I am a big fan of automating document management. In this day and age when the number of digital artifacts is increasing as the paper based counterparts are less or more expensive, we are faced with the options or either:

• ignoring and not tracking the documents (quite risky as some are important for our financial or physical well being)
• dumping all in a heap on own or Cloud based storage: better than first choice but still difficult to find a reference when needed quickly
• manually maintaining a document management system at a file system level. This approach would be time-consuming to maintain but more resilient from technology point of view.
• Implement a system based on a software product that allows for partial or full automation

I chose the later option. I am managing the documents via DEVONthink system. It is a very good system for the users of Apple ecosystem.

Automatic Sorting Based on a date

The first use case is sorting for archive purposes of files that are already processed. For this purpose I implement a ‘Smart Rule’ in DEVONthink with the following requirements:

• search in the working folder (in this case the folder where I keep the documents arrived form the Bank)
• identify the documents
  • modified within last month
  • marked as Done
• setup following possible runs for the rule:
  • monthly runs (I do not get a lot of documents from the bank so monthly sorting is sufficient)
  • On Demand (in case i need to)
• these actions will be performed:
  • file into the Archive folder, in this case /Archive/Bank/”Creation Year”/

After running this rule, the subsequent structure gets updated, populated and maintained over time: