Auto-rename payslips as PDF

A team of thirty produces three hundred and sixty payslips a year, plus annual documents and corrections. The payroll software exports them under names like Abrechnung_03_2024.pdf — unambiguous for the month, useless for the personnel file, because the employee is missing. Filery Rename reads payroll period and name from the document and sorts the files per person. The monthly export becomes a file per person.

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Before & After

Abrechnung_03_2024.pdf 2024-03_Gehaltsabrechnung_Mueller-Thomas.pdf

What a payslip contains

The header names the employer, the payroll month and the details of the employed person: name, personnel number, start date, tax class, social security number, health insurer. Below follow the earnings, the deductions and the net amount. German payroll certification rules prescribe which details must be present, which is why the structure barely differs between payroll packages — good news for recognition. For a filename you need exactly two things out of it: the payroll period and the person. Everything else is in the document and does not need repeating in the name.

Why the name is built from month and surname

2024-03_Gehaltsabrechnung_Mueller-Thomas.pdf carries the payroll month, not the payment day — a payslip applies to a month, and a day-level date would be falsely precise. The name is written surname-first so that files inside a monthly folder sort alphabetically by surname, as is customary in personnel administration. Filery transliterates umlauts in the target form, here Mueller instead of Müller, so the name stays free of accidents on network drives, Windows servers and macOS alike. If payslips live in folders per person, move the name to the front — the pattern rearranges freely.

Which fields are better left out of the filename

Payslips are particularly sensitive personnel data, and a filename is the least protected part of a file. It shows up in backup logs, mail attachments, folder previews and search indexes, even when the file itself is encrypted. Salary amount, tax class, date of birth and social security number have no business being there. When a folder is shared across several desks, even the plain name can be one field too many — the personnel number is then the better choice, because it gives nothing away without the staff list. Filery recognises both fields; which one ends up in the pattern is your decision.

Combined PDFs, corrections and one-off payments

Many payroll packages export a single PDF containing all payslips for the month by default. Filery renames files, not pages, and would give the bundle the data of the first person in it. So switch the export to one file per person, or split the combined PDF beforehand. The second stumbling block is recalculation: a correction created in May for March carries both months. The payroll month of March belongs in the name, otherwise the correction does not sit next to the payslip it corrects. An extra type field such as correction makes the difference visible.

Annual documents and certificates in the same scheme

Alongside the monthly payslip come documents issued once a year or on occasion: the annual wage tax certificate, social insurance records, registration certificates, confirmations for parental allowance or public authorities. They belong in the same personnel file and should carry the same naming stem while differing in the type field. For the period, the year alone is enough here instead of year and month. That way a person's file holds twelve payslips with the annual documents underneath, without the sorting getting tangled. Filery recognises the document type from the text, so certificate and payslip never share a name.

What happens to the payroll data

Filery reads the PDF on your device and transmits the text content encrypted for AI analysis; only the recognised metadata such as period, name and document type comes back. The renaming then runs on the device again, and the payslips themselves are not stored permanently. Because this is employee data, the question of data processing agreements belongs in your own privacy review. Anyone who wants to keep it entirely within their own contractual relationship uses the Custom plan at 5 euros a month and stores their own API keys. The preview shows every suggestion first.

FAQ

Yes, the personnel number sits in the header of the payslip and is read out as text. Whether it goes into the filename in addition to or instead of the name is set in your pattern — for shared folders the number is the more data-sparing option.

Yes, provided there is one file per person. You select the monthly folder, review the suggestions and confirm the batch. The Business plan covers 500 documents a month, which matches a complete payroll run in most payroll departments. Nothing changes without confirmation.

That assessment is made by your own data protection function, not by the app. The relevant fact for it: the document content is transmitted encrypted for analysis. The Custom plan with your own API keys moves that processing into your own contractual relationship with the AI provider.

Through the type field. If the correction carries its own document type in the name, it sits directly next to the original payslip for that month in the folder and is still clearly identifiable as a correction. Do not delete the original payslip.

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