Receipts that come from a dozen portals
The typical freelance receipt is not sent to you, it is downloaded: from the software vendor's account area, from the hosting provider's portal, from an online retailer's order history. Every portal assigns its own filenames, usually an internal invoice number with no reference to the vendor. Twelve months later, three hundred such files sit in one folder and not one of them can be identified without opening it. Renaming right after download costs seconds; reconstructing it afterwards costs a weekend.
The naming pattern for your annual accounts
For business expenses the most useful order is year and month, then issuer, then document type. That produces a month-by-month sort order in the folder that matches your VAT filings and holds up through the annual close. If you add the expense category as well, such as software, travel or professional literature, you can later get a rough sense of the totals per category from the file list without opening your bookkeeping. The name should not carry more than four components, though.
Outgoing invoices follow a different rule
For invoices to clients, the sequential invoice number is a mandatory item. That makes it the unambiguous identifier, and it belongs in the filename together with client and month. If you work per project, add a project code as well, because clients with several parallel engagements otherwise cannot be told apart. An unbroken number sequence in the file list doubles as a simple control: if a number is missing, the invoice was either cancelled or never filed.
Handing everything to your accountant
Whoever pre-sorts their own receipts gets fewer questions back. One folder per quarter, with filenames naming date, issuer and document type, can be handed over without a covering note. Retention duties for accounting documents run for many years, and in that time nobody will be able to refresh their memory of a receipt from 2021. The filename is the only documentation that still works when nothing else is remembered.
A one-person business has no stand-in
If you drop out, nobody who does not know your abbreviations can work in your filing. That applies not only to illness but also to a tax audit, a handover to a bookkeeper, or a client asking for evidence years later. Filenames that are readable without context therefore matter more for sole traders than in a department where colleagues can simply ask each other.
How it runs and what it costs
You collect a month's downloads in one folder, let Filery run over it once and confirm the suggestions. The receipt is read on your own computer, its text content goes encrypted to the AI analysis, and as soon as the detected details are back the app renames the file on the device. The receipts are not kept in storage. The Starter plan is free, covers 50 documents per month and needs no sign-up, which is enough for many sole traders.
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