Hazel for Expense Receipts

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Tagged as computing, OS X and hazel

Hazel is a wonderful tool for au­to­mat­i­cal­ly sorting files. In fact, I've written a family of rules that sort differnt types of receipts into folders for expense report backup. These rules are assigned to my Downloads folder, which is used as a "sorting folder".

Most of the expense document sorting rules have the same general recipe:

  • Identify the type of document (usually PDF)
  • Pick at least one unique text string
  • Somehow match the a date in the document contents that is used to determine into which month's folder it will be sorted.
  • If the file name is not already unique, rename it such that it (probably) is.
  • Move the file into ~/Work/Expenses.
  • Sort the file into a subfolder, creating it if necessary, with the pattern YYYY-MM.

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