Automation

Watch here an youtube screencast showing automation feature in action.

With Automation feature you can automate repetitive tasks like:

1. moving documents into their destination folder
2. assigning specific tags to the document

Each automate instance consists of:

• name or a title - give it whatever name you like
• match - what documents it applies to?
• destination folder - where shall it move the matched document?
• (optionally) tags - which tags shall it associate to the matched document?

Matching

In order to decide if automate instance applies to current document - it will look for certain keywords in the document. For example if document contains capital case REWE, then this document must be routed to folder Expenses/Groceries; if document contains word Deutschlandradio (german word which translates to english as German radio), then it will be routed to ARD ZDF Briefe

Caution

It is crucial to understand that matching is per Page. Thus, statement match a document is not entirely correct. Automation processes is triggered every time when OCR for certain page completes. OCRed page is sent to automation module and Papermerge will try to match each automate instance on it. In case there is a match - it is considered that document matched automate criteria, although technically correct is - page of respective the document matched!

There are 4 different ways to match:

1. Any
2. All
3. Literal
4. Regular Expression

With Any matching algorithm, document matches if any of mentioned keyword will match. With All, document matches if all mentioned keywords are found in document. Keywords order does not matter. With Literal, match means that the text you enter must appear in the document exactly as you’ve entered it. You can use Regular Expression for matching criteria. Regular expressions is a general programming method of text matching. Computer programmers usually know what it means.

Inbox + Automates

Automates run only for documents in Inbox folder.

Imported documents from local watch directory or from email account end up in your Inbox folder. Papermerge will apply automates only on the documents in Inbox - regardless where those documents were imported from. The side effect of this feature is that automates will run on documents in Inbox even if you uploaded them manually - this one is a very useful trick to test your automates.

Note

There is a good reason why automates apply only on the documents from Inbox. The reason is that in Inbox documents may disappear. In other words - it is acceptable for documents to suddenly move from Inbox to another folder - due to automation match. If automates would be applied on any folder - then imagine how confused you might be if documents would unexpectedly disappear from your current folder (due to automation match)!

Automates and UI Logs

You can check which automate matched specific document by looking at UI Logs:

In UI Log entry you can see document’s name, page number and document id on which Automates were applied (remember, automates are applied per Page!). Also, you can see that text which was extracted from that document:

In order to check which Automate matched this document/page, you need to scroll to the very bottom of the message: