Added a section on best practices.

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jonaswinkler 2020-12-08 17:34:29 +01:00
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@ -183,6 +183,63 @@ You can also submit a document using the REST API, see :ref:`api-file_uploads` f
.. _basic-searching:
Best practices
##############
Paperless offers a couple tools that help you organize your document collection. However,
it is up to you to use them in a way that helps you organize documents and find specific
documents when you need them. This section offers a couple ideas for managing your collection.
Document types allow you to classify documents according to what they are. You can define
types such as "Receipt", "Invoice", or "Contract". If you used to collect all your receipts
in a single binder, you can recreate that system in paperless by defining a document type,
assigning documents to that type and then filtering by that type to only see all receipts.
Not all documents need document types. Sometimes its hard to determine what the type of a
document is or it is hard to justify creating a document type that you only need once or twice.
This is okay. As long as the types you define help you organize your collection in the way
you want, paperless is doing its job.
Tags can be used in many different ways. Think of tags are more versatile folders or binders.
If you have a binder for documents related to university / your car or health care, you can
create these binders in paperless by creating tags and assigning them to relevant documents.
Just as with documents, you can filter the document list by tags and only see documents of
a certain topic.
With physical documents, you'll often need to decide which folder the document belongs to.
The advantage of tags over folders and binders is that a single document can have multiple
tags. A physical document cannot magically appear in two different folders, but with tags,
this is entirely possible.
.. hint::
This can be used in many different ways. One example: Imagine you're working on a particular
tasks, such as signing up for university. Usually you'll need to collect a bunch of different
documents that are already sorted into various folders. With the tag system of paperless,
you can create a new group of documents that are relevant to this task without destroying
the already existing organization. When you're done with the task, you could delete the
task again, which would be equal to sorting documents back into the folder they belong into.
Or keep the tag.
All of the logic above applies to correspondents as well. Attach them to documents if you
feel that they help you organize your collection.
When you've started organizing your documents, create a couple saved views for document collections
you regularly access. This is equal to having labeled physical binders on your desk, except
that these saved views are dynamic and simply update themselves as you add documents to the system.
Here are a couple examples of tags and types that you could use in your collection.
* An ``inbox`` tag for newly added documents that you haven't manually edited yet.
* A tag ``car`` for everything car related (repairs, registration, insurance, etc)
* A tag ``todo`` for documents that you still need to do something with, such as reply, or
perform some task online.
* A tag ``bank account x`` for all bank statement related to that account.
* A tag ``mail`` for anything that you added to paperless via its mail processing capabilities.
* A tag ``missing_metadata`` when you still need to add some metadata to a document, but can't
or don't want to do this right now.
Searching
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