Tracker for all the documents to get regularly

[jflesch]

Today, my flatmate gave me 3 rent receipts that are 1 year old. I've never scanned nor even seen any of them up to now. I wasn't even aware they existed or were missing ...

So maybe a good feature in Paperwork could be a regular document tracker: Something that would let people check that they got all the document they are supposed to get. For instance:

• each month:
  • payslip
  • rent receipt
  • phone bill(s)
  • bank statement(s)
  • etc
• annually:
  • ?

Note that the period shouldn't be hardcoded for any document. For instance, I had a job where I got a payslip every 2 weeks instead of each month.

[jflesch]

I'm wondering whether it should a be a separate program or not

[jflesch]

Maybe could be called "reminders"

[tYYGH]

IMHO, this is not Paperwork’s role. I’ve been thinking about recurrent documents too, and I think a calendar is more suited to this task.

However, Paperwork could be a given (configured) calendar’s client, in CardDAV protocol: alongside the labels, there could be the list of expected papers (= non-acknowledged events); if the user validates the date/labels/events tab after having checked some events, these events become acknowledged on the server.

Eg:

===================+==================================…
  +----------+-+   :
  |2017-04-18|V|   :  /-------------------------------…
  +----------+-+   :  | Electricity INVOICE, 2017-04-17
===================+  |
  | | label1       :  | bla
  |x| label2       :  | foo
  | | label3       :  | bar
===================+  | …
Expected:          :  |
  | | 2017-04-15   :  |  <== YOU CHECK THIS BEFORE
monthly electricity:  |      VALIDATING THE LEFT PANE
  | | 2017-04-20   :  |
monthly bank report:  |
  | | 2017-06-30   :  |
yearly insurance   :  |

[jflesch]

A calendar client ? So users would need a calendar server, right ? Which leave them with proprietary options (Google Calendar, etc) or annoyingly hard-to-configure opensource options.

Also, what would be the benefit from interfacing with calendar servers ?

Moreover, from my experience, you can hardly expect bills to be on time at a specific day of the month :/

[tYYGH]

Good points… I sometimes forget that I’m not the average user :-p

[jflesch]

Note however that I would tend to agree with your first statement. I'm not sure it's Paperwork role. But it's somehow connected.

[tYYGH]

Would a statistics-based solution be possible? I’m thinking of patterns. Eg, Paperwork would see that:

• each month between the 1st and the 5th, there has been a document with words "income" "employer" "employee"…;
• each month between the 14th and the 20th, there is a document with words "mobile", "invoice"…;
• each year between march and april, there is a document with words “tax”, “income”, “declaration”…

And for each pattern, Paperwork would display a warning for the duration of one period (a month for monthly documents, etc.) during the first period where an expected document has not appeared; after that, the warning would disappear because it may be that you resigned from a contract…

[jflesch]

Actually, I had in mind something similar to your idea. Except without specific date.

Crappy example:

• period : "1 month" : "electricity" AND label:bill ; number of documents per period : 1
• period : "1 month" : "phone" AND label:bill ; number of documents per period : 1
• period : "1 month" : "train" AND label:bill ; number of documents per period : 2
• period : "1 year" : "taxes" AND "official" AND label:taxes ; number of documents per period : 1
• period : "1 year" : "red cross" AND label:charity AND label:taxes ; number of documents per period : 1
• period : "1 year" : "médecins sans frontières" AND label:charity AND label:taxes ; number of documents per period : 1

Here, the start date of each period would always be:

• either the last time the expected number of documents has been added to Paperwork ;
• or the date at which the reminder was added.