Hazel for Expense Receipts

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.

Other Articles

• Hazel Rule for Hertz Receipts
• Hazel Rule for Hurley Travel Receipts

• Computing
• Os X
• Hazel