All guides · 6 min read

Filing invoices and scans at home – so you find them again

How long to keep private receipts, why one folder per year beats one per topic, and what a scan has to look like if you want to search it.

Paper has one advantage: it lies somewhere and piles up visibly. Digital receipts disappear silently – into the mailbox, the downloads folder, the photo album on your phone. They are always looked for when time is short.

How long do you have to keep things?

Private individuals do not have to keep the vast majority of receipts at all. There are a few cases, though, where it is mandatory or at least strongly advisable:

• Building and tradesman work on a house or flat: in Germany a two-year duty to keep the invoice, and a fine if you do not (§ 14b Umsatzsteuergesetz)
• Proof of purchase for anything under warranty: two years from delivery – without a receipt it gets difficult
• Papers for your tax return: until the assessment is final and any appeal is settled
• Contracts, policies, certificates, deeds: as long as they apply – for certificates and deeds that means forever

For everything else there is a pragmatic rule: what you have not needed within three years, you will not need. Storage costs less today than thinking about it – when in doubt, keep it and look through the oldest folders once a year.

One folder per year beats one per topic

The obvious structure is by topic: “Insurance”, “Car”, “Home”. It has a catch you only notice after two years: topics grow at different speeds, and plenty of receipts fit under two of them.

For receipts the year is the more reliable first level, because every receipt has exactly one date – there is nothing to decide. The topic goes into the file name, not into the folder name:

Receipts\2026\2026-03-14 City Utilities annual statement.pdf

Search for “City Utilities” and you have the file in two seconds, across every year. Want to know what happened in 2026? Open one folder. Both questions are answered, and filing required no decision at all.

Scanning: PDF, not JPG

A phone is perfectly adequate as a scanner – the built-in apps straighten the page and crop it. Only the format matters: save as PDF, not as a photo.

The reason is text recognition. A PDF can carry the recognised text along invisibly; a JPG cannot. With such a PDF, Windows search will later find the amount or the customer number even when the file name mentions neither. That is the difference between an archive and a pile of pictures.

The name does the work

Three components are enough, always in the same order: date, sender, what it is about.

2026-03-14 City Utilities annual statement.pdf

The date first, starting with the year, keeps the yearly folder in chronological order by itself. The sender is what you actually search for – almost nobody searches for “invoice”, almost everybody searches for the name of the company.

One copy off site

A digital archive has a weakness paper does not: a dead hard disk takes everything at once. For receipts a simple rule is enough – two copies on different devices, one of them off site, for instance in a cloud folder or on an external disk at somebody you trust.

With Zortio

The route from scan to archive almost always passes through the downloads or desktop folder. That is exactly where Zortio comes in: sorting by type and year moves the PDFs into “Documents\2026”, and the duplicate search finds the invoice you downloaded twice.

One point matters more with receipts than elsewhere: Zortio deletes nothing. Duplicate receipts move into a folder of their own that you review yourself – with something you are required to keep for two years, you do not want to leave the decision to a program.