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Receipt & invoice intake without the shoebox

Every receipt filed, tagged and ready for your accountant

Every supplier invoice and fuel receipt lands in one searchable archive, OCR'd and tagged, ready for your accountant — self-hosted, software cost zero.

The problem

It's the 4th of the month. Your accountant wants Q2 expenses. Half your supplier invoices are PDF attachments buried in email, a quarter are paper receipts in a drawer, and the rest are screenshots on your phone. You spend an evening forwarding, scanning, and renaming files — and you'll do the exact same thing next quarter. For a 3–15 person business this is typically 2–5 hours a month of pure drag, plus the ones you lose, which cost real deductible expenses.

The architecture

One machine, one Docker Compose file. paperless-ngx watches a mail account and a folder; everything dropped in comes out OCR'd, dated, tagged by supplier and document type, and full-text searchable. Your accountant gets a filtered export instead of a shoebox.

Tool choices — and why

paperless-ngx (GPL-3.0, 40.7k stars, release April 2026). The core. Chosen because it bundles the whole intake chain — mail consumer, OCR, classifier, archive, API — in one actively maintained package with a large community. The built-in classifier is not an LLM: it learns from your manual corrections, which is exactly right for a stable set of 20–50 recurring suppliers. Alternatives like building your own OCR pipeline mean owning table extraction, retries, and monitoring yourself — a net negative for a small team.

OCRmyPDF (MPL-2.0, 34.1k stars, release April 2026). The OCR engine paperless-ngx uses under the hood (Tesseract-based). Listed separately because it's also useful standalone for batch back-OCR of your existing PDF archive before migration.

Optional LLM extraction — Ollama (MIT, 175k stars, release June 2026). If you later want line-item extraction (amounts, VAT, invoice numbers as structured data), run a small local model via Ollama against paperless-ngx's API. Start without it; the searchable archive alone kills most of the pain. A note on vetting: the popular paperless-ai companion project failed our checks — its README carries an explicit "not maintained" notice and the last release is roughly 8 months old — so we don't recommend it, whatever the star count says.

Monthly cost. Software: €0, all self-hosted open source. Hardware: €0 if you have any spare mini-PC or NAS that runs Docker; otherwise a small European VPS runs roughly €4–8/month (verify current pricing — it moves). Your time: expect a half day for setup and a couple of weeks of casually correcting tags while the classifier learns. Compare: commercial document-intake SaaS for this typically starts around €15–50/month per user.

Setup outline

1. Create a dedicated mail address (invoices@yourdomain) and tell suppliers to use it. This one habit does half the work.
2. Deploy paperless-ngx with the official Docker Compose file on your box or VPS.
3. Configure the mail rule: consume attachments from invoices@, delete-after-import off until you trust it.
4. Set up a consume folder synced from your phone's scan app (any app that saves PDF to a synced folder works).
5. Define document types (invoice, receipt, contract) and correspondents for your top suppliers; correct tags for two weeks so the classifier learns.
6. Monthly: filter by tag and date range, export, hand to accountant — or import the CSV of metadata into your bookkeeping tool.

Pitfalls — the real ones

Don't expose it to the internet. The paperless-ngx team says it plainly: documents are stored unencrypted, so run it on your LAN or behind a VPN, never on an open port. Your invoices are exactly the data an attacker wants.
Backups are not optional. This becomes your system of record within a month. Snapshot the data volume off-machine, and test a restore once.
OCR is not bookkeeping. Tesseract-class OCR reads clean print well and handwriting badly. Treat extracted totals as search aids, not accounting truth — the human posting entries still checks the figure.
EU note: structured e-invoicing (Peppol and national mandates, already mandatory in Belgium for B2B since January 2026) will progressively shrink the PDF-invoice problem. This pipeline stays useful for receipts, foreign suppliers, and the long tail — but don't over-invest in extraction sophistication the regulation will make redundant.

Verified repos

paperless-ngx — GPL-3.0, 40.7k stars, active (April 2026)
OCRmyPDF — MPL-2.0, 34.1k stars, active (April 2026)
Ollama — MIT, 175k stars, active (June 2026)