Tax Season, Procrastination, and the AI That Saved My Sanity

It’s tax season… and even though I’ve technically been “paperless” for a while, my actual document management? Yeah—let’s just say it hasn’t kept up. 😅

While procrastinating (YouTube rabbit hole, naturally), I stumbled across a video about Paperless-ngx—a document management system that supposedly auto-tags your docs based on heuristics (aka smart guesses). Intrigued, I gave it a spin on about 150-200 documents.

Verdict? Cool idea, but… not quite smart enough.

So, I did what I do best—asked ChatGPT what was missing. Turns out, there’s a powerful little sidekick: Paperless-AI. It plugs into Paperless-ngx and uses local AI to handle the actual smarts.

Fast-forward: I spun it all up using Docker and Ollama (a self-hosted LLaMA 3.2 AI model). And now? It’s chewing through my documents like a beast.

The setup?

• Drop documents into a watch folder (or pull them from my email).
• They get OCR’d, parsed, and passed through local AI.
• Paperless-AI auto-generates context, titles, tags, keywords, and even figures out the sender (correspondents).
• Everything gets backed up to the cloud, too.

Honestly… this is the doc management system I’ve always wanted. Private, automated, organized, and blazing fast.

What more could I ask for?