Prepare PDF documents for year-end closing

Between the turn of the year and the handover to your accountant lie a few weeks that decide how laborious the closing becomes. If you have collected twelve months of documents under scanner names, you now open each file individually just to see what it contains. This page describes a workflow that splits into a handful of evenings: review, name in quarterly batches, check, hand over.

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Before & After

Beleg_Dezember.pdf 2024-12-31_Jahresabschluss_Bilanz_Steuerberater-Meier.pdf

Timing: when each step makes sense

Two dates structure the preparation. The first falls in November or December: here you check completeness, chase missing invoices, and pull annual statements from portals while they are still retrievable there. The second falls in January or February, once nothing more is arriving: now you name, check and hand over. That order saves duplicated work, because files you name in November and supplement in January have to be touched twice. Anyone naming as they go shortens both dates considerably and faces nothing more than a visual check in January. For the December date, one afternoon is usually enough.

Completeness before tidiness

Before renaming, walk through the document types that experience shows go missing: annual statements from insurers and energy suppliers, December bank statements, credit card statements, leasing paperwork, documents for fixed asset additions, last quarter's expenses, and statements from online portals that are often only available twelve months back. Only once those gaps are closed is the renaming pass worth running. A neatly named but incomplete year folder produces more follow-up questions than an untidy one that at least holds everything, and it merely postpones the real search. So walk the list once without any tool and tick off what you already have.

Work in quarterly batches

A year folder holding eight hundred PDFs is hard to review in one sitting, because attention for a suggestion list does not stretch across eight hundred rows. Split the stock into quarters and work one batch per session: pick the folder, let it analyse, walk the list, confirm. The conspicuous cases are till receipts without a text layer, for which OCR can be switched on, and bulk scans holding several documents in one file, which have to be split beforehand. The renaming history in the app shows which batch has already run when you pick the work up a week later.

The handover to your accountant

How you hand over depends on the firm: an upload into DATEV Unternehmen online, a client portal, a data room, or an encrypted archive. What every route shares is that the filename becomes the common language, because it shows up in the file list and in every query. So a pattern with the document date first, then business partner, document type and document number makes sense. Ask in advance whether the firm has its own specification; many do, and following it costs nothing but saves both sides coordination and later corrections.

What the tool does not do, and how it handles documents

Filery renames and nothing else. It does not sort documents into quarterly or account folders, builds no document list, reconciles nothing against bank statements, and does not check whether anything is missing; completeness stays your job. On data handling: the PDF is read on your computer and its content transmitted encrypted for AI analysis. The recognised details come back, the new name is built from them, and the renaming then happens again in your file system. The documents are not stored permanently. For your own keys there is the Custom plan at five euros a month.

FAQ

Technically yes, sensibly rarely. Quarterly batches can still be reviewed; a year batch usually cannot. Also mind your plan's monthly document limit: Starter covers 50 documents a month, Business 500 for 30 euros. Spread a large stock across several months accordingly, or move up a plan for the closing.

Before. The firm then works with readable names from the start, queries can often be settled from the filename alone, and renaming documents that are already handed over or archived becomes unnecessary, which would only create explanation work anyway. Naming as you go is better still.

Those should be split before the run, because one file can carry only one name and otherwise only the first document shows up in it. Filery does not split PDFs; use your scanner's separation feature or a PDF tool for that.

It helps with finding, not with proving. A consistent name makes an individual document findable in seconds instead of hunting through the folder. Whether your filing is audit-proof depends on archiving, immutability and process documentation. The filename is an aid for searching, not evidence in itself.

Related topics

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