Auto-rename rental agreements as PDF

A rental agreement is signed once and then supplemented for years: stepped rent, modernisation notice, handover report, eventually the termination. If the source file is called Mietvertrag_unterschrieben.pdf, three properties are already too many. Filery Rename reads property address, start of tenancy and tenant name from the contract and builds filing that still holds after the next tenant change. Property, tenancy and event stay distinguishable.

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Before & After

Mietvertrag_unterschrieben.pdf 2024-01-01_Musterstr-12_Mietvertrag_Mieter-Weber.pdf

The property is the sorting key, not the person

In ordinary contracts the counterparty comes first. For rental agreements that is the weaker choice, because tenants change while the property stays. Over ten years a single flat accumulates three tenancies, each with a contract, several amendments and two handover reports. If the address sits second in the name, directly after the date, the entire history of one flat lies together in the folder, sorted chronologically and independent of who currently lives there. The tenant name follows behind and answers the second question: which tenancy does this document belong to.

Which fields a rental agreement provides

Page one names landlord and tenant in full, the address of the rented property and the exact location of the flat — second floor left, flat number, sometimes a unit number used by the management. Then follow the start of tenancy, any fixed term, the base rent, the service charge prepayment and the deposit. Usable for the filename are address, start of tenancy and tenant. The location within the building is worth an extra field as soon as several units in one building are let, because Musterstr-12 then covers eight flats. Rent amounts do not belong in the name; they change and they are in the document.

Start of tenancy rather than signature date

The target name reads 2024-01-01 even though the contract was most likely signed in December. That is deliberate: people search by the period in which a tenancy existed, not by the day of signature. The start of tenancy is also the reference point for notice periods, rent steps and the service charge accounting period. Filery recognises both dates in the contract; which one goes into the pattern is up to you. For open-ended contracts the start is enough, while for fixed-term contracts some managers add the end as a separate field to spot expiring tenancies in the folder view.

Amendments, rent increases, reports and terminations

Everything that comes after the contract should carry the same stem of address and tenant and differ only in the type field: amendment, rent-increase, handover-report, termination, service-charge-statement. The date up front is, for these documents, the date of that particular event rather than the start of tenancy — only then does the chronological order in the folder reproduce the course of the tenancy. A special case are amendments that no longer name the tenant at all and merely refer to the contract of such and such a date. There the tenant field stays empty and is filled in from the preview.

Owner and property manager on the same pattern

Duplicate filing almost always starts with the spelling of the address: Musterstraße 12, Musterstr. 12, Muster Str.12. As soon as owner and manager name the same documents differently, a search finds only half of them. A jointly agreed pattern with a fixed short form — Musterstr-12, no dots, no spaces, umlauts transliterated — solves this permanently. Filery applies that spelling identically on every pass, even when the address is formatted differently inside the contract. When a manager changes, the inherited backlog can be brought onto the same pattern in one batch.

What happens to the contract content

Rental agreements contain names, addresses and bank details. Filery reads the PDF on your device and transmits the text content encrypted for AI analysis; only the recognised fields come back. The renaming then happens on the device again, and the contracts themselves are not stored permanently. Property managers holding other people's tenant data in trust are well advised to run the analysis on the Custom plan at 5 euros a month with their own API keys, because the processing then sits in their own contractual relationship with the AI provider.

FAQ

Only to a limited extent. In form contracts the start of tenancy, the rent and the names are often entered by hand into pre-printed fields, and handwriting stays unreliable for text recognition. The printed part is recognised; the handwritten entries should be added in the preview.

Umlauts are transliterated and characters that cause trouble in filenames are replaced. Musterstraße 12 becomes Musterstr-12. What matters most is that the spelling is identical across all documents for one property — the pattern takes care of that. It then applies on every pass.

Yes. Because the address is read from the document rather than fixed in advance, contracts for different properties can sit in the same batch. After renaming they sort themselves apart along the pattern. For managers with many units this is the usual route.

The structure is comparable, except that a company rather than a private person appears as tenant, and a floor area often replaces the flat location. The pattern works unchanged; a separate document type is useful to keep residential and commercial leases apart.

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