Getting Started

You’ve ordered a managed Paperless-ngx from server.camp — congratulations! This guide is written for small and medium-sized businesses: whether you run a trade business, an agency, a law firm, or a nonprofit, here’s how to set up Paperless-ngx so it actually simplifies your day-to-day work.

Many SMBs still file incoming invoices in binders, keep contracts in different drawers, and launch a frantic search whenever the tax office asks for a receipt from three years ago. Paperless-ngx solves exactly that.

Common use cases in SMBs:

• Digitize incoming invoices and find them via full-text search — no more flipping through folder after folder
• Store contracts centrally so management, accounting, and the relevant department all have access
• Scan incoming mail and automatically route it to the right employee or department
• Manage personnel files with granular permissions — visible only to HR and management
• Find delivery notes, quotes, and order confirmations quickly in daily operations
• Archive tax-relevant documents safely beyond the statutory retention periods

Paperless-ngx uses OCR to recognize text in scanned documents, stores everything in the long-term stable PDF/A format, and makes it all searchable. Unlike expensive proprietary DMS solutions, you’re not locked in — your documents are stored as regular files on the server, and you can export them at any time via WebDAV export.

If you’ve been working with Windows folders or physical binders, Paperless-ngx’s core principle takes a little getting used to: there are no nested folders. Instead, you organize documents with metadata:

• Correspondent — the sender or recipient (e.g. “Supplier Smith Ltd”, “Tax Office”)
• Document type — the kind of document (e.g. “Incoming invoice”, “Contract”)
• Tags — any number of keywords (e.g. “Project New Build”, “Tax 2025”, “Accounting”)
• Created date — the document date (not the scan date)
• Custom fields — additional information (e.g. invoice number, contract term, cost center)
• Archive serial number (ASN) — links the physical original to the digital document

Why no folders?

The key advantage: An incoming invoice from Supplier Smith is assigned to a correspondent and can simultaneously carry the tags “Project New Build”, “Accounting”, and “Tax 2025”. In a folder structure, you’d have to decide where to file it — or create copies. In Paperless-ngx, you find it through any of those paths.

Correspondents represent who a document comes from or goes to. In a typical SMB, these are:

Examples of useful correspondents:

• Suppliers: “Office Supplies Ltd”, “Weber Steel Co.”
• Customers: “Customer Acme Corp”, “Customer Green & Associates”
• Authorities: “Tax Office”, “Chamber of Commerce”
• Insurers: “Allianz”, “AXA”
• Banks: “Barclays”, “HSBC”
• Utilities: “City Power & Gas”, “Telekom”, “Vodafone”
• Service providers: “Tax advisor Johnson”, “Lawyer Smith”

Tips

• Use the official company name, not abbreviations — so colleagues can find the right entry too.
• Don’t create too many variations: “Deutsche Telekom” is enough; no need for separate entries for mobile and landline. Use tags to make that distinction.
• Customers as correspondents: Consider whether that makes sense for you. Some SMBs only add suppliers/senders as correspondents and use tags for customer references (e.g. Customer: Acme Corp), since many customers can quickly get unwieldy.

Document types describe the form of a document — not its topic. Keep this list short and general. In practice, 10–15 types work well:

Tip

A common mistake is creating topics as document types (e.g. “Car” or “IT”). That bloats the list. Use tags for topics and document types only for the form of the document.

Tags are the most flexible tool in Paperless-ngx. A document can have any number of tags. To keep things manageable with 50+ tags, we recommend a color system:

• Accounting — tax-relevant, goes to bookkeeping
• Management — contracts, strategic documents
• Purchasing — supplier correspondence, orders
• Sales — customer quotes, order confirmations
• HR — employment contracts, payslips
• IT — licenses, maintenance contracts, IT service invoices

• Fleet — everything related to company vehicles
• Property — lease, utilities, maintenance
• Project: New Build — project-specific documents
• Insurance — policies, claims

• Tax 2025 — receipts for the fiscal year’s tax return
• Input VAT — incoming invoices with deductible VAT
• Retention required — documents with a statutory retention period

• Inbox — new, not yet reviewed
• To pay — open invoice, needs to be transferred
• To review — needs sign-off from a specific person
• Filed — physical original archived (see ASN labels)

Tags are very individual

The examples above are suggestions based on our experience. Think about which tags actually make sense for your business. A short list with clear meanings beats 100 tags that nobody can keep track of.

Combine tags into saved views that appear on the dashboard. Each team member sees exactly what’s relevant to them when they log in:

• “Inbox” — filters on tag Inbox, sorted by created date
• “Outstanding invoices” — filters on tag To pay
• “Tax receipts 2025” — filters on tag Tax 2025
• “My department” — filters on the department tag of the respective user

Nobody wants to tag every document by hand. Paperless-ngx offers three ways to automatically assign correspondents, document types, and tags:

For each correspondent, document type, or tag, you can set a search term and a matching algorithm. When the OCR-recognized text of a new document contains the search term, the assignment is set automatically.

Correspondent example: “City Power & Gas” gets the matching text City Power Gas with the algorithm “Any”. Every invoice mentioning any of those words is assigned automatically.

Tag example: The tag “Input VAT” gets the matching text VAT tax invoice with the algorithm “Any”. Invoices containing any of those terms automatically receive the tag.

Algorithm overview:

• Any: Triggers if at least one of the specified words appears. The most versatile option to start with.
• All: Triggers only if all specified words appear. Useful to avoid false matches.
• Exact: The entire search text must appear exactly as written.
• Regular expression: For advanced users who want to match complex patterns.

Paperless-ngx has a built-in AI algorithm: set the matching algorithm to “Auto” and a neural network learns from your past assignments. After 30–50 correctly tagged documents, it works reliably for recurring business documents (invoices, bank statements, etc.).

Important for business operations

• Documents tagged with Inbox are intentionally ignored by auto-matching. The document only enters training once you remove the tag (confirming the assignment).
• Auto-matching works well for assignments derived from document content: bank name → correspondent, “invoice” → document type. It doesn’t work for status tags like “To pay” or “To review” because those have no content-based relationship to the document.
• The more correctly classified documents there are, the better the recognition. In the early phase, it’s worth tagging documents carefully by hand.

For more complex automation, Paperless-ngx offers workflows — rules that run automatically when a document is added or changed. Examples:

• If a document is uploaded via a WebDAV folder /accounting/, then set the tag “Accounting” and the owner “Ms. Johnson”.
• If a document receives the document type “Incoming invoice”, then add the tag “To pay”.
• If a document has the tag “Contract” and the correspondent is “Telekom”, then set the storage path “Contracts/Telecommunications”.

Storage paths define how Paperless-ngx names and sorts your documents on the filesystem. This matters if you want to access files outside of Paperless-ngx — via Nextcloud or a backup system, for example.

A proven format that mirrors typical business filing structures:

{correspondent}/{document_type}/{created_year}/{title}

This produces paths like:

City Power & Gas/Incoming invoice/2025/2025-01-15 Electricity bill January.pdf
Tax advisor Johnson/Tax document/2024/2024-08-20 Income tax assessment 2023.pdf
Smith Construction/Contract/2023/2023-03-01 Heating maintenance contract.pdf

If multiple people use Paperless-ngx and you want a clean filesystem separation:

{owner_username}/{correspondent}/{document_type}/{created_year}/{title}

Or using department tags as storage path assignments:

• Path “Accounting”: Accounting/{correspondent}/{created_year}/{title}
• Path “HR”: HR/{correspondent}/{created_year}/{title}
• Path “General”: General/{correspondent}/{document_type}/{created_year}/{title}

A dedicated path for tax-relevant documents keeps everything tidy:

Tax/{created_year}/{correspondent}/{title}

This groups all tax receipts for a given year in one folder at the filesystem level — handy for exporting to your tax advisor. Set the storage path automatically via a workflow: when a document receives the tag “Tax 2025”, the path is set to Tax/2025/{correspondent}/{title}.

In a SMB, multiple people use Paperless-ngx. The permissions system ensures everyone only sees what they should.

Paperless-ngx manages users and groups under Settings → Users & Groups. The recommended approach:

1. Admin account — create one (or use the one from your order). This account manages settings, workflows, and users. Ideally, don’t use it for daily work.
2. Groups — create groups that reflect your company structure, e.g. “Management”, “Accounting”, “Sales”.
3. User accounts — create accounts for team members and assign them to the appropriate groups.

Every document in Paperless-ngx has an owner and can have additional view and edit permissions for specific users or groups.

Practical examples:

• Incoming invoices: Accounting is the owner; the “Management” group gets read access.
• Personnel files: HR is the owner; nobody else has access (except the admin).
• Customer contracts: Sales is the owner; accounting and management get read access.

Automate via workflows: Set up workflows that automatically assign the right owner and permissions — based on the import folder, tags, or document type. Nobody has to manage permissions manually.

If you’re on a Paperless-ngx Corporate plan at server.camp, you can manage your team members centrally. We support the OpenID Connect standard, so you can integrate Paperless-ngx into your existing identity management system.

If you don’t have central identity management yet but want the convenience of single sign-on, we offer Managed Authentik as a user-friendly SSO solution. Your team signs in once and has access to Paperless-ngx and other services — no separate passwords to remember. Contact our support team to set up SSO.

The most important daily process: how does a document get from the letterbox (or email inbox) into the system and end up correctly filed?

1. Digitize incoming mail: Someone in the office (reception, assistant, office support) opens the day’s mail and scans everything directly into Paperless-ngx — via WebDAV or a scanner app. Digital incoming invoices (PDF by email) can be uploaded directly or fetched automatically via an email rule.

2. Review and assign documents: Create a saved view “Inbox” on the dashboard. A designated person works through it regularly — ideally daily — and checks:

• Is the correspondent correct? (Often already right thanks to auto-matching.)
• Is the document type correct?
• Which tags are missing? (e.g. department, project, tax relevance)
• Is the created date correct?
• Does the physical original need to be kept? → Assign an ASN (see next section).
• Does someone need to act? → Set tag To pay or To review.

3. Remove the inbox tag: Once a document is fully classified and saved, remove the Inbox tag. The document is now “processed” and enters the auto-matching training.

Tip for teams

When multiple people process the inbox, configure Paperless-ngx to accept uploads via different consume subfolders (/consume/reception/, /consume/accounting/) and use workflows to automatically assign the right owner and tags.

Even in a digital office, some documents must or should be kept as originals — notarized deeds, contracts with original signatures, building plans. The archive serial number (ASN) links the physical original to its digital counterpart.

1. Each document to be retained gets a sequential number (the ASN).
2. Stick a label with a barcode on the first page of the document.
3. File the document in order in a binder — regardless of topic.
4. When scanning, Paperless-ngx reads the barcode and enters the ASN automatically.

When someone needs the physical original: search in Paperless-ngx → note the ASN → look it up in the binder. No hunting through different topic folders, no “who filed that where?”.

Free web tools let you generate ASN labels as QR codes or barcodes and print them on standard label sheets:

• Web generator (QR code): tobiasmaier.info/asn-qr-code-label-generator — works directly in the browser
• Web generator (QR code / Code128): maksimkurb.github.io/asn-barcode-label-generator — also supports Code128 barcodes

Tip

Choose labels with the “REV” suffix (removable without residue). Print a stock in advance — 2–3 sheets cover several hundred documents.

For Paperless-ngx to read the ASN from the barcode automatically, enable barcode recognition in the settings (gear icon) under “Enable ASN labels / barcodes”.

Once active, it also enables batch processing: scan a whole stack of documents, each with an ASN label on the first page. Paperless-ngx reads the barcodes, automatically splits the scan into individual documents, and assigns the correct ASN to each.

• Keep a stock of ASN labels next to the scanner.
• File all documents in sequential ASN order in binders — no thematic sorting needed.
• Label full binders with the ASN range (e.g. “Documents 001–200”).
• Store binders in a secure location. You’ll rarely need them, since you search everything digitally in Paperless-ngx.

Your server.camp Paperless-ngx instance includes a built-in WebDAV connection. Use it to feed documents from almost any device directly into Paperless-ngx. The WebDAV connection maps to the consume/ folder in Paperless-ngx — everything you upload there is processed automatically and lands in the inbox (with the Inbox tag).

More details: Document import via WebDAV

The WebDAV connection also lets you download your processed documents — ideal for local backups or sharing with your tax advisor.

More details: Document export via WebDAV

Many SMBs use Nextcloud as their central file management platform. Combined with Paperless-ngx, you get a powerful duo: Nextcloud for daily collaboration on files, Paperless-ngx for structured archiving and full-text search.

Nextcloud app “Integration Paperless”: The Nextcloud App Store offers an app that adds an option to the file context menu to send documents directly to Paperless-ngx. A team member can send an invoice received by email to Paperless-ngx for processing with one click.

Automatically via a Nextcloud folder: Create a folder in Nextcloud (e.g. “Paperless Import”) that points via WebDAV to the consume folder of Paperless-ngx. Everything placed in this folder is automatically picked up by Paperless-ngx. Mobile scanner apps that save to Nextcloud can also feed Paperless-ngx indirectly this way.

If team members need access to archived documents without Paperless-ngx access (e.g. on a job site or at a customer’s location), sync the processed documents via WebDAV export into a Nextcloud library. Since Paperless-ngx adds an OCR text layer, documents are also full-text searchable in Nextcloud.

More details: Nextcloud integration

If you use Paperless-ngx for business purposes, retention requirements apply. The following is an orientation — not legal advice.

Paperless-ngx stores documents in PDF/A format (long-term stable), always retains the unmodified original, and provides an audit log that records all changes to documents.

• Regular backups of your Paperless-ngx instance are essential. At server.camp, backups (up to 6 months back) are included in the hosting.
• Avoid deletions: Configure the trash so deleted documents aren’t permanently removed immediately. Contact us if you need help with this.
• Process documentation: Retention requirements call for a description of how your DMS process works — from incoming mail through digitization to filing. This doesn’t need to be a novel, just a clear description of your process.
• Don’t destroy originals prematurely: Check with your tax advisor which originals you may destroy after scanning and which you must retain.

Paperless-ngx is not a certified compliant archiving system — nor does any official certification body maintain a whitelist of approved systems. What matters is that your overall process (software + organization + documentation) meets the requirements. Many SMBs use Paperless-ngx successfully after review by their tax advisor. When in doubt, discuss it with yours.

If you need help setting up the system, have questions about configuration, or want to implement any of the integrations described above, reach out any time at support@server.camp.

Find answers to common questions on our product page.