Setup

Clara has created a Teams account and is now its administrator. This page walks through setting up Papermerge according to the plan. Clara will:

1. invite Martin and Ella
2. create a group
3. create a cabinet
4. create the retention periods
5. create the metadata fields
6. create the categories

You do this once. It takes about 25 minutes.

As a reminder, here is Clara’s plan:

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

1. Invite Martin and Ella

1. Open the Users page and click Invite.
2. Enter Martin’s email address, choose the role user and click Send Invitation.
3. Do the same for Ella.

See Users & Groups.

2. Create the Group

A group lets you give several people the same access at once. Clara creates the group Bakery Team with herself, Martin and Ella, so that in the next step she can give all three access to the cabinet in one go.

1. Open the Groups page and click Add.
2. Name the group Bakery Team.
3. Select Clara, Martin and Ella as members, and save.

3. Create the Cabinet

The cabinet is where all of Rosewood Bakery’s documents are kept. Clara makes the Bakery Team group its owner, so Clara, Martin and Ella can add, edit, archive and delete any document in it.

1. Open the Cabinets page and click Add.
2. In the New Cabinet dialog, enter the title Rosewood Bakery.
3. Under Owners, add the group Bakery Team (type Group).
4. Save.

See Cabinets.

4. Create the Retention Periods

The plan has two retention periods: 10 years for invoices and 3 years for hygiene records.

1. Open the Retentions page.
2. Create the two retention periods below. Keep End of year enabled for both.

Name	Value	Unit
10 Years	10	Year(s)
3 Years	3	Year(s)

See Retentions.

5. Create the Metadata Fields

Every metadata field in Papermerge has a type. The type decides what can be entered, for example a date, an amount or a choice from a list. Here are the fields from Clara’s plan with their types:

Name	Type	Used by
Supplier	Short Text	Supplier Invoice
Customer	Short Text	Customer Invoice
Invoice Date	Date	Supplier Invoice, Customer Invoice
Invoice Number	Short Text	Supplier Invoice, Customer Invoice
Total Amount	Currency (EUR)	Supplier Invoice, Customer Invoice
Record Date	Date	Hygiene Record
Checked By	Select	Hygiene Record
Topics	Long Text	Hygiene Record
Results	Select	Hygiene Record

All fields are company-wide, so they don’t belong to a cabinet. You create a field once and can use it in as many categories as you like.

Open the Metadata page and create the fields as shown below.

See Metadata.

Short Text and Date Fields

Clara starts with the simple fields: Supplier, Customer and Invoice Number are of type Short Text:

Invoice Date and Record Date are of type Date:

Total Amount

Total Amount is of type Currency. A currency field also needs the currency itself, which for Rosewood Bakery is EUR.

Checked By

Checked By records who did the hygiene check. That is always Clara, Martin or Ella, so Clara makes it a Select field with the three names as its options. Nobody has to type a name, and the spelling is always the same.

Topics

Topics is a Long Text field for a short summary of the record: what was checked and what was noted. Long Text holds several sentences, and its content is searchable, so Clara can later find reports by keyword.

Results

Results records the outcome of a hygiene check. It is a Select field with these options:

• Passed
• Passed with remarks
• Follow-up needed
• Failed

6. Create the Categories

Everything so far was preparation for this step. A category ties together metadata, a retention period and a cabinet. Clara makes the same decisions for all three categories:

• Pivot: the retention period counts from a date field on the document (Invoice Date or Record Date), not from the upload date. See Retention Pivot.
• Deletion approver: Clara.
• Owner: company-wide. A category can also belong to a cabinet, so that only people with access to that cabinet can use it, but Rosewood Bakery doesn’t need that.
• Cabinet: Rosewood Bakery. In a Teams account every category files its documents into a cabinet, even a company-wide one. Documents in a user’s own Inbox or Home folder are that user’s private or unfiled documents.

Open the Categories page. It offers a setup wizard, but click Add instead and create three categories with these settings:

Setting	Supplier Invoice	Customer Invoice	Hygiene Record
Metadata	Supplier, Invoice Date, Invoice Number, Total Amount	Customer, Invoice Date, Invoice Number, Total Amount	Record Date, Checked By, Topics, Results
Retention Period	10 Years	10 Years	3 Years
Retention Pivot	Metadata	Metadata	Metadata
Retention Pivot Metadata	Invoice Date	Invoice Date	Record Date
Deletion Approver (User)	Clara	Clara	Clara
Who will own this category?	Company-wide	Company-wide	Company-wide
Cabinet	Rosewood Bakery	Rosewood Bakery	Rosewood Bakery
Target Folder	/{{category}}/	/{{category}}/	/{{category}}/

Each document is filed into a folder named after its category: a supplier invoice ends up in Supplier Invoice/ in the Rosewood Bakery cabinet. See Categories and Filing Rules.

The videos below show how to create each category.

Supplier Invoice:

Customer Invoice:

Hygiene Record:

That’s the whole setup.

Next: Everyday Work.