The test

I used to think I was organised. Then I tried answering these five questions about my own family's documents -- and I could only get two of them without searching.

Here’s a quick test. Can you answer these questions right now, without searching?

If you answered all five confidently, congratulations, you’re in the minority. Most people can answer one or two. The rest require digging.

Why it matters

These aren’t trivia questions. They’re the questions that surface during emergencies, renewals, disputes, and life transitions, exactly when you have the least time and energy to go searching.

A 2023 survey found that 67% of Canadian adults couldn’t locate an important financial document within 10 minutes. Not because the documents don’t exist, but because they’re scattered, disorganized, or buried.

The three broken approaches

1. The filing cabinet

Physical folders in a drawer. Works until someone files something in the wrong place, the cabinet gets full, or you need to access it from somewhere other than your home office. And you still can’t search the contents, only the labels you wrote on the folders.

2. The cloud drive

Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud. Better than physical folders, but you’re just recreating the filing cabinet digitally. Search only works on file names, not document contents. You still can’t ask “What does my insurance cover?” and get an answer.

3. The “one organised person”

Many families rely on one partner who “knows where everything is.” This works until that person is unavailable, overwhelmed, or (in difficult situations) incapacitated. It’s a single point of failure for your family’s critical information.

What’s different about Archevi

Archevi isn’t a better filing cabinet. It’s a knowledge layer that sits on top of your documents and makes them queryable.

• Upload documents and ask questions in plain English
• Every answer cites the specific document and page
• Both partners get access to a shared vault
• Works across all document types: insurance, legal, tax, medical, property
• Canadian-hosted, PIPEDA-compliant — your documents stay in Canada

The real comparison

Competitors charge $20–30/month for cloud storage with basic OCR search. No AI, no question answering, no citations. You’re paying for a slightly fancier Dropbox.

Archevi starts at $8/month and gives you something none of them offer: the ability to ask questions and get verified answers from your own documents.

The cost of waiting

The best time to organise your documents is before you need them. Nobody thinks about their insurance policy until the claim. Nobody looks for the will until it’s urgent.

Sign up free. Upload a few documents. Ask a question you’ve been meaning to look up. It takes five minutes, and the next time an emergency hits, you’ll be ready.