Every SMB credit package lands as a jumble of cryptic files—01.03.24-final(3).pdf, scan00123.jpg, bank2_conceled_text_v2.pdf. Kaaj.ai reads each document, understands what it is, extracts the tell-tale details, and rewrites the name to something a human (or a robot) can understand—“Bank Statement │ Chase Bank │ Jan 2025.pdf”. Underwriters locate what they need in seconds, audit trails stay pristine, and funding timelines shrink.
Why File-Name Chaos Hurts Underwriting
Loan teams usually obsess over spreads, covenants, and credit boxes—yet the boring task of file naming quietly drains hours every week. Here’s what goes wrong when filenames don’t make sense:
- Search fatigue
- Analysts scroll long directory trees or crack open PDFs “just to be sure.”
- Multiply two wasted minutes by 10 documents and thirty deals a day—that’s a lost afternoon.
- Analysts scroll long directory trees or crack open PDFs “just to be sure.”
- Lost context
- 1.pdf tells you nothing about document type, borrower, or date range.
- Mistaking a February statement for January can derail variance checks and cash-flow analysis.
- 1.pdf tells you nothing about document type, borrower, or date range.
- Version confusion
- A borrower emails “invoice-final-v4-really_final.pdf” plus another named “invoice-final-v4(1).pdf.”
- Which one is correct? Only a side-by-side compare (or an irate phone call) can tell.
- Audit anxiety
- Regulators want a clear trail: document → reviewer → outcome.
- Cryptic names trigger additional sampling, questions, and sometimes fines.
- Automation blockers
- Downstream AI agents, extractors, and BI dashboards often key off filenames.
- Inconsistent patterns force manual workarounds and brittle regex scripts.
- Downstream AI agents, extractors, and BI dashboards often key off filenames.
You wouldn’t tolerate mismatched GL accounts—why accept messy filenames that slow down every other task?
What Makes a “Good” Filename?
After interviewing dozens of credit, ops, and compliance teams, we distilled three universal rules:
- Self-describing
- Humans should know what’s inside before they click.
- Example: Tax Return │ 1040 │ 2024.pdf.
- Humans should know what’s inside before they click.
- Machine-friendly
- Predictable delimiters (│, _, or –) and order let scripts parse the string in milliseconds.
- Predictable delimiters (│, _, or –) and order let scripts parse the string in milliseconds.
- Audit-ready
- Immutable identifiers—document type, entity name, date or period—so anyone can trace it later.
- Immutable identifiers—document type, entity name, date or period—so anyone can trace it later.
The pattern that scores highest on all three axes is:
<Doc Type> │ <Primary Entity> │ <Period>.pdf
Borrower names, institutions, statement ranges, or invoice dates drop right in. If your policy demands more granularity (loan number, branch code), Kaaj lets you extend the template in one click.
Why Humans & Simple Scripts Can’t Keep Up
- Sheer volume – A single SBA deal can carry 40–100 attachments. Even at 30 seconds each, renaming devours an hour.
- Ambiguous content – A file contains a bank statement yet is labeled BS_01.pdf. The system has to open, read, and understand it.
- Inconsistent layouts – Key fields appear in different corners depending on the bank, the year, or the PDF generator.
- Weird edge cases – Think grainy faxes, mobile snapshots with skew, or password-protected statements.
- Maintenance overhead – Regex hacks break the moment a new template or bank lands in your pipeline, spawning yet another Jira ticket.
Result: a never-ending game of whack-a-mole that saps team morale and delays closings.
Inside Kaaj AI-Powered Renaming Pipeline
We keep the recipe high-level—no need to give away all the sauce, just enough to prove it works. Kaaj uses a three-layer stack, each smarter (and slightly costlier) than the last:
- Document Identity Check
- What happens: Our fastest vision models glance at logo placement, dominant typography, and obvious keywords to decide whether a file is a bank statement, invoice, or tax form.
- Why it matters: Correct type = correct naming template. Most docs exit here in milliseconds.
- What happens: Our fastest vision models glance at logo placement, dominant typography, and obvious keywords to decide whether a file is a bank statement, invoice, or tax form.
- Context Extraction
- What happens: A text-focused language model skims headings, tables, and footers to pull issuer names (“Chase Bank”), borrower identifiers (“Utility Trailer Sales of Dallas”), and the relevant period (“Jan 2025”).
- Why it matters: Supplies the tokens that populate the new filename.
- What happens: A text-focused language model skims headings, tables, and footers to pull issuer names (“Chase Bank”), borrower identifiers (“Utility Trailer Sales of Dallas”), and the relevant period (“Jan 2025”).
- Deep Multimodal Review
- What happens: Only tricky files—low-resolution scans, photos, odd layouts—flow to a multimodal model that reasons over image, text, and spatial layout together.
- Why it matters: Catches the edge cases without slowing everything else. Typically < 5 % of traffic reaches this stage.
- What happens: Only tricky files—low-resolution scans, photos, odd layouts—flow to a multimodal model that reasons over image, text, and spatial layout together.
Smart routing plus caching means renaming runs in the same pass as document classification, so you get two wins (clean labels and clean filenames) for the price of one inference.
Before-and-After Walkthrough
Here’s a simplified snapshot of Kaaj in action—mirroring the screenshots you just saw:
- Input filenames
- kaaj-demo.pdf
- bank2_conceled_text_v2.pdf
- 1.pdf
- ).pdf
- kaaj-demo.pdf
- AI steps
- Detects application, bank statements, invoice, tax form.
- Reads borrower name “Utility Trailer Sales of Dallas,” issuer names “Chase Bank,” “Citizens Bank,” and dates.
- Applies template.
- Detects application, bank statements, invoice, tax form.
- Output filenames
- Credit App │ Utility Trailer Sales of Dallas │ 05-19-2025.pdf
- Bank Statement │ Chase Bank │ 9775 │ Jan 2025.pdf
- Invoice │ Excel Truck Group │ 05-23-2025.pdf
- Tax Form │ 1040 │ 2024.pdf
- Credit App │ Utility Trailer Sales of Dallas │ 05-19-2025.pdf
Analysts instantly understand what each file is. Better still, they can sort their desktop folder alphabetically and every bank statement lines up in order.
Business Wins Our Lenders Report
- 90 % faster retrieval – Type “Bank Statement Jan 2025” into search and every relevant file appears.
- Cleaner borrower comms – Fewer “please clarify attachment” emails.
- Automation unlocked – Downstream AI agents route Invoice* files to invoice analyzer; Tax Form* to K-1 extractors.
- Ops morale boost – Analysts focus on credit judgment, not clerical drudgery.
FAQ — File-Renaming Edition
- Can I customize the filename template?
Absolutely. Choose your delimiter, field order, or extra tokens (loan number, branch code). Talk to us about it and we can update in hours. - How do you pull borrower or issuer names reliably?
We combine high-confidence extraction zones (headers, “Bill To”, “Account Holder”) with cross-checks against onboarding metadata. - What if two files generate the same name?
Kaaj detects collisions in real time and appends a version suffix (-v2) so nothing overwrites silently. - Will this slow my pipeline?
Classification and renaming happen in the same microservice, processing thousands of docs/hour. Humans can’t touch that speed.
Ready to Turn Filename Garbage into Gold?
Drag-and-drop a messy package into Kaaj.ai or ping our API—watch your PDFs flip into clean, searchable assets in seconds. Book a live demo and see the transformation yourself.