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 — operated on dedicated infrastructure in Germany/EU, GDPR-compliant.
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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, Paperless-ngx, PostgreSQL — 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.
- Self-hosted: your documents stay on your infrastructure.
- No change for customers & clients — all existing channels stay open.
- Established open-source technology (n8n, Paperless-ngx) — no vendor lock-in.
The first step: a pilot in 2 weeks
One document stream — e.g. incoming invoices — is automated end to end, at a fixed price. 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
of sorting and filing work per employee per day eliminated.
Get in touch without obligation — two sentences about your document intake are enough.
Non-binding information. Implementation is individual, based on an assessment of your setup.