This paper presents an image of a futuristic document filing system, or an advanced filing system, based on an analysis of the filing activity. Then, the techniques in artificial intelligence required to realize this system are discussed. The approaches proposed here are document understanding and knowledge-based filing. The document understanding technology may automate document image analysis and information extraction using character recognition. A method of image segmentation using layout knowledge is described. Knowledge-based filing, on the other hand, can ease the user to register and retrieve documents with the help of inference applied to domain specific knowledge. Software simulations and experiments on a prototype system are also described.