The private document organiser for iPhone

Most people store documents in three or four different places at once: a few things in email, some photos in the camera roll, a folder on the desktop, a pile on the kitchen counter. When you actually need something — a warranty for a broken appliance, a receipt for an expense claim, a lease clause at renewal — you spend twenty minutes searching for it and still aren't sure you found the right version.

filedup is a document organiser for iPhone that solves this with one change: scan once, find anything, and nothing ever leaves your phone. On-device AI extracts the key fields from each document the moment you scan it. Everything is stored locally, organised by folder, and searchable in seconds. No cloud account to set up. No subscription to worry about for core features. No third party holding copies of your financial records.

How to set up your folder system

The temptation when starting any new organising system is to create too many folders, or to create folders based on file types rather than life events. Both approaches fail for the same reason: they don't match how you'll actually search for documents later.

When you need something in filedup, you'll search by asking a question like "where's that lease renewal clause?" or "which folder has my renovation quotes?" — not "where did I put my PDFs?" The best folder system maps to the things that happen in your life, not to the type of paper you received.

A recommended folder taxonomy

Start with six folders. Add more only when a life event makes it obvious you need one.

• Work Claims — expenses you'll claim back from your employer: transport, meals, accommodation, equipment. One folder per employer or per calendar year if you change jobs.
• Tax [Year] — everything that will appear on your tax return for a given year. Receipts for deductible expenses, donation acknowledgements, income statements. Lock this folder once you've filed.
• Warranties + Manuals — proof-of-purchase receipts and manuals for appliances, electronics, furniture. Scan the receipt the day you buy something; you'll thank yourself when something breaks.
• Renovation Quotes — quotes, contracts, variation orders, and final invoices from any building or renovation work. These matter for capital gains calculations, insurance claims, and disputes with contractors.
• Lease + Tenancy — signed lease agreements, tenancy agreements, inspection reports, correspondence about bond returns. You'll want these at renewal time and when you move out.
• Utilities — electricity, gas, water, and internet bills. Useful for expense claims if you work from home, for dispute resolution, and for comparing usage over time.

Each folder in filedup is a searchable, exportable archive. You can search within a folder by keyword, amount, or date, and export the entire folder as a PDF when you need to send records to an accountant, insurer, or government authority.

What to organise in filedup

Any physical document that has financial, legal, or administrative significance is worth scanning. The practical test: would losing this document cause you a problem? If yes, scan it.

Tax receipts and expense claims. These are the most time-sensitive. Thermal receipts fade — sometimes within a year. Scan them the same day. See the 12 documents every adult should have scanned for a comprehensive checklist.

Lease agreements. Residential and commercial leases contain clauses you'll need to find quickly — notice periods, rent review dates, permitted use, make-good obligations. A searchable scan is far faster than reading 30 pages of PDF.

Home warranties. Most appliances and building products come with manufacturer warranties of one to ten years. The warranty is useless without proof of purchase and the original receipt. Scan both together.

Renovation quotes and contracts. Multiple quotes from different trades, scope-of-work contracts, progress payment invoices. If you're renovating a home you own, these form part of the cost base for capital gains purposes.

Insurance policies. The declaration page, the schedule of cover, and any correspondence that confirms or changes your coverage. You'll need these urgently after an incident — not a good time to be searching.

Vehicle records. Roadworthy certificates, service invoices, registration papers. Important for resale and for warranty claims on parts.

Medical receipts. Out-of-pocket expenses that may be tax-deductible or claimable through private health insurance. Date and provider are critical — both fields are extracted automatically by filedup's AI.

How the on-device AI works

Most document scanner apps work by sending your image to a cloud server, running OCR on the server, extracting structured data, and sending results back to your phone. filedup does none of that. Point your camera at a document and the entire process happens on your iPhone, using Apple's on-device machine learning frameworks.

The AI reads the text in the image and extracts four key fields: merchant or counterparty name, total amount (with currency), date, and document category. These become the metadata that makes documents searchable and sortable. You review the extracted fields before the document is filed — if the AI misread something, you correct it in seconds.

Why does this matter? Two reasons: privacy and reliability.

Privacy. When a cloud-based app processes your document on a server, your financial information — merchant names, amounts, dates — sits in a database you don't control. In some cases it's used to train AI models. Under frameworks like PDPA (Singapore) and GDPR (Europe), uploading personal financial records to a US server creates compliance considerations, particularly for small businesses. filedup processes everything on your device. Nothing is transmitted. No account is required.

Reliability. Because there's no round-trip to a server, on-device processing is also faster. It works offline. And it works in regions where cloud services may be slow or blocked.

Finding documents fast

The point of organising documents isn't the organisation itself — it's being able to find what you need when you need it. filedup's search covers every field the AI extracted, plus the folder name and any notes you add.

You can search by keyword (merchant name, any word in the document), by folder, by date range, and by amount. Looking for all receipts over $50 from last November? That's a filter, not a scroll through hundreds of images. Looking for the name of the electrician you used in 2024? Search "electrician" and it surfaces every document in your Renovation Quotes folder that mentions one.

Because the AI extracts amounts as structured data — not just text — you can also sort by amount and see totals per folder. This is especially useful for expense claims: you can see at a glance that your Work Claims folder for the quarter contains 23 receipts totalling $847.

Exporting: share, report, hand to your accountant

There are two export modes in filedup. The first is available on all tiers: export any folder as a multi-page PDF, with each document on its own page. This is the standard format for handing records to an accountant or including documents with a tax return or insurance claim.

The second mode — expense report PDF export — is available on Plus. It generates a structured expense report: a cover page with the total and item count, then each receipt in order with its extracted fields displayed alongside the image. This is the format most HR departments and accountants actually want. No manual spreadsheet required.

For more on using filedup for expense reporting, see the best expense report app for iPhone. For guidance on what your accountant actually needs from you, see what documents does your accountant actually need?

filedup vs just using iCloud Photos

iCloud Photos is where most people currently store their document scans — because it's already there and requires no setup. It's a reasonable first step, but it has four significant limitations as a document organiser.

No field extraction. Photos stores an image. It doesn't know the image contains a receipt from a hardware store for $127.50. filedup knows, because the AI extracted that information. That difference is what makes search work.

No organisation structure. Albums in Photos are loose collections. There's no way to represent a folder hierarchy, no way to lock a completed year, and no way to see totals across a group of images.

No export as expense report. You can share images from Photos, but you can't export a set of receipts as a structured expense report with a total and an itemised list. filedup Plus does this in two taps.

Not searchable by amount or merchant. Photos' search is visual and keyword-based on photo content generally — not on structured financial fields. You cannot search Photos for "all receipts over $100 from 2024" and get a reliable answer.

iCloud Photos is a backup. filedup is an organiser. They do different jobs, and for documents that matter, you want both: filedup as the organised archive, and your existing iCloud backup as the safety net.

Getting started

Download filedup from the App Store — it's free. Open it, create your first folder (Work Claims or Tax 2025 are good starting points), and scan the most recent document sitting on your desk. The whole process takes about two minutes the first time, and less than thirty seconds for every document after that.

Once you've scanned your first document and seen how the AI extracts the fields, the habit of scanning immediately — rather than keeping the paper — tends to stick on its own.