How to digitise your documents at home

Step 1: digitise without buying anything

You don't need a scanner. The camera in your phone is good enough for letters, invoices and contracts, and it has one decisive advantage: it's already in your pocket when the post arrives.

A scanner only pays off once you regularly capture many pages in one go, a whole binder of bank statements for instance. For day-to-day paperwork it's the slower route; it needs a fixed place and a computer switched on, and neither tends to be where the post lands.

Most of it already arrives digital, and then disappears

Everyone thinks of paper when they think of digitising. Yet the larger share of your paperwork already sits as a PDF in some customer portal, and that's not a safe place for it. Providers tidy their portals up: Telekom shows roughly the last eighteen months of invoices, one municipal utility words it as at least 18 months, and Postbank deletes online-banking statements after twelve months unless you move them into its document area first.

So don't count on a portal to be your archive. Providers keep their invoices for their own bookkeeping, which doesn't mean they'll keep them available to you or reissue them free of charge later.

Make it a habit to download every invoice the first time you look at it. Once a year it's also worth a round through the portals of your bank, energy, phone and insurance providers, ideally in January when you're thinking about tax anyway. What you find there is already searchable text and needs no camera at all.

Step 2: take a good photo in ten seconds

The light decides the quality. Put the sheet flat on a plain surface, ideally next to a window, and hold the phone parallel above it. The most common cause of unreadable captures is your own shadow, so stand where you aren't blocking the light.

Photograph each page separately and in full, including the margins. If there's something on the back, it counts as a page. For creased paper, a few minutes under a book works wonders.

• A plain background so the edges are visible
• Daylight from the side, no direct flash
• Phone held parallel to the sheet
• The whole page in frame, with a little margin

Step 3: turn the image into readable text

A photo is only an image to begin with. Text recognition, usually called OCR, is what makes it searchable: it reads what's on the sheet and stores the text invisibly behind the image. After that you can find the letter by any word it contains, and no longer only by its file name.

This is where it's decided whether your archive is any use later. A folder full of photos is a digital box you rummage through exactly as you rummaged through the cardboard one; a folder of recognised documents is a reference work.

Be careful with free scanner apps

Scanner apps work very differently from one another, and you can't tell by looking. Some do everything on the phone: Genius Scan advertises that documents never leave the device, and the scanning feature in Apple Notes recognises text on the device as well. Others upload every page to a server, because that's where their text recognition runs.

One example makes the question concrete: CamScanner processes in the cloud by default, and in 2019 security researchers at Kaspersky found a malicious module in a version of its Android app that could pull in advertising code. Google removed the app from the store for a time. The case is years old and was cleaned up; it still shows what's at stake when bank statements and medical letters travel through somebody else's servers.

So check two things before your first invoice: where is it recognised, and where is it stored? With health and financial records that's no small matter. Incidentally, Microsoft retired its own Lens app in March 2026 and points people to the scanner in OneDrive, which raises the same question: that route runs through a Microsoft account.

Step 4: a structure you'll stick to

Most people start by building thirty subfolders and end up using four. Start small. Six to eight areas are plenty: Home, Insurance, Finances, Work, Health, Taxes. You can always split one later, once it genuinely gets too full.

More important than the folder is the file name. Naming files year-month-day gives you chronological order for free, with no extra software involved.

Will this still open in twenty years?

The worry is fair and usually overstated at the same time. PDF and JPEG are openly documented and implemented millions of times over; people who work in digital preservation now regard the doom scenarios of the 2000s as overblown themselves. An ordinary PDF made today will very probably still open in 2046.

If you want to be stricter, save important documents as PDF/A. That's a tightened-up PDF under the ISO 19005 standard: fonts and colour profiles have to be embedded and active content is forbidden, so the page still looks the same when the typeface is installed on no machine anywhere. Germany's Federal Archives recommend PDF/A-2 for this and advise caution with the newer variants when embedded files don't themselves conform.

On resolution there's a solid number: 300 dpi. The German Federal Office for Information Security uses it as the example value in its generic scanning concept, together with PDF/A as the target format. More does no harm but costs space, and less comes back to bite you on small print.

Step 5: digitise today's paperwork first, the cellar later

From today, digitise everything that arrives; it takes about half a minute per letter, and your archive then holds, from the very start, exactly the things you're most likely to go looking for later.

Digitise the backlog afterwards, and even then not all of it. What's worth the effort: current contracts, the last three years of receipts, and the papers you can never get again, such as certificates, references and pension records. Twenty-year-old bank statements can stay in the box.

Step 6: throw away or keep?

After scanning comes the question that actually clears your desk. Nothing prescribes the form in which private individuals keep documents, so a scan will normally do. Keep originals of official certificates and notarised documents.

Also keep what you're obliged to keep for two years in Germany: invoices for work on your home. Which period applies to which paper is covered in detail in the guide on retention periods.

And backups?

An archive that exists on one device isn't a backup. It's a single point at which everything can be lost. If your documents live on a phone and the phone is stolen, they're gone.

So paperwork belongs somewhere that gets backed up and that you can reach from anywhere. Pay attention to where that somewhere is and who can look inside: with health and financial records, encryption and a German server location are the whole reason to pick one provider over another.

Frequently asked questions