The Plan

Before you set anything up, answer three questions:

• What categories of documents do I have?
• What information do I need from each category?
• How long do I need to keep each document?

Of course, there are more questions. But to get started, these three are enough.

Categories

Start with the first question. A category is a group, or type, of documents. Documents in the same category look roughly alike and carry similar information.

When Clara asked herself this question, she realized that she has three kinds of documents:

• Supplier Invoices
• Customer Invoices
• Hygiene Records

Metadata

Once you roughly know which categories your documents fall into, the next step is to decide which information from the documents of each category is relevant to you.

From supplier invoices, Clara needs the Supplier (who issued the invoice), the Invoice Number, the Invoice Date (when the invoice was issued) and the Total Amount (the total of the invoice).

Customer invoices are similar: Clara needs the Customer, Invoice Number, Invoice Date and Total Amount.

From hygiene records, Clara wants to know the date of the record (Record Date), who did the check (Checked By), which topics it covered (Topics), and whether anything was found, such as a problem, a warning or a needed follow-up (Results):

These pieces of information about a document are called metadata. Clara writes down the metadata for each category in a table:

Category	Metadata
Supplier Invoice	Supplier, Invoice Date, Invoice Number, Total Amount
Customer Invoice	Customer, Invoice Date, Invoice Number, Total Amount
Hygiene Record	Record Date, Checked By, Topics, Results

Data Retention

Nobody wants to keep documents forever: they take up space, and old personal data is a liability. Some documents must be kept for 3 years, others for 10 years. This is the retention period: how long you must (or want to) keep a document. In many countries, the law sets a minimum period.

Rosewood Bakery is in a fictional country whose law requires invoices to be kept for 10 years and hygiene records for 3 years.

Here is Clara’s plan for structuring the bakery’s documents:

Category	Metadata	Kept for
Supplier Invoice	Supplier, Invoice Date, Invoice Number, Total Amount	10 years
Customer Invoice	Customer, Invoice Date, Invoice Number, Total Amount	10 years
Hygiene Record	Record Date, Checked By, Topics, Results	3 years

Caution

The retention periods in this example are made up. Check with your tax advisor which periods apply to your documents.

Cabinet

A cabinet in Papermerge is the digital equivalent of a physical filing cabinet.

Rosewood Bakery has just three people who will use Papermerge. With only three categories, Clara does not want to complicate matters, so she wants the simplest setup possible: all three of them, Clara, Martin and Ella, will have full access to all documents.

All three categories will be created as company-wide (they belong to the company, not to one person) and will file their documents into one cabinet, Rosewood Bakery.

Next: Setup.