AKTA — how it came to be

Why bother

Sunday evening, tax paperwork for January. I was kneeling on the living-room floor with three open ring binders, hunting a contractor invoice I knew for a fact existed. An hour later I still didn't have it — but I had three others I'd long forgotten about. That was the moment.

I'd briefly tried Paperless-ngx. Solid piece of kit, but too rigid for how I think. Also — I wanted an excuse to build something of my own.

How much time

Grew over several months, always evenings or weekends. At the start I could only drop documents in and type keywords — everything else I had to fill in myself. Then AKTA started suggesting titles, categories, senders. Then it reminded me about deadlines. Then it found documents I'd misremembered. And today I can ask AKTA questions directly — instead of "find me the insurance PDF" just "when does my home contents insurance expire?", with the source documents as backing. It never became a "finished thing" — more something I shape, piece by piece, around my daily life.

What went well

• The first time I found an old invoice in five seconds — that justified everything.
• Suggestions, not automation. When I drop something in, I see title, category and sender as suggestions, click one away or type over it. I decide, AKTA does the legwork.
• Scanning a document twice is no drama anymore — AKTA notices, says so, doesn't file it twice.
• I don't forget deadlines anymore. A reminder once sat in the pile with two weeks left — these days I get three mails, 30, 7 and 1 day ahead.
• Search finds "burst pipe" even when I type "water damage". Recently I dug up a contract I'd misremembered, using a keyword that wasn't even in the document.
• Questions instead of searches. "When does my home contents insurance expire?" returns the date directly, with the backing documents underneath. No source, no answer — that matters to me.

What didn't go so well

• Poorly scanned documents push text recognition to its limits. Some thermal receipts just aren't machine-readable — for those I still type the title and category myself.
• For a while I'd give AKTA hints on how to categorise better — and after every update the hints were gone. Today my customisations survive every update.
• Sometimes the LLM gets too creative. Filing a payment reminder as "Newsletter" was a good laugh. These days I look closer — and AKTA cuts the wildest suggestions off before they land in my archive.

Where it stands today

The stack of paperwork on my desk is gone. New documents go in an inbox folder, AKTA does the rest and only asks back when it's unsure. The 2025 tax return went through in one afternoon. That's all that counts.

If you want to see what's inside — the architecture, the stack, the key decisions — that's under the hood.