Auto-rename PDF files for trades and crafts businesses

In the trades, documents appear in three places at once: the quote in the office, the measurement on site, the delivery note in the supplier portal. By evening all of it sits as PDF in the same folder, named according to whoever sent it. Filery Rename reads the files and puts job site, date and document type first, so the link to the job number is not lost.

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Before & After

Rechnung_20240315.pdf 2024-03-15_Bauprojekt-Hauptstr_Sanitaer_RE-2024-089.pdf

From quote to final invoice

A single job produces a quote, an order confirmation, measurements, site log pages, delivery notes, progress invoices, the final invoice and the acceptance record. With several trades involved, inspection records and conformity documents come on top. These documents appear over weeks and come from different senders, yet they belong together. If the filename starts with the job or project number, they sit next to each other in the folder view even while three other sites are running. That is the real gain over sorting by arrival date.

The job site is the sorting level, not the customer

Many businesses file by customer name, and that is exactly where the problem starts: a developer has ten properties, a property manager thirty. The customer name alone then says nothing about which bathroom is meant. The project or job number is unambiguous, and the site address is its readable equivalent. In the naming pattern you put both first and add date and document type. The customer name can follow, but it should not carry the sort order.

Material documents from supplier portals

Delivery notes and invoices from wholesalers are made available as PDF in a portal or sent by email. The filenames consist of the supplier's internal document numbers, which have no connection to your job site. For post-calculation that connection is exactly what matters: which material went onto which job. If renaming happens right after download, while the assignment is still fresh, it saves the reconstruction work at month end when nobody remembers what the copper pipes were for.

Warranty outlasts the project by years

For work on buildings, the limitation period for defect claims is five years under section 634a of the German Civil Code, and usually four under the German construction contract terms. If a complaint arrives after three years, how quickly you find the measurement, the acceptance record and the material documentation decides how expensive it gets. On top of that, invoices to private clients carry their own retention duty under VAT law. A filename with year, job site and document type makes those papers findable years later without a search run.

The evening scanning batch

Delivery notes come back from site on paper, often creased and annotated. They get scanned in the evening or once a week and land in the folder as scan0001.pdf. Processing whole folders is made for that batch: run it through once, check the suggestions, confirm. For scans without a text layer you switch on OCR. The rename history in the app later shows what a file was originally called, in case a document was filed under the wrong job after all.

How the recognition works

During a run the app opens each file on the office computer and reads out the text. That content goes encrypted to the AI analysis, and what comes back are the detected fields such as sender, date and document type. Renaming then takes place on the office computer again, and the documents are not kept in storage. To get started, the free Starter plan with 50 documents a month and no sign-up is enough. If you want the analysis to run through your own keys, use the Custom plan with your own API keys.

FAQ

Only to a limited extent. Filery works with the text in the PDF; handwriting would first have to be picked up by OCR, and that result depends heavily on the handwriting. For printed forms with handwritten additions, recognition of the printed fields works reliably.

No. Filery is a desktop application for Windows and macOS, meant for the office computer. Documents from the site travel to the office the usual way and are processed there as a batch.

If it appears as text in the document, for instance on your own quote or on a delivery note carrying your order reference, then usually yes. If it is missing from the document, you set it as a fixed component when running the folder for that particular site.

No. The app is installed on the office computer like any other program, and setting up the naming pattern takes a few minutes. A server installation or ongoing administration is not part of it.

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Choose your platform and start with automatic document renaming

macOS

Universal (Apple Silicon & Intel)

Windows

Windows 10 & 11

We are currently working on official code signing for Windows. The download is already available – Windows Defender or SmartScreen may show a warning because the app is not yet certified. Choose “More info” → “Run anyway” to install.

System requirements: macOS 10.14+, Windows 10/11

All downloads are transmitted securely via HTTPS.