Phase 3 documentation. This page is about how the household actually uses
Household Hub day to day — the main Household Hub page
covers architecture and what each service owns; this page covers the human
side: routines, recurring tasks, and how a piece of information moves through
the stack from "something happened" to "filed and findable."
No single service in this stack does everything, and that's deliberate — each
one is good at exactly one thing, and they hand off to each other rather than
overlapping:
- Something arrives on paper (mail, a receipt, a form) → scan it into
Paperless via the matching consume/ folder → it's OCR'd,
searchable, and tagged automatically within seconds.
- Something needs to be remembered long-term but isn't a document (a
preference, a process, a plan) → write it in BookStack, in the book
that owns that kind of information.
- Something needs to happen on a specific date (a bill, a birthday, an
errand) → put it on the right Baïkal calendar.
- Something happened to a vehicle → log it in LubeLogger, not
BookStack (BookStack only holds the vehicle's unchanging facts).
- A recipe or meal plan → Mealie, never duplicated into
BookStack's Food book (which is deliberately reference-only: restaurants,
favorites, not instructions).
- Pantry/shopping → Grocy, generated from a Mealie meal plan when
planning ahead.
- Photos → Immich, never attached to a BookStack page.
- Home automation → Home Assistant, referenced from BookStack's
Home (Future) book only for planning notes, not live state.
The Templates book in BookStack is the glue that ties this together for
recurring situations — each template explicitly lists which of these services
to touch and in what order (see the templates themselves for the specifics of
each scenario, e.g. New Vehicle or Apartment Move-In).
The Homepage dashboard (Tailscale-only, http://household-hub:6879) is
the fast entry point into all of this — one page, one click to whichever
service the task at hand needs, rather than remembering four different URLs.
A new bill arrives in the mail:
- Scan it into
consume/Apartment/ (or Insurance/, Vehicle/, etc.
depending on what it's for) — Paperless auto-tags it from the folder.
- Set Document Type (
Utility Bill, Insurance Policy, etc.) and
Correspondent in the Paperless web UI.
- If it needs to be paid on a recurring schedule, make sure there's a
standing reminder on the Baïkal Household calendar — this is a one-time
setup per bill, not a per-bill-arrival task.
- Nothing needs to happen in BookStack for a routine bill — BookStack only
gets touched if this is new information (e.g. a new utility provider,
which updates the Apartment book's Utility Providers page).
A major purchase happens:
- Create a page in BookStack's Purchases book using the New Purchase
template.
- File the receipt and warranty card in Paperless under
Receipts/.
- Update Finances → Warranty Expiration if there's a warranty date
worth tracking.
- If it's vehicle-related, this becomes a Vehicle Maintenance LubeLogger
entry instead (see the Vehicle Maintenance template) — Purchases is for
everything else.
A vehicle gets serviced:
- Log the service in LubeLogger directly (Service, Repair, or Upgrade tab —
see the LubeLogger Usage Guide in BookStack's Vehicles book for which tab).
- File the shop invoice in Paperless under
Vehicle/.
- Nothing needs to happen in BookStack unless a static fact changed (new
tire size, new paint after bodywork).
Planning a trip:
- Start a page in BookStack's Travel book (Trip Planning) using the
Vacation Planning template.
- File confirmations in Paperless as they're booked.
- Block the dates on the Baïkal Relationship or Household calendar.
- Track actual spend against budget in Travel → Budget once the trip
is done.
Processes are the recurring, multi-step routines that don't map to a single
"event" the way the templates above do — they happen on their own schedule
regardless of what else is going on. See BookStack's Procedures book for
the step-by-step checklist for each of these; this page is the schedule,
Procedures is the how.
- Monthly Financial Review
- Meal Prep Routine (coordinates Mealie + Grocy)
- Cleaning Schedule
- Tax Preparation Checklist (coordinates with Paperless's Taxes folder)
- Check the Baïkal Household/Errands/Chores calendars for anything due today.
- If anything arrived in the mail that needs filing, scan it into the
appropriate Paperless consume/ folder the same day rather than letting it
pile up — a single document takes seconds; a backlog of 20 takes an
afternoon.
- Log any fuel-up or vehicle expense from the day in LubeLogger while it's
fresh (the receipt, if kept, goes to Paperless separately).
- Run the Monthly Financial Review procedure (BookStack → Procedures).
- Clear anything sitting in Paperless's
Inbox/ folder that hasn't been
properly re-tagged/re-filed yet.
- Review the Baïkal calendars for the coming month and confirm nothing's
missing (upcoming bills, birthdays, appointments).
- Check LubeLogger's Reminders tab for anything approaching its due
date/mileage.
- Annual Financial Review (Templates book) — net worth, insurance coverage,
subscriptions, upcoming large expenses.
- Annual Home Maintenance (Templates book) — HVAC filters, gutters, smoke
detector batteries, water heater, weatherstripping.
- Review Paperless documents tagged
Archive or past their suggested
retention window (see Document Management → Retention Strategy) and
decide what to actually clean up.
- Review Technology Inventory (Templates book) for expired warranties.
- Update Emergency Contacts and Emergency Preparedness pages if anything
changed (new provider, new emergency kit contents).
A suggested cadence for tying the above together, rather than treating every
task as independent:
- Every time mail/paper arrives: scan it same-day into Paperless. This is
the single highest-leverage habit in this whole system — everything else
(search, tagging, retention review) only works if documents actually get in.
- Weekly: quick glance at Baïkal for the week ahead; anything on the
Errands calendar gets combined into one trip rather than four separate ones.
- Monthly: the Monthly Tasks list above, ideally on a fixed day of the
month (e.g. the first Sunday) so it becomes a habit rather than something
that gets forgotten.
- Annually: block time for the Annual Tasks list above — these are easy
to let slide because nothing breaks immediately if they're skipped, but
they compound (an unreviewed warranty expiring unnoticed, an outdated
emergency contact) if skipped for multiple years running.
- As life happens: use the Templates book — new vehicle, new apartment,
a medical visit worth remembering, a household project — rather than
improvising a new structure each time. Consistency here is what makes
search and review actually useful later.
| Date |
Change |
| 2026-07-25 |
Phase 3: page created — operational workflows, household processes, daily/monthly/annual task lists, recommended routines, service-synergy write-up. |