Docspell is a personal document organizer. You'll need a scanner to convert your papers into PDF files. Docspell can then assist in organizing the resulting mess 😉.

You can associate tags, set correspondends, what a document is concerned with, a name, a date and some more. If your documents are associated with this meta data, you should be able to quickly find them later using the search feature. But adding this manually to each document is a tedious task. What if most of it could be done automatically?

Documents have two main properties: a correspondent (sender or receiver that is not you) and something the document is about. Usually it is about a person or some thing – maybe your car, or contracts concerning some familiy member, etc.

1. You maintain a kind of address book. It should list all possible correspondents and the concerning people/things. This grows incrementally with each new unknown document.
2. When docspell analyzes a document, it tries to find matches within your address book. It can detect the correspondent and a concerning person or thing. It will then associate this data to your documents.
3. You can inspect what docspell has done and correct it. If docspell has found multiple suggestions, they will be shown for you to select one. If it is not correctly associated, very often the correct one is just one click away.

The set of meta data, that docspell uses to draw suggestions from, must be maintained manually. But usually, this data doesn't grow as fast as the documents. After a while there is a quite complete address book and only once in a while it has to be revisited.

The documentation site provides more information.

Check the feature list and the quickstart guide to try it out:

• Features
• Quickstart