Getting started

Sign in

Signing in takes your email address, your password, and a one-time code. The code is emailed to you, unless you have set up an authenticator app, in which case it comes from there instead. This applies on every device.

If the emailed code does not arrive, look in your junk folder. It is the single most common reason people cannot sign in. Mark the message as not junk and the next one will land in your inbox.

Connect a cloud drive

DriveFiler works with Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. You connect one, and DriveFiler creates a single folder called DriveFiler in it, containing two folders:

• Inbox — documents that have arrived but have not been filed yet.
• Cabinet — documents you have filed, in folders named after the categories you gave them.

DriveFiler only ever touches that one folder. Everything else in your drive is left alone.

Filing a document

Select a document in the Inbox and fill in what it is. Only Date, Document Type and Vendor are required; the rest are there when they are useful.

• Vendor — who the document is from. A bank, a shop, an employer.
• Account — which of that vendor's accounts it belongs to. Accounts belong to a vendor, so choosing the vendor first narrows the list.
• Document Type — statement, receipt, invoice, policy, and so on.
• Owner(s) — who the document is about. A vendor or an account can have default owners, filled in for you.
• Asset — a car, a property, a piece of equipment the document relates to.
• Crosslink Vendor / Account — a second party, for a document that involves two: a payment from one account to another, say.
• Tags and Comments — anything else you want to find it by.

Filling the form from the file name

DriveFiler reads the document's existing file name and fills in anything it recognises, leaving the rest blank. It looks for values it already knows rather than expecting a particular naming pattern, so the order and the separators do not matter. A banner tells you exactly which fields came from the file name, so a guess is never mistaken for something you chose.

Turn it off from Settings › Fill In Categories From the File Name.

"Also known as"

Every category has an Also known as field for other spellings it should answer to. An old company name, an abbreviation, whatever appears in your file names. Those alternatives are searched and are used when filling the form in from a file name — so a vendor that renamed itself is still found under the name your older documents use.

After you file something, DriveFiler may ask whether a word in the file name it did not recognise should be remembered as another name for the category you chose. It only asks when that word turns up in more than one waiting document, so it is worth the question.

Check and repair your files

Utilities › Check and Repair My Files compares what DriveFiler believes about your documents against what is actually in your cloud drive, and offers to fix the differences.

It is worth running after you have moved things around in the drive yourself. It finds:

• documents that are not in the folder the specification says they belong in;
• files in your DriveFiler folder that it has no record of;
• records whose file has been renamed, moved or deleted;
• duplicate copies of a document you already have.

It always shows you the whole plan before it changes anything. Nothing is moved or deleted until you approve it, and you can open any file to look at it first. It will never delete the only copy of anything, and it will never delete a file it could not read.

Non-PDF files in the folder are listed but never touched.

Account and billing

DriveFiler is $14.99 USD a year for up to 25 devices, with the first month free. Full detail is on the pricing page.

Cancel any time from your account page — you never have to email us to stop paying. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not end the time you have already paid for.

Every payment is refundable for 30 days, the first one and every renewal, no reason required.

If a subscription lapses, DriveFiler keeps working in read-only form for a short period — you can still open and export everything, you just cannot file anything new until it is renewed.