On the contrary, documents like bills and receipts are among the worst candidates for using Classify or Auto Classify. This AI assistant looks at the contextual relationships among the contents of each of your groups in order to determine patterns of terms, their associations and frequencies. It then looks at unclassified documents to see if the contextual relationships of the contents of each document are sufficiently similar to a group’s pattern to make a filing determination. The AI looks only at the textual information Content (the body of text), not the Name or other metadata. Most bills and receipts don’t give the AI much to work with.
I’ve got collections of other kinds of documents for which Classify and Auto Classify do work. For example, a collection of scientific papers from various disciplines and subdisciplines will give the AI a lot to work with. If I initially create appropriate groups and seed them with appropriate documents in each group, the AI will “see” distinctions between each group, and filing suggestions by Classify for new content that is about one of those scientific disciplines will become more and more accurate as the database grows, so that eventually I might begin to use Auto Classify. This works very well in my large Main research database, which has hundreds of topical groups.
The upside of the fact that AI isn’t really appropriate for bills and receipts is that your organizational structure for them is probably very simple and straightforward, so that you can easily toss new items into appropriate groups.
I scan a lot of paper to searchable PDFs. I scan into a database named Incoming Scans. That database holds some 33 smart groups to collect items that can be defined by search criteria into groups so that I don’t need to rummage through a large collection of scans to isolate categories of documents for filing purposes.
Example: One smart group is based on a search that pulls anything from my water utility, Brown County Water Utility, into it. The content will include monthly water bills, as well as any special notices. When I feel like it, I’ll use the Change Date script to assign Creation Date to the date of the bill or notice, so that I can sort by date and file the items into another database where I keep records of expenses. I have no plans to sell my cabin, but potential buyers might want to see utility costs.
Other smart groups pull scans together from each of my bank and investment accounts, medical, home and vehicle insurance, etc. And so on.
When I’ve emptied those 33 smart groups there will still be stuff left that I have to manage item by item. There usually aren’t many of those. I’ve saved time and effort.