Simple example: I keep the books and records for a small performing arts non-profit I work with. DevonThink is—of course!—the repository where I store all of the related documents. I’ve got a folder (a “group” in DT terms) where I store our IRS 990’s, a folder where I store our annual state filings, a folder where I store grant agreements, a folder where I store venue rental agreements, a folder where I store certificates of insurance, a folder for bank statements, etc., etc., etc. I also create a folder for each fiscal year where I store things like scans of donor checks, invoices, receipts, records of electronic disbursements and receipts, and the like.
I add a tag to each document indicating what fiscal year it’s from (our fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30, so searching by calendar year won’t work), and other information as relevant, e.g., payment method used (either for receipts or payments), the specific event it’s associated with, the fundraising campaign, etc.
If I want to see all of the donations from Daddy Warbucks, that’s easily done via a name search. But let’s say I want to confirm which of our donors made their contributions via paper check over the last five years. I can ask DT to pull up the documents tagged “donation” and “check” and it will return all of the scanned checks that were for donations. (Yes, there is a spreadsheet with all of this information in it but, trust me, it’s mission critical to be able to cross-check a spreadsheet entry against a document.)
Or, let’s say I want to see the documentation for all of the payments and receipts connected with a specific event: I just search for everything tagged with the event name. Those payments and receipts may be spread over more than one fiscal year and may be linked to a couple of different rental agreements—and will thus be in different folders. Searching by the event tag pulls them all into one window.
For work like this I generally find it easier to file documents by type—except for transaction records, which get filed by fiscal year—and tag them by what I’ll roughly call purpose. So, all the insurance certificates are in one folder, because that’s the type of document they are, but they’re tagged to reflect which event they were for, which is their purpose, generally speaking.
The tag and folder systems for my knowledge work repositories are different because they’re not transaction based, but the principle is not dissimilar.