pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/26 "2021-09-27T12:37:33Z")
If youāre into self-hosting solutions, you might be interested in [https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng](https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng)
OCR included. I donāt use it, but heard a lot of good about it.
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### Author:  [@Mobius](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/Mobius)
#### Post date: [September 27, 2021, 9:29pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/27 "2021-09-27T21:29:34Z")
That was one of the many solutions I tried, but never managed to get it to work properly. These were my requirements, by the way:
- Self-hosted;
- Quick to import and to search PDFs;
- Use tesseract OCR as that is the gold-standard of open-source OCR for me;
- No state stored that cannot be rebuilt from the PDF themselves (I donāt want to own a separate datastore). Some solutions import PDFs and then you lose sight of them and everything must be done within the tool itself. No thanks.
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### Author:  [@Polo](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/Polo)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2021, 3:39pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/28 "2021-10-03T15:39:47Z")
- I scan all documents and destroy the papers, DL the ebill bills etc.
- Sort them in different folders (assurances, prƩvoyance, mƩnage, impƓts etc.) on a cloud (I do not use the internal drive of the laptop so that they stay available from every device when not at home).
- Every time I do a bit of admin work (1-2 times a month approx), I duplicate the folders on an other cloud and on a external harddrive.
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### Author:  [@Mobius](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/Mobius)
#### Post date: [October 13, 2021, 9:46pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/29 "2021-10-13T21:46:24Z")
Coincidently, my Ambar server recently started having issues with expired SSL certificates and consuming some CPU every 5 minutes, so I started looking for a replacement. I have now replaced it with [pagerless-ng](https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng) (a much better maintained fork of the original paperless project) and Iām much happier with it, for the following reasons:
- it uses much less resources when idle;
- it still leverages the great OCRmyPDF/Tesseract projects;
- it has AI technology to automatically recognize sender/document date/type of document;
- it still maintains a tree of PDFs in your disk so you donāt lose access to them if the project stops being maintained for some reason;
- thereās a ton of [community support](https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng#affiliated-projects), with apps for Android/iOS and even command line interface(!)
In short, hopefully you havenāt yet gone down the Ambar route, since this will be more future-proof solution. Hope this helps!
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### Author:  [@SwissTeslaBull](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/SwissTeslaBull)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2021, 6:14am UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/30 "2021-10-14T06:14:30Z")
Simple: i have a āFinanceā share on my Synology nas with nightly encrypted backup to the Synology Cloud.
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### Author:  [@Ed\_Waadt](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/Ed_Waadt)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2021, 2:36pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/31 "2021-10-16T14:36:04Z")
> [@Mobius](#):
>
> In short, hopefully you havenāt yet gone down the Ambar route, since this will be more future-proof solution. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the heads-up! Fortunately no, I was on holidays and I just go back at my PC to geek, so iāll give this NG fork a test.
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### Author:  [@belouga13](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/belouga13)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2021, 7:16am UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/32 "2021-10-19T07:16:10Z")
Hi @betterlatethannever
very good topic! I handle archiving for both work and my personal life (obviously). I apply the 10 year role for my private stuff as well (if it is in paper form I file in a binder, if not I archive everything on a NAS with backup)
However recently I came across this startup, based in Lausanne: [Addmin - your intelligent digital filing cabinet](https://en.addmin.com/solution-private)
Havenāt tried it out (yet), but might be of interest to anyone if managing/filing documents is not your cup of cake š
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### Author:  [@San\_Francisco](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/San_Francisco)
#### Post date: [October 22, 2021, 8:15pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/33 "2021-10-22T20:15:00Z")
Are these hosted / servers solutions worth it for an individual user?
Canāt you just use your file managerās built-in folders, tags and search functionality (Finder tags, Spotlight search)? Much less complexity and installation required, less likely to break with a software update or malfunctionā¦?
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### Author:  [@Burningstone](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/Burningstone)
#### Post date: [October 27, 2021, 2:45pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/34 "2021-10-27T14:45:11Z")
Thank you for sharing this. Just gave paperless-ng a try and I have to say Iām really impressed by the OCR capabilities.
Iāll start now to digitalize all my documents and finally get rid of paper as much as possible.
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### Author:  [@MrCheese](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/MrCheese)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2021, 2:30pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/35 "2021-10-29T14:30:20Z")
Thanks for the paperless-ng recommendation, was rather easy to spin up the docker containers on my QNAP.
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### Author:  [@bamboo](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/u/bamboo)
#### Post date: [October 30, 2021, 3:42pm UTC](https://forum.mustachianpost.com/t/how-do-you-manage-your-financial-documents/7106/36 "2021-10-30T15:42:16Z")
$ ocrmypdf -l fra MyInputFile MyOutputFile
InputFile and OutputFile can have different or same name.
The -l option defines the language of the document to optimize the ocr work.
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