The Documents That Live in Five Jurisdictions
A Tamil Nadu family with members holding credentials from India, Grenada, Antigua, St. Kitts, and the United States does not have a simple document management problem. They have a jurisdictional management problem. A bank account opened with an Indian address needs different supporting documents than one opened in Grenada. A medical council registration in Tamil Nadu has a renewal cycle that has nothing to do with an insurance policy issued under a US address. A travel visa for one family member needs to be stored separately from the same visa for another, under the same trip itinerary, without the records colliding.
Most people manage this by keeping physical originals in one folder, scanning some documents to a hard drive that may or may not be backed up, and maintaining credential lists in their head or in a notes app that offers no structure. The cognitive tax is paid every time something needs to be located, renewed, or verified under pressure.
The Architecture of a Record That Covers Everything
The Whose field — Dad, Mom, Mine, Ooty atha, Appar atha, Pappa — is the first filter and it is more important than it looks. It establishes family-member scope immediately, which matters when you have overlapping document types (both parents hold property deeds, both parents have bank accounts) and need to pull one person's records without the other's showing up in a search.
Country Giving and Giving Authority operate as a two-level jurisdiction classifier. Country narrows to India, Grenada, USA, Antigua, St. Kitts, Tamil Nadu state-specific, or Personal Pictures. Giving Authority narrows further: University College, Election Commission, Bank, Income Tax, Insurance, Medical Council, Law, Doctor, Property, Travel ticket/visa. The combination of these two fields creates a filter that can isolate, for example, all Bank-issued documents from Grenada, or all Travel visa records regardless of country, or every document the Election Commission of India has ever issued to any family member.
The Type field — Docu, Pass, Both — separates records that are pure document scans from records that include login credentials. A fixed deposit certificate is Docu. An online banking login is Pass. A government portal where you also store the underlying document is Both. This prevents a credential vault from being contaminated by records that have no password, and vice versa.
Valid From and Valid Until fields apply to both document types. A passport has a validity window. So does a bank password that gets cycled on a schedule. The date range fields work the same way regardless of type, which is a clean abstraction that saves building two parallel validity-tracking systems.
Forty Slots Because Documents Are Not Simple
The image and file pair structure — up to forty Picture fields and ten File fields — is the most unusual design decision in this template, and also the most practical one for the use case it is solving.
A property document in India is not a single sheet. It may include a sale deed, an encumbrance certificate, an occupancy certificate, a building plan approval, tax payment receipts, and layout approval from the local development authority. Scanning all of these into a single record keeps them grouped under one property identifier, with Country Giving set to India, Giving Authority set to Property, and Whose set to the appropriate family member. The alternative is a folder structure that requires you to know in advance what the folder naming convention will be and maintain it across a hard drive, a phone, and a backup location simultaneously.
The bank classify field — Opening documents, Fixed deposit, Other — adds a sub-classification layer that makes Bank-type records useful at volume. When a family holds fixed deposits across multiple banks in multiple countries, being able to filter on Fixed Deposit across all Bank authority records gives you a consolidated view of maturity dates and amounts that would otherwise require checking each institution separately.
The hint text on Other Details — "DOB Used / Address used / Pass questions" — reveals the depth of credential management this vault handles. Security question answers and the specific date-of-birth format accepted by a given service are the kind of credential details that get lost when the person who set up the account is unavailable and someone else needs to access it. At 1 AM in a hospital waiting room in Grenada, trying to access an insurance portal that requires the exact birth date format used at enrollment, that field is not a convenience. It is the only thing standing between you and the policy details you need.