docspell/modules/microsite/docs/doc.md

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docs	4	Documentation

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Docspell assists in organizing large amounts of PDF files that are typically scanned paper documents. You can associate tags, set correspondends, what a document is concerned with, a name, a date and some more. If your documents are associated with this meta data, you should be able to quickly find them later using the search feature. But adding this manually to each document is a tedious task. What if most of it could be attached automatically?

How it works

Documents have two main properties: a correspondent (sender or receiver that is not you) and something the document is about. Usually it is about a person or some thing – maybe your car, or contracts concerning some familiy member, etc.

1. You maintain a kind of address book. It should list all possible correspondents and the concerning people/things. This grows incrementally with each new unknown document.
2. When docspell analyzes a document, it tries to find matches within your address book. It can detect the correspondent and a concerning person or thing. It will then associate this data to your documents.
3. You can inspect what docspell has done and correct it. If docspell has found multiple suggestions, they will be shown for you to select one. If it is not correctly associated, very often the correct one is just one click away.

The set of meta data that docspell uses to draw suggestions from, must be maintained manually. But usually, this data doesn't grow as fast as the documents. After a while there is a quite complete address book and only once in a while it has to be revisited.

Besides extracting the text from documents to analyze, docspell also converts all files into PDF files. This unifies the different formats your documents may be in originally and makes them more accessible from other systems and the future.

Terms

In order to better understand these pages, some terms should be explained first.

Item

An Item is roughly your (pdf) document, only that an item may span multiple files, which are called attachments. And an item has meta data associated:

• a correspondent: the other side of the communication. It can be an organization or a person.
• a concerning person or equipment: a person or thing that this item is about. Maybe it is an insurance contract about your car.
• tag: an item can be tagged with custom tags. A tag can have a category. This is intended for grouping tags, for example a category doctype could be used to group tags like bill, contract, receipt etc. Usually an item is not tagged with more than one tag of a category.
• a item date: this is the date of the document – if this is not set, the created date of the item is used.
• a due date: an optional date indicating that something has to be done (e.g. paying a bill, submitting it) about this item until this date
• a direction: one of "incoming" or "outgoing"
• a name: some item name, defaults to the file name of the attachments
• some notes: arbitrary descriptive text. You can use markdown here, which is appropriately formatted in the web application.

Collective

The users of the application are part of a collective. A collective is a group of users that share access to the same items. The account name is therefore comprised of a collective name and a user name.

All users of a collective are equal; they have same permissions to access all items. The items don't belong to a user, but to the collective.

That means, to identify yourself when signing in, you have to give the collective name and your user name. By default it is separated by a slash /, for example smith/john. If your user name is the same as the collective name, you can omit one; so smith/smith can be abbreviated to just smith.