Filing Rules

Every document you add to Papermerge needs a home — a folder to live in. Choosing that folder by hand gets tedious fast: the more documents you have and the deeper your folder tree grows, the harder it is to remember where each kind of document belongs.

A filing rule lets you decide once, per category. After that, whenever you give a document that category, Papermerge moves it to the right folder for you — and can rename it too.

Why filing rules help

Say you receive an invoice from a supplier, Acme GmbH, and open Papermerge to file it. Where does it go?

• /Suppliers/2024/acme-gmbh/invoice-2024-01.pdf?
• /Invoices/2024/Suppliers/acme-gmbh-2024-01.pdf?
• /Accounting/Invoices/?

Without an agreed rule you either stop and think every time, or file things inconsistently and lose track of them later. A filing rule settles the question once.

How a filing rule works

You attach a filing rule to a category. The rule describes where documents of that category belong. From then on, every time a document is given that category, Papermerge evaluates the rule and moves the document there.

A filing rule has two parts:

Part	Field in the category dialog	Purpose
Target folder	Target Folder	The folder the document is moved into. Required.
Rename	Rename Document (optional)	A new title for the document. Leave it empty to keep the current title.

Example

For the Incoming Invoices category, set Target Folder to /Store/Invoices and leave Rename Document empty. Now, whenever you assign Incoming Invoices to a document, Papermerge moves it into /Store/Invoices and keeps its title unchanged. Any folders in the path that don’t exist yet are created automatically.

Note

A rule path starts at your home folder — the one labeled Files in the sidebar. A path like /Store/Invoices therefore means Files / Store / Invoices.

Writing the path

Leading and trailing slashes are optional, and spaces around a slash are ignored. These paths are all equivalent:

• /Store/Invoices/
• Store/Invoices
• /Store / Invoices
• Store / Invoices

The Rename Document field names a file, not a path, so it must not contain a slash — Papermerge rejects the rule if it does.

Root folder

Team accounts only

Changing the root is only useful when you have cabinets or shared folders.

By default, a rule’s path starts at the user’s own home folder, so /Suppliers/AcmeGmbH/ lands in that user’s Suppliers/AcmeGmbH/.

In a team account you can change the starting point with the category’s Root Folder field and point it at a cabinet or a shared folder instead. When the root is a cabinet, documents filed by the rule also move into that cabinet’s ownership.

Dynamic paths with placeholders

A fixed path is enough for simple cases, but often the folder — or the new title — should depend on the document itself: its category, or the date it was added. Placeholders cover this.

A placeholder is a name wrapped in double curly braces, like {{year}}. Spaces inside the braces don’t matter — {{year}} and {{ year }} behave the same. Each time the rule runs, Papermerge replaces every placeholder with the document’s actual value.

Placeholder	Replaced with
{{id}}	The document’s unique ID. Always available, so it’s a safe way to guarantee a unique path.
{{title}}	The document’s title.
{{file_name}}	The document’s original file name.
{{category}}	The document’s category name.
{{year}}	The year the document was added, e.g. 2026.
{{month}}	The month it was added, as a plain number: 3, 10 (not 03).
{{day}}	The day of the month, as a plain number: 6, 27.

If you mistype a placeholder, Papermerge rejects the rule when you save it — so you find out immediately instead of after documents have been misfiled.

You can use placeholders in both fields. For example, for a Grocery Invoice category:

• Target Folder: /Invoices/{{category}}/{{year}}
• Rename Document: invoice-{{year}}-{{month}}-{{day}}

Assigning Grocery Invoice to a document added on 7 September 2026 moves it to /Invoices/Grocery Invoice/2026/ and renames it to invoice-2026-9-7.

Note

Numbers aren’t zero-padded: September is 9, not 09, so filenames built from {{month}} and {{day}} won’t sort in calendar order.

When the rule runs

A filing rule takes effect when a category is assigned to a document. If you add or change a rule on a category that already contains documents, Papermerge re-files all of them to match the new rule.