Automating Office Management With Node — #1
File Cabinets, bookkeeping, and more are part of normal business operations. In this article we use Node.JS to explore ways to automate these tasks.
Update: Part 2 and Part 3 have been posted. Part 2 looks at using OCR to extract text from documents. Part 3 ties it all together with a functioning application that uses Natural Language Processing to classify the documents and file them into the file cabinet automatically.
Lets tackle some common items in managing an office for a small business. The first challenge we’ll examine is the typical file cabinet.
The purpose of the file cabinet is to store documents. Every business has their own “system” for how data is stored in the file cabinet. As long as it makes sense, most people can use it. We’ll leave this type of organisation to the experts — the administrative experts and/or bookkeepers. No, we are more interested in WHERE the data gets stored.
The only thing that really needs to be physically stored are those documents that have a “wet signature” — someone has signed it with a pen. Almost every other document can be digitised by scanning it and turning it into an image or PDF file.
We can create a virtual file cabinet then to store our documents. A simple directory structure like this may do the trick:
