scan_0042.pdf: how Filetable files your documents for you

To know what is inside, you have to open it. To file it, you have to decide where. And the day your accountant asks for it, you have to find it. In Filetable, the same file becomes this:

Nobody renamed it. Nobody moved it. Here is how.

Why your folders never get sorted

Filing a document means making two decisions: what to call it and where to put it. Two tiny decisions, repeated for every invoice, every receipt, every contract. They always get put off until later, and that is how the "to sort" folder is born.

A regular drive does not help: it files where you tell it to. The file name is whatever the sender or the scanner chose, and the folder structure depends on whoever created it, one day, for some other reason.

Filetable starts from the other end: the document already knows where it belongs. Its supplier, its date and its number are written on it. They just need to be read.

1. Everything lands in one place

Documents come in the way they already arrive:

• Upload: drop a whole folder, PDFs, Office files or images.
• Email: every workspace has its own private address. Forward an invoice and its attachments are imported: PDFs, Office files, images. By default only your team can write to it; open it to your suppliers when you choose. A file you already have is recognised and set aside as Already imported before anything reads it, so nothing is processed twice.
• Mobile scan: open Filetable in your phone's browser, no app to install. Each page is detected and straightened, and the pages are sent as a single PDF.

A PDF that holds several documents, like a stack of invoices scanned in one go, is detected and split. Nothing is cut until you confirm.

2. Filetable understands what it receives

Before anything is extracted, AI decides what each document is: an invoice, a contract, a payslip, a statement, a receipt. It chooses among the tables in your workspace, using their names, their columns and their descriptions.

You set the Confidence threshold (80% in a new workspace). Above it, the document is classified on its own. Below it, it waits for you as Needs table selection, with the most likely tables first, so the decision takes one click. A document that fits none of your tables is kept without being forced into the wrong one.

3. The data is extracted, and you can check it

Once the type is known, Filetable reads the document and fills the table's columns: supplier, date, number, amounts, invoice lines, Swiss QR-bill data. These are typed values, ready to filter and total, rather than copied text.

Every value stays linked to the spot on the page it was read from. Hover a cell and its source lights up in the document. Checking a figure takes a second, and fixing one never means retyping everything. That is what we call traceability.

4. The document renames and files itself

This is where scan_0042.pdf disappears.

The name follows a pattern built from the document's own fields, set once per table and yours to change: for an invoice, the supplier, the type, the date and the number. Every file is named the same way, wherever it came from. Out of the box the new name is proposed: a Suggested name appears on the row and in the file preview, and one click applies it. Switch on Auto-rename on import and nobody clicks at all: the file is renamed as soon as it is read, and again whenever a value in its pattern is corrected. The name it arrived with is not lost: the drive keeps it, and shows it as Arrived as when you point at the file.

The folder is generated from your data. A rule such as Quarter › Supplier creates a folder for each value, and every document lands where its data says it belongs. These are virtual folders:

• Always current: a folder appears with its first value and disappears when nothing is left in it.
• Alive: correct the supplier in the table, and the file moves to the right folder at once.
• No duplicates: a contract can sit in its supplier's folder and in the contracts folder without being copied.

Your ordinary folders stay too: the two live side by side in the same smart drive.

What changes day to day

• Finding: press ⌘K and type a supplier, a reference, an IBAN. Filetable searches file names and the text of every document it has read, scans included.
• Getting ready for your accountant: the year's documents are already sorted by quarter and by supplier.
• No more retyping: your invoices' data is already in a table. Export it to CSV or Excel whenever you like; it stays yours.

Wondering how long each of those documents has to be kept? Our guide to document retention periods in Switzerland lists them, each with its legal source.

Your files stay in Switzerland

Filetable is built in Geneva. Your files and data are stored in Switzerland, and your original files are encrypted before they are stored, all under Swiss and EU data-protection law. The details are on our security page.

Try it with your own "to sort" folder

1. Create your workspace on Filetable: it is free to start, no credit card.
2. Drop twenty or so documents in, unsorted.
3. Watch them land in their folders, each with its new name ready.

Rather do it together? I am looking for 10 business owners with a folder that has been waiting for months. Twenty minutes on a call, and we sort it together in Filetable, for free. Send me a message on LinkedIn.