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. More on formats, sizes and file names in a separate guide.

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, the photos are already taken, or you would simply rather not upload a bank statement anywhere but to the Jobcenter itself. The alternatives are compared in a guide of their own.

How to do it with A4Norm

A4Norm is a free scanner right in the browser: you choose a photo of a page and get 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. The photo never leaves your phone.

1. Photograph the page, all of it with a little margin, in even light. This short guide has the details.
2. Open the A4Norm page in your phone's browser. No account, no payment, nothing to install.
3. Choose the photos with "Add photos or PDF" (on Android, "Choose photos"). Choose several pages of one document together — you get one multi-page PDF, in the same order. Or take them straight from the page, one after another. When all are in, tap "Make the PDF". Forgot a page? "More photos" under the finished PDF appends it (a photo from the gallery: "More" → "Add pages from photos").
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.

A page usually takes about a second, a few on slower devices; pages appear as they are made, so a bad one can be retaken without waiting for the rest.

Several documents? One scan per document. Make the bank statement PDF, send it, tap "More" → "New scan" (a second tap confirms) and go on to the tenancy agreement. 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.

The document is already a PDF, but too big for the portal? Choose the file on A4Norm's first screen with "Add photos or PDF" (on Android, "Choose PDF"). A PDF made on a computer opens as it is; "More" → "Make smaller" rebuilds it as a light A4 PDF, and "More" → "File size" shows what it weighed and what it weighs now. Its text becomes an image, as in any scan. If that is still not enough, "More" → "File size" offers the "Minimum" step — it makes any scan smaller still.

Something on the statement the Jobcenter does not need to know? In outgoing payments the agency lets you black out certain details, in income it does not; the rules are in the guide to housing documents. You can do it right here: "Edit" under the finished PDF, then "Black out" in "Remove". There "Output" → "Colour" makes the PDF black and white too — the mode the agency suggests when a file is too big. In detail: the guide to "Edit".

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. On the A4Norm page, nothing: the photo is processed right in the browser, on your phone, and neither the photo nor the PDF goes to my server or to a cloud. Check it in airplane mode — the scan still works. The last scan is kept only in your browser until you start a new one.

If Telegram suits you better, the same scanner is in the bot @a4norm_bot: the "Scanner" button at the bottom left of the chat. There, too, the photo is processed on your phone. Only the finished PDF passes through my server, and only if you tap "Send to chat" so that the bot sends it to you; the server does not keep it. The code is open and also runs as a Docker container without internet access. More on the A4Norm page.