Document Versioning

Papermerge tracks every version of your documents and maintains a complete audit trail. This ensures compliance with tax regulations and legal requirements — you can always prove what a document looked like at any point in time, who made changes, and when.

The Document Lifecycle

Every document in Papermerge follows a lifecycle through these states:

draft → archived → expired
            ↓
       superseded

• Draft — The document is being prepared. You can edit it freely.
• Archived — The document is finalized and locked. No changes allowed.
• Superseded — An archived version that has been replaced by a newer version.
• Expired — The retention period has ended. The document can be deleted.

Working with Drafts

When you upload a document, it starts in draft state. This is the working state where you can:

• Edit the title and metadata
• Assign a category
• Add or remove tags
• Rotate, delete, or reorder pages
• Delete the document entirely

Once you’re satisfied that the document is correct and complete, you transition it to archived.

Example: You upload a receipt that was scanned upside down. You rotate the page, assign it to the Receipts category, fill in the metadata (date, amount, vendor), and then archive it.

Archiving Documents

When you archive a document, it becomes locked — no further changes are allowed. This is intentional: archived documents serve as a reliable, tamper-proof record.

Archiving is appropriate when:

• The document is complete and verified
• You need to preserve it for tax or legal purposes
• You want to ensure it cannot be accidentally modified

Tip

Only archive documents when you’re confident they’re correct. While you can create a new version to make corrections, the original archived version is never deleted.

Making Corrections

What if you archive a document and then discover an error — a typo in the title, a wrong category, or missing metadata?

Since archived documents cannot be edited, you create a new version:

1. Create a new version of the document (it starts as draft)
2. Make your corrections
3. Archive the new version

When you archive the new version, the previous version automatically transitions to superseded. The superseded version remains in the system — it’s never deleted. This preserves the complete history of changes.

Example: You archived an invoice but later notice the category should be Business Expenses, not Personal. You create a new version, fix the category, and archive it. The original version is now marked as superseded but remains accessible for audit purposes.

Document Expiration

Archived documents have an associated retention period. When this period ends, the document transitions to expired and becomes eligible for deletion.

Expired documents are not deleted automatically — they require approval from a designated deletion approver. See Data Retention for details.

Document State vs. Version State

A document can have multiple versions, each with its own state. The document state always reflects the state of its most recent version.

Versions	Document State
v1: archived	archived
v1: superseded, v2: archived	archived
v1: superseded, v2: expired	expired

In most cases, when people refer to a document’s state, they mean the state of its current (most recent) version.