Use Case: A Bakery of Three Gets Its Paperwork in Order

The Bakery

Rosewood Bakery is a small bakery with a shop. Besides walk-in customers, it delivers bread and pastries to a café, a hotel, a school kitchen and a caterer. Three people run it:

• Clara, the owner and head baker;
• Martin, who works part time in the office on invoices and bookkeeping;
• Ella, the shop manager, who takes the deliveries and keeps the hygiene logs.

The Problem

A bakery produces a surprising amount of paper:

• supplier invoices for flour, dairy, fruit and packaging, several a week;
• customer invoices for the weekly deliveries to cafés and hotels;
• hygiene records: inspection reports, pest control visits, temperature logs, staff training.

At Rosewood, these live in three places: a folder in the office, Clara’s email inbox and a shoebox under the shop counter. Every month Martin collects the invoices for the tax advisor and always misses a few. When the food safety inspector asks for the latest pest control report, everyone starts searching.

Invoices have to be kept for years, so throwing things away is risky too. And nobody knows which old documents may be thrown away.

The Approach in Papermerge

Clara sets Papermerge up once, in about 15 minutes. After that, the daily routine is the same for everyone.

One shared place. All three work in one shared cabinet, Rosewood Bakery. Every document in it is visible to the whole team.

Three categories, decided once. Clara creates three categories: Supplier Invoice, Customer Invoice and Hygiene Record. Each one says which details to record (for example supplier, invoice date and total amount) and how long the document must be kept.

Nobody decides where a document goes. Ella photographs the dairy invoice when the delivery arrives, uploads it to her inbox and picks the category Supplier Invoice. That’s her only decision. Papermerge files the invoice into the bakery’s cabinet, in the folder for supplier invoices of that year. No folder to choose, so no invoice ends up in the wrong place.

Found in seconds. At the end of the month, Martin filters all supplier invoices by invoice date and has the whole month in one list, no matter who uploaded them.

Kept as long as needed, and not longer. Every archived invoice is kept for 10 years from its invoice date, every hygiene record for 3 years. When the time is up, Clara approves the deletion. Nothing is deleted by accident, and nothing is kept forever.

What Changed

Before	With Papermerge
Paper in three places	One shared cabinet for the whole team
Martin hunts for invoices every month	One filter: category and date
“Where is the pest control report?”	Search by category and date
Nobody knows what may be thrown away	Every document knows its own expiry date

Try It Yourself

The step-by-step guide shows the complete setup: users, group, cabinet, retention periods, metadata and categories. It comes with 15 fictional sample documents from Rosewood Bakery, so you can follow along in your own team account.

Rosewood Bakery: step-by-step setup