Three ways in, and the third is the one people forget.
Upload files
Press Upload, then Files, and pick one or several. They land in the folder you are standing in, and inherit its sharing — so dropping a file into Finance means accounts can already see it.
Upload folder
Press Upload, then A whole folder. Point it at a folder on your computer and the whole tree comes across, sub-folders and all, with the structure intact.
This is how you move in. Take the folder that currently lives on somebody’s laptop, upload it once, and then share the top of it.
Tidy the folder before you upload it, not after. Ten years of accumulated files are far easier to prune in a file browser you already know than in a web page you have just met.
Attach to a record
The third way: from a customer, an invoice, a project or a vendor, use its Files tab. The file goes into the document store and is attached to that record.
Use this for anything that belongs to one thing rather than to the company:
- the signed contract, on the customer,
- the delivery photograph, on the invoice,
- the vendor’s GST certificate, on the vendor,
- the client’s brief, on the project.
The point is retrieval. Somebody dealing with that customer in a year opens the customer and the contract is there. They do not have to know it exists, or guess which folder it went in.
A folder plan that survives
- Start with audience: everyone, accounts, management, one per team.
- Inside those, use topic.
- Put anything that belongs to a record on the record, not in a folder named after it. Do not make a folder per customer.
- Use tags for the things that cut across folders — contract, policy, template.
The mistake almost everybody makes is a folder per customer. It looks tidy, it grows to four hundred folders, and every one of them needs sharing.
What happens on upload
| Sharing | Inherited from the folder it lands in. Nothing to set. |
| Owner | You. An owner always keeps access to their own file. |
| Version | One. Replacing it later makes two. |
| Storage | Counted against your plan. |
Check what a folder is shared with before dropping files into it. Uploading into a folder shared with everyone publishes the file to the whole business the moment it lands, and nothing asks whether you meant to.
Names matter more here than on a laptop
On your own machine you find files by where you left them. Here other people find them by searching the name, so the name is the whole of the retrieval.
| Weak | Better |
|---|---|
scan001.pdf | GST registration certificate.pdf |
final_v3_FINAL.docx | Leave policy.docx — and replace it rather than re-upload |
IMG_4471.jpg | Delivery photo — INV-2026-27-0006.jpg |
The middle row is the important habit: when something changes, upload it as a new version instead of adding v3 to the name. Versions are what the store is for.
Where to go next
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us. A question that needed asking usually means a page that needed writing.