Method of sorting printed documents and feeding them to a finishing machine

A method for sorting a plurality of different printed documents each consisting of at least one sheet of paper and feeding the documents to a finishing machine (25), the method comprising:

• printing a document identifier at least on one page of a first and a last page of each document, reading said identifier and sending identifier to central controller (33);
• offset stacking the documents in successive order as said documents are outputted from a printing device (10) into an exchangeable cassette (16) which is mounted on an input unit (15), and securing said documents in said cassette (16);
• introducing said cassette into an output unit (28) for picking up the individual documents, wherein said output unit is associated with the finishing machine (25),
• reading the document identifier as the documents leave the output unit (28) with a reader (36) which is operatively associated with the central controller (33), wherein the finishing machine is controlled in response to the signal received by the reader and the document identifier of the documents.