Help with Document organization filing system

You can do a file directory structure, but you will need to settle on a naming scheme. M_Barnes files by geographic location. I file by a directory structure of Operator/Year/OperatorName-StatementType-Year-Month.

If you are have sufficient amounts of time, nerdiness, and are just plain crazy, you can try setting up a document management system. I am using Paperless-NGX, but it is cumbersome to set up and is a big do-it-yourself project. There are hosted options where a company attempts to make that easy such as Managed Paperless-ngx Service | Elest.io, but I have not used that company and it has a monthly fee. The advantage of something like paperless-ngx is after scanning a document it can automatically recognize the text and then tags the document with relevant information, such as operator, date, type of statement, etc. If you want, you can attach multiple “tags” to a document. For instance, you could tag the document with the geographic location. That way, you can search by statement type and well location, and it can give you a list of all those documents organized by year and operator.

I have also tried File Center ( Paperless Office Software for Any Office | FileCenter DMS ). It is a bit more limited than paperless, but much easier to set up and understand, and is fairly affordable. It is a program that runs on your computer, so it is not accessible from a website like Google Docs. It also does text recognition (not perfect though) so you can potentially search files by key words if you want to look for something specific.

If you receive statements of EnergyCrap (I am sorry, Energy Link), they lock the pdf files to prevent copying text so they can entice you to pay more. It is pointlessly stupid. All you do is print the statement then scan it (or just directly print to pdf again!) to be able to perform text recognition.

Any which way, if you are doing it electronically, make sure you have some software to back up all those files (not a cloud drive, an actual backup solution).

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