4. Scan what you want digitally, and do it in a single pass
Digitising is worth the effort for the middle tier of documents: things you want findable but not physically. It is not worth it for certificates you must hold in paper, and it is a waste of time for things you are keeping for one year.
Use a phone rather than a scanner. The document scanning mode in most phone camera apps, or a free scanning app, produces a cropped, deskewed PDF in about four seconds per page and is genuinely good enough. A dedicated sheet-fed scanner is only worth buying if you have thousands of pages.
Work in one pass with a rhythm: lay the sheet down, shoot, name, next. Naming is what makes it useful later, so use a consistent pattern such as 2026-03-14 EDF electricity bill — date first in year-month-day order so files sort chronologically on their own. Ten minutes spent agreeing a naming pattern saves hours of searching.
Build a simple folder structure matching your seven piles, not a deep hierarchy. Two levels is plenty: a top folder per category, and a year folder inside it. Deep nesting is how digital paperwork becomes as lost as the paper version.
Store it in two places. One cloud service for access and search, and one local backup on an external drive or a second cloud account. A single cloud account holding your only copy of everything is a single point of failure, and account lockouts do happen.
Turn on the scanner app’s text recognition if available, which makes the contents searchable and removes most of the need to file carefully in the first place.