Digitaler Unterlagen-Ordner

A filing cabinet for your PDFs — collect every document into one structured, bookmarked PDF.

Digitaler Unterlagen-Ordner (internally BelegTool) is a Windows desktop app for anyone who keeps a lot of documents and receipts and wants them in one place instead of scattered across folders. Import PDFs, scans, photos, Office files, emails, and archives into a single structured tree, preview and compress them, and export the whole thing as one PDF with a clickable table of contents and sidebar bookmarks.

The interface is available in German and English.

Status: active beta. It's solid enough for real use, but see Known limitations and BETA_TESTING.md before you rely on it. Bug reports and feedback are very welcome — see Feedback & contributing.

Features

Bring in anything

• PDF and .belegtool files load directly as document trees.
• Images (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC) are converted to PDF automatically.
• Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), converted via the installed Office apps.
• Email — .eml and Outlook .msg — with attachments extracted into a subtree.
• Archives — ZIP and TAR/TGZ — with their folder structure preserved (and a zip-bomb guard).
• An import safety screen rejects executables and files masquerading as PDFs or images.

Organize

• Arrange documents in a foldered tree: create folders, rename, delete, deep-copy.
• Drag-and-drop to move, nest, and reorder — or drop OS files straight in to import them.
• Keyboard-driven restructuring (grab, move, commit) with full undo/redo.
• Split a multi-page document into one node per page; merge siblings back together.
• Per-node status tracking (captured / to capture / prior-year), which round-trips when you save.

Preview & compress

• Fast, cached, page-by-page preview with a DPI slider (50–300).
• Multiple compression methods computed in parallel — grayscale/colour JPG, PNG, and structural — with the smallest result picked automatically and original sizes shown for comparison.

Export & save

• Export your selection or the whole tree to a single PDF with a printed, clickable table of contents and sidebar bookmarks.
• Save as .belegtool: a real PDF that any viewer can open, with your tree structure stored inside so it re-imports losslessly.
• Open multiple documents at once, each in its own window.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11.
• For importing Office files, Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint must be installed. Everything else (PDF, image, archive, and email import) works without Office.

Installation

Option A — Prebuilt (recommended)

Download the latest build from the Releases page, unzip it, and run BelegTool.exe. No Python or Node.js required. You can also open a file directly:

BelegTool.exe yourfile.belegtool

Option B — From source

Requires Python 3.12 and Node.js.

pip install -r requirements.txt
cd webui && npm install && npm run build && cd ..
python host.py

Open a file on launch with python host.py yourfile.belegtool.

Known limitations

• Large exports produce a single PDF. Automatically splitting very large exports into multiple files isn't available yet.
• Compression is irreversible once saved. When you commit compression on a document and save, the original bytes are dropped to keep the file small — that node can't be reset afterward.
• See BETA_TESTING.md for the full current list and what to expect while testing.

Feedback & contributing

This project is in active testing, and feedback is the most useful thing you can give. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to report bugs, request features, and share first impressions.

Translations are welcome too: the UI strings are externalized (German source + English map under webui/src/i18n/), so adding a language is just a translation file. Open an issue if you'd like to help.

License

Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPLv3) — free to use, modify, and distribute, and free for personal use. If you use it to provide a network service, you must make your modified source code available to that service's users.

A commercial license is available for closed-source or proprietary use. Contact: tobias.a.w.heinrich@gmail.com

See LICENSE for the full AGPLv3 text and LICENSE_COMMERCIAL.md for commercial terms.