Digital Document Intake
Mail, e-mail, scans and faxes land on your desk every day. A digital intake workflow sorts, captures and archives them — before anyone has to touch them.
Sound familiar?
- Receipts and contracts arrive by e-mail, mail, scan and fax — and get sorted by hand.
- PDF forms are printed, filled in, scanned back, typed off.
- Searching costs minutes, filing costs nerves, and every now and then a document is missing.
How digital document intake works
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Bundle the intake
E-mail inbox, scanner and your existing fax number (fax-to-digital) converge into one intake lane. Your numbers and routines stay.
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Read automatically
Text recognition plus AI extracts sender, date, amounts, document type — on a server in Germany; AI extraction runs via a provider based in the EU, under a data processing agreement. Local AI on request.
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File sorted
Every document lands in the right folder or archive, full-text searchable; anything unclear goes to a review list instead of getting lost.
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Process further
On request: handover to DATEV (tax firms), assignment by property (real estate) or from incoming inquiry to work order (trades).
How it is built
An n8n workflow orchestrates the whole lane: every intake channel feeds a Paperless-ngx archive with German text recognition. A rule parser reads unambiguous fields such as dates, amounts and IBAN exactly; an AI model classifies the document and extracts the remaining fields in validated, structured form. Only when both paths agree is the document filed automatically — everything else goes to the review list.
- One stack per client: n8n and Paperless-ngx (database: SQLite) — self-hosted in Germany/EU, no shared system.
- AI is swappable: EU cloud API or a local model with no cloud at all — e.g. for tax firms bound by professional secrecy (§ 203 StGB).
- No document gets lost: every intake item is traceable into the archive or the review list.
- Daily or weekly digest: processed documents, review list, anomalies.
Tailored to your sector
Tax firms
Receipts assigned per client, export prepared DATEV-compatible; duplicates detected, missing receipts per month as a checklist. On request entirely without cloud AI.
Property management
Every document automatically assigned to property and unit; service-charge-relevant receipts tagged per accounting year, correspondence bundled per property.
Trade businesses
Inquiries by e-mail or form become a draft work order with customer, address and trade; supplier invoices are matched to the right job.
- Your own instance for your business only, on a server in Germany — no shared system.
- No change for customers & clients — all existing channels stay open.
- Established open-source technology (n8n, Paperless-ngx) — you stay independent of any single vendor.
The pilot: one document stream in 2–3 weeks
One document stream — e.g. incoming invoices — is fully automated at a fixed price (package “document intake, complete”, prices below). You see on your own documents what the automation delivers before you decide on more.
Acceptance, measured on at least 100 real documents:
- ≥ 95 % of documents correctly classified (type and sender)
- ≥ 90 % filed fully automatically — the review list stays the exception
- 0 lost documents: every intake item traceable
- Every document findable via full-text search within 5 minutes of arrival
less sorting and filing work per employee per day — an estimate; the process check measures it for your business.
What it costs
- First call 30 minutes, by phone or on site.
- €0
- Process check Half a day: count documents, time the manual steps, written savings estimate and fixed-price offer. Fully credited if the pilot follows within 60 days.
- €390
- Document intake, complete One document stream, set up and accepted — including the first month of operation & maintenance.
- from €2,900 one-off
- Operation & maintenance Includes server and AI extraction for up to about 1,000 documents a month; above that on request. Servers in Germany, backups with restore tests, updates, monitoring, reply on the next business day, data export guaranteed at any time. Minimum term 6 months, then cancellable monthly.
- €129 per month
- Additional work Extensions and changes, billed by time.
- €85 per hour
First year in total €2,900 + 11 × €129 = €4,319 net The first month of operation & maintenance is included in the package.
Terms
- Pay for results 50 % at the start, 50 % only after acceptance. If the agreed acceptance criteria are not met, the second half is not due.
- Instalments on request On request, you can pay the package in 6 monthly instalments.
- Honest volume rule Worth it from about 15 documents a day. Below that, I honestly recommend the document capture in the software you already use (lexoffice, sevDesk, DATEV Unternehmen online).
No obligation — two minutes, three questions.
Non-binding information. Implementation is individual, based on an assessment of your setup.