Uploading documents to the Jobcenter without a scanner

The Jobcenter wants a bank statement (Kontoauszug), your tenancy agreement or a certificate from your employer, ideally through jobcenter.digital. The document is on paper, and there is no scanner at home.

You can post it, but it is slower. Jobcenter Soest explains why in its own guide: paper goes to a scanning contractor and is destroyed afterwards, and it often reaches the caseworker only after about five working days. An upload goes straight into your electronic file.

So the obstacle is not the scanner but the file. A phone photo comes out crooked, half in shadow and several megabytes large.

What the portal accepts

The Federal Employment Agency lists it in its upload guide (version of 20.03.2026):

• Formats: PDF, JPG, PNG or BMP. Nothing else is accepted.
• Size: the limit is shown in the hint next to the upload field. The guide itself warns that smartphone photos can be larger than allowed.
• If the file is too big: cap the resolution at 300 dpi, and choose black and white for a PDF.
• After uploading: open the document in the portal and look at every page. If it is incomplete or unreadable, upload it again.

Some Jobcenters are more specific. Jobcenter Saalfeld-Rudolstadt says that a jobcenter.digital message may be at most 7.5 MB including attachments, with file names no longer than 80 characters. Yours may differ; what counts is the hint in the upload window.

Why "use Office Lens" no longer helps

Leaflets from Jobcenters and employment agencies often recommend Office Lens, Microsoft's scanner app. It is gone: according to Microsoft it left the app stores on 9 February 2026, and new scans stopped working after 9 March 2026.

An iPhone has a scanner in Notes and in Files; on Android there is one in Google Drive. They work if you scan on the spot, standing over the page. a4norm covers the rest: no room for another app, no wish to create yet another account, or the photos are already taken.

How to do it with a4norm

a4norm is a free Telegram bot: you send a photo of a page, it sends back an A4 PDF. The page is straightened, the desk and shadows disappear, the paper turns white, and a blue signature stays blue. One page usually comes to a few hundred kilobytes.

1. Photograph the page, all of it with a little margin, in even light. This short guide has the details.
2. Open the bot: @a4norm_bot. No extra account, no payment, just Telegram.
3. Send the photos. Switch on HD when sending, or send the photo as a file via the paperclip, otherwise Telegram compresses away fine detail. Send several pages of one document as one album: you get one multi-page PDF, in the order the photos went out.
4. Save the PDF under a clear name, such as Kontoauszug_2026-08.pdf or Mietvertrag.pdf. The caseworker reads German, so a German name helps.
5. Upload it to jobcenter.digital, then open it and check every page, as the agency recommends.

It takes about half a minute per page; the bot writes when the PDF is ready.

The form wants an image, not a PDF? The /jpeg command turns the last PDF back into pictures, one per page.

Several documents? One album per document. Each PDF is then its own file with its own name, and nobody has to work out where the bank statement ends and the tenancy agreement begins.

What a4norm is not

• Not a guarantee that the Jobcenter accepts the file. The Jobcenter decides. a4norm only makes the page straight, readable and small.
• Not a certified copy (beglaubigte Kopie). If an original or a certification is required, no PDF will do.
• Not text recognition. The PDF holds a picture of the page, not searchable text.

What about the data?

Bank statements and benefit decisions are personal, so briefly what happens to them. The photo travels to the bot through Telegram, like any message. It is processed on my own server in Germany, not by a cloud service or a third-party API. The photos are not stored. For a week the bot keeps only the ID of your last PDF so that /jpeg works; the PDF itself sits in your Telegram chat.

If you would rather not let documents leave your computer at all: the code is open and runs as a Docker container without internet access. More on the a4norm page.