A home for your paperwork: contracts, warranties, insurance and certificates

Where paperwork ends up

A contract comes by post and goes into a drawer. A warranty card is photographed and forgotten among holiday pictures. An insurance policy arrives as an attachment and stays in the inbox. None of this is wrong, but a year later the question is never where the drawer is; it is which of two hundred papers says what you need.

Why a photo roll or a notes app stops working

A photo of a page is only a picture: you cannot search it for a policy number, and it sits between screenshots and birthdays. A notes app can hold a scan, but each note is filed by hand, and after a hundred of them the filing is the work. Both are fine for ten documents and tiring for a household's worth.

What an archive means in practice

The original is kept. Cropping or straightening a scan should make a better copy, not replace the page you took.

Each page is checked when you take it. A blurred or dark page is easy to retake on the day and impossible to fix a year later.

Every word is searchable. You look for the landlord's name or the word on the warranty, not for the folder you put it in.

Deleting can be undone. A document thrown away by mistake should come back, for a while at least.

You can take it all with you. An archive you cannot export is a place you cannot leave.

What is worth keeping

Contracts for your home, work and phone; insurance policies and their renewals; warranties and the receipts that go with them; certificates such as birth, marriage and school certificates; tax returns and payslips; and the medical and car papers you may be asked for again. How long each must be kept depends on the country and on what the paper is for; when a document matters to a claim or a dispute, keep it until that is settled.

How Pocket Aurora Papers does it

Papers keeps each document's original pages as you took them; edits make a new version and never overwrite them. Its camera checks every page as you take it, and your iPhone reads the text on each page, in English, Czech, German, French and Spanish, so search finds a document by any word in it, with no connection.

You can add a document's issuer, date, reference and amount, keep home, work and school papers in separate spaces, and give a bill a due date so Papers reminds you before it is due. What you delete goes to Deleted, where it can be restored for 30 days, and Settings › Export all documents writes the whole archive to a folder, originals included. How it works.