18 · Migration & data-in

Everything on the platform gets sharper with data: benchmarks read your real deals, renewals watch real dates, and Vera answers from your actual estate. This chapter is the complete guide to getting that data in, whether you are carrying one quote, a folder, a whole contract estate, or an export from the tool you are leaving. It ends where every migration should: at a green Data health score.

The honest headline first: you do not migrate into this platform by retyping. Documents are read, registers are mapped, and your corrections always outrank the machine's guesses. The work that remains for a person is choosing, checking, and deciding, not data entry.

Choose your door

Four doors, sized to what you are carrying. They combine freely: most organizations use the folder door in week one and the connector door forever after.

Two properties of intake worth knowing before you pick:

• Nothing ambushes your team. Renewal alerts are strictly opt-in, so loading your estate never triggers a wave of email; deadlines start reaching people only when someone switches alerts on under Notifications. Migration Studio goes further: everything it loads is held in staging, invisible to alerts, digests, and agents, until an owner signs it off.
• Duplicates are detected by content, not by file name. Re-dropping the same archive is safe on every door: byte-identical documents are skipped, never imported twice, while two same-named order forms a week apart are correctly kept as two real order forms. In Migration Studio the skipped row also names the exact file it matched, Duplicate of Main Contract.pdf; skipped., with Import anyway beside it for the rare copy you genuinely want kept.

The AI Contract Management

Where: Contracts & renewals › AI Contract Management · /office
Who: everyone in the organization

One window over the whole estate, in the same dress as the contract reader: nine rooms, one set of papers. Use it when you want to copy contracts in, have them read, work the renewals, move files through their stations, watch the signatures, see where each deal stands, and stand back over every vendor you hold, without moving between screens. Opening any paper hands it to the reader you already know.

Your Archive folded into this window in August 2026, so the estate has one door rather than two. /archive and its pages now redirect into the matching room. Contract Management folded in on 25 August 2026 for the same reason, bringing its four unique boards with it: /agreements/command now redirects here, and a ?desk= link lands in the room that took over its work. Each agreement's own file is untouched, at the same address as before.

On the screen

• The room tabs — Files, Index, Contracts, Search, Market, Workflow, Sign, Renewals and Estate. Keys 1 to 9 switch between them; a tab carries a mark when something wants you, for example two notice deadlines inside the month.
• Files — the explorer. The rail holds this estate, your smart folders, your connected sources and one folder per vendor. The table lists the papers with the columns you chose; Tiles shows them as pages instead.
• Index — how the papers are read. The standard read on the left, a custom read with Vera on the right, and below them the grid of every paper by every term.
• Contracts — what renews. The headline states the money renewing inside a year and the notice deadlines inside a month before any table; the runway draws the same estate weighted by value; the ledger edits on the row.
• Search — every word of every paper, and one question across all of them.
• Market — every agreement you hold placed against what comparable buyers pay, in five bands.
• Workflow — the files in motion on a six-station board: drag a card to move it through the same guarded lifecycle the agreement file uses, with the approval holding it shown on the card and cleared in one press when it is yours.
• Sign — every envelope in the estate, whichever rail carried it, with each signer's standing, and remind, re-route and void one press away.
• Renewals — the decision runway: every renewal placed by the day it must be decided, sized by the money, colored by urgency and decision, with the calendar, the uplift meter and the drafted notice letter beside it.
• Estate — the standing view over everything you hold: one row per vendor with the money and the dates on it, and the watch of every right you hold and duty you owe.
• Tools — the menu in the titlebar opens the enterprise migration wizard, compare, extract, groups, diligence, the vault and the clause library as windows over the office.
• What next — the close at the foot of every room: what the estate is asking you to decide, each behind its own confirm.
• The inspector — the panel on the right, following whatever you have selected. Collapse it from the titlebar when you want the table wide.
• Light or dark — the sun and moon in the titlebar flips the whole account between light and dark without leaving the office (the same theme as the top bar switch, remembered across devices); every room takes the night interior.
• The foot — how many papers, how many contracts, what needs a look, and what the estate is worth a year on the paper.

How to use it

1. Open AI Contract Management from the rail.
2. In Files, drag your contracts onto the window, or drag a whole folder and its tree comes with it. You can also copy files in Windows Explorer and press Ctrl+V here, or press Add papers and pick them.
3. Watch the tray at the foot: each paper says where it landed, and anything that cannot be filed is refused by name with the reason. Nothing is refused in silence.
4. Every paper is read as it lands. Press 2 for Index to see what the read found, or to read a set again.
5. Press 3 for Contracts to work the renewals, and 4 for Search to find a clause.
6. Double press any row to open the paper in the reader.

The material

The window wears the same layered Fluent dress as the Benchmark Library and the contract reader, so moving between them does not feel like moving between applications. The frame is Mica: the colour of what is behind it, blurred and tinted, with a fine grain and a lit top edge. Every rail is acrylic, so the weather drifts behind your folders and your queues. Every surface you actually read from, the tables, the grid, the boards and the inspector, is opaque, because a figure should never sit on frosted glass. Menus, the jump palette and the shortcut sheet are acrylic flyouts. Focus rings and selection take your own Windows accent colour where the browser exposes it.

Tips

• Ctrl+Z takes back the last drop, move, rename, owner change or renewal change for thirty seconds. A delete is the exception and says so: the rows and the stored files go together.
• Ctrl+K jumps to any paper, folder, vendor, view, lens or room. Type vendor and the Estate room comes up; type watch and it opens on the watch. Type ? first and the rest of what you type becomes a question for the estate.
• Filing follows the paper, not the folder you dragged it from: the read decides which vendor folder it belongs in.

Where Contract Management went

Related: Files: the explorer, Index: reading the papers, Contracts: the renewals, Search: every word of every paper, Estate: every vendor you hold

Files: the explorer

Where: Contracts & renewals › AI Contract Management › Files · /office?room=files
Who: everyone in the organization

The estate as a file manager. This is where papers come in and where they live.

On the screen

• Sources — SharePoint, Google Drive and Box show as connected or as one press to connect. A connected source is watched: new papers land on their own, and each paper keeps a line saying where it came from.
• Email in — every vendor folder has its own address. Forward a contract to it and the paper lands in that folder.
• Smart folders — a search you saved. It answers itself again every time you open it, so it never goes stale.
• Columns — choose which columns show. Any finding from one of your lenses can be a column too, and it fills as the read lands.
• The tray — the transfer, at the foot: what is copying, what landed, what was refused and why.

How to use it

1. Drop papers, paste them with Ctrl+V, or connect a source from the rail.
2. Drag a row onto a folder in the rail to move it. F2 renames one paper and keeps its extension; Rename to house style renames a whole selection to Vendor, kind, date.
3. Tick rows to act on many at once: index them, move them, set an owner, put them on legal hold, or delete them.
4. Put on legal hold stops a paper or a whole folder being deleted and keeps the retention sweep away from it, until a person releases it.

Tips

• j and k walk the rows, Space selects, Enter opens the paper, Ctrl+A selects the folder, / focuses the filter.
• A duplicate is caught by its contents, not its name, so re-dropping the same archive is safe.

Related: The AI Contract Management, The estate door: the Enterprise Uploader

Index: reading the papers

Where: Contracts & renewals › AI Contract Management › Index · /office?room=index
Who: everyone in the organization · metered by plan
You get: the terms of every paper in one grid, each figure anchored to the line it came from · about 40 seconds a paper

Two ways to read, side by side.

On the screen

• Standard read — the fourteen terms every contract gets: the parties, the term, the renewal and its notice, the money, the uplift cap, the liability, the law and the payment terms.
• Custom read with Vera — you describe what to scan for in your own words. Vera turns it into the questions she will ask each paper and shows you that list before anything runs. Save it and it becomes a lens you can run on any folder later.
• The grid — every paper in scope by every term. A green tick is a figure the read is confident about; a gold mark means it wants a human look; a cell that says not stated means the paper is silent, and the read never fills that gap with a guess.
• Evidence — the panel on the right: the value, the page it sits on, the question Vera asked, and the verbatim line the answer came from.

How to use it

1. Choose the scope at the top: everything not yet read, papers needing a look, one folder, or the whole estate.
2. Choose Standard read, or write a sentence under Custom read with Vera and press Show me the questions.
3. Check the questions, name the lens, and press Save the lens if you want it again.
4. Press Read N papers. The run is on the server: close the window, come back tomorrow, the grid is filled.
5. Press any cell to see its evidence. Confirm keeps what the read found and records that a person checked it; Correct it replaces the value, saved with your name beside the read's own.

Tips

• A lens finding can be a column in Files, so the thing you asked for becomes part of how you see the estate.
• A scan with no text layer goes into the transcription lane first, and the grid says so rather than showing it as read.

Related: Files: the explorer, Documents AI Agent

Contracts: the renewals

Where: Contracts & renewals › AI Contract Management › Contracts · /office?room=contracts
Who: everyone in the organization

What renews, when notice is due, who owns it, and what everyone has said about it.

On the screen

• The headline — the money renewing inside twelve months, then the contracts inside ninety days, the notice deadlines inside a month named with their dates, and what has nobody's name on it. Every figure is computed from the same rows the ledger below renders.
• The four tiles — next ninety days, notice due, unowned, needs a look. Press one to filter the ledger to it.
• Runway — the same estate drawn over the next nineteen months, each bar as thick as the contract is large. A brick tick is a notice deadline inside thirty days, a gold one inside ninety.
• Families — the master, its order forms, its amendments and its DPAs as one tree per vendor, with a line saying which terms flow down and which the order overrides.
• The ledger — grouped by vendor. A brick edge means notice is due inside a month, gold inside three.

How to use it

1. Press a renewal date on the row to change it. The notice deadline moves with it, and the renewal calendar is kept in step where an agreement exists for that vendor.
2. Press the owner to assign one. The renewal owner follows.
3. Use the inspector to record a decision (renew as is, renegotiate, give notice), set your own reminders, read and add to the thread, and see who can see the contract.
4. Invite people grants a colleague access to that one contract and its thread, nothing else in the estate.

Tips

• Your reminders are yours: nobody else sees them, and they are off until you switch one on.
• A private note lives beside the shared thread and only you can read it.

Related: Renewals, Agreements

Search: every word of every paper

Where: Contracts & renewals › AI Contract Management › Search · /office?room=search
Who: everyone in the organization · Ask the estate requires an AI plan

Two questions, two engines: where does it say that, and what does my estate say about this.

On the screen

• Passages — the full text search. Each hit shows the line with the matched words painted, and the page it sits on.
• Ask the estate — the grounded answer, with the papers it rests on listed underneath.
• Operators — vendor:, kind:, before:, renews: and has:, plus quotes for an exact phrase. Press one in the rail to add it.
• Vendor facets — the vendors that carry your hits, with their counts.

How to use it

1. Type what you are looking for and press Enter.
2. Narrow it with an operator or by ticking a vendor.
3. Press a hit to read it in context, then Show on the paper to open it in the reader on that line.
4. Press Save as a smart folder and the search joins your Files rail, answering itself again every time.

Tips

• A paper has to have been read to be searchable. The Index room reads the ones that have not been.
• A passage with no page number comes from a paper indexed before the page map existed; it gets one the next time that paper is read, and until then the office says the page is not known rather than printing one.

Related: Documents AI Agent, Index: reading the papers

Market: where every agreement stands

Where: Contracts & renewals › AI Contract Management › Market · /office?room=market
Who: everyone in the organization · the run requires an AI plan

Every agreement you hold, placed against what comparable buyers pay for the same product at the same size. Since 25 August 2026 the room ranks two ways, and the rail's Rank by switch chooses: Agreement, which places each paper, or Vendor, which places the whole relationship. The vendor lens came from Contract Management's Benchmarks desk when that console folded in.

On the screen

Rank by: Agreement

• The finding — what the gap is worth over the term, before any table, with the weakest paper you hold named in the sentence under it.
• The bands — the rail filters by rank: Top of the market, Good, At market, Below market, Poor, and Not ranked.
• The ledger — one row per agreement: your discount, the peer range with its midpoint, the annual value, and the money between where the deal sits and where it could.
• The basis — pressing a row shows where the discount came from, the range it was measured against, and how many comparable deals stand behind it.

How to use it

1. Press 5, or open Market from the room bar.
2. Press Benchmark all N agreements. The dialog says what the run costs and how long it takes; nothing starts until you confirm.
3. Leave if you like. The run keeps going and a notification brings you back.
4. Press a band in the rail to see only those, and a row for the reasoning behind its rank.
5. From a row, Benchmark it opens the full placement, Plan the renewal puts it on the renewal ledger, and Open the paper hands it to the reader.

Tips

• Where a paper prints no list price, the rank is measured against the vendor's latest known list rate as a stated working baseline, and the row says so. Ask the vendor to confirm the list in writing before you use the figure in a negotiation.
• A paper with nothing measurable on it is never guessed at. Its row carries the exact question to put to the vendor.
• Rows that failed on a timeout can be retried on their own with Retry N unranked, without re-reading the estate.

Rank by: Vendor

• The finding — what sits between these deals and the peer midpoints, a year, before any table, with how much of the estate's spend is placed at all.
• Four figures — the opportunity a year, how many families are placed and what share of spend that covers, how many sit below market and on how much, and how many are not placed.
• One row per family — the rank pill, your position, the peer range with its midpoint, the family's annual, and the gap priced per year. A family ranked Poor or Below market wears its tone on the row's left edge, so the weak positions read at a glance.
• The basis, on every row — each placement rests on the strongest defensible source you hold, in this order: a delivered analyst benchmark (verified by hand), Vera's estate read of the filed paper, a saved self-serve scenario or the family's own value and seats replayed against the reference set, or a bare market reference when the market is held but your own input is missing. A family with none of these says exactly what unlocks it. Nothing is ever estimated in the gap.
• What if you negotiated — the lever on the family's file. Slide the ask from your current rate toward the peer midpoint or the top of the band and the money moves with it, per year, on that family's own annual figure. Deterministic: the same inputs always draw the same result. Preset chips jump to the named stops.

How to use the vendor lens

1. Switch the rail's Rank by to Vendor and read the four figures. The opportunity figure is the size of the prize; the below-market figure is where it lives.
2. Select the top row, which is already ordered by consequence, and read the file: the rank, the gap, and the basis.
3. Pull the lever to the peer midpoint. That number is the annual value of the mid ask; take it into the renewal or open the family's report for the full case.
4. Work the not-placed families last: each row names the one missing input or the one tool that places it.

If the vendor lens looks wrong

• Every row says Not placed: run the estate benchmark on the Agreement lens, or price a deal in a self-serve tool and save it. The board composes those sources; it never invents a position.
• A family shows a range but no rank: that is the market reference tier, the market is held but your own paper's input (a list price, a seat count, or an annual value) is missing, and the row says which.

Related: Contracts: the renewals, Benchmark Library, Estate: every vendor you hold

Workflow: the files in motion

Where: AI Contract Management › Workflow (key 6) · /office?room=workflow
Who: everyone; moving a file needs edit access, approving needs an owner or approver seat

The estate's files in motion, six stations on one board: Requested, Drafting, In negotiation, In approval, Executing, In force. Each card is an agreement record with the money on it, its owner, and a clock showing how long it has sat at its station; the clock warms as it approaches the station's target and goes brick past it.

On the screen

• Waiting on your hand — when an approval is yours to decide, a strip at the top names it, says how long it has sat, and clears it in one press.
• Showing: the board or the clock — the rail switches the room between the work and the measure of it.
• The cycle strip — median days at each station, from your own transition history, with the slowest station named. Thin history says so rather than printing confident numbers.
• The clock — the fuller measure, folded in from Contract Management on 25 August 2026: the median run from request to in force, how often approval clears on the first pass and how much of that moved by policy alone, how long counterparties take to come back with paper against how long your own side takes to answer, and the lifecycle moves recorded in the last thirty days. Below the figures, the cycle time per station and a read in plain sentences saying where the queue sits and which side of the table is holding the paper. A figure that cannot honestly be stated yet says so; it never reads as zero.
• The board — drag a card to its next station to move it. The same guarded lifecycle the agreement file uses runs here: an illegal move is refused with the stations named, and a legal one lands on the activity trail with your name.
• The gate on the card — a file held at approval shows who holds it and for how long, in the open. When the request is yours, Approve sits on the card itself.
• Rules on duty — the rail lists your approval rules as sentences, with their SLAs, and a door to write or change them.
• The inspector — the six-station stepper, the gate's chain of approvers, the legal doors from here, and doors to the agreement file and the paper.

How to use it

1. Press 6 in the AI Contract Management.
2. Drag a card one station to the right when its work is done; the board refuses a skipped gate by name.
3. When the strip says something waits on you, press Approve and the file moves itself when the last gate clears.
4. Switch the rail to The clock when the question is not what is stuck but why everything takes as long as it does.

Related: Track agreements and never miss a notice window, The agreement file

Sign: the envelope desk

Where: AI Contract Management › Sign (key 7) · /office?room=sign
Who: everyone; remind, re-route and void need edit access

Every envelope in the estate on one desk, whichever rail carried it: VendorBenchmark Sign, DocuSign, or Adobe Acrobat Sign. What needs a hand sorts first.

On the screen

• Your signature — an envelope where your own name is the pending signature offers Sign now: a fresh personal link opens the signing page in a new tab, and the old link dies with the mint.
• The chain on every row — each signer in order with their standing: signed with the date, opened it but not signed, or not opened yet. A declined envelope shows the signer's reason verbatim.
• Remind, re-route, void — a live VendorBenchmark Sign envelope can nudge the signer the chain waits on, be re-routed to a different person (the old link dies on the spot), or be voided with a reason that lands on the record.
• The inspector — the full chain with the evidence per name, and doors to the agreement file and the paper.

How to use it

1. Press 7 in the AI Contract Management.
2. New envelopes start from an agreement file at the Executing station: the signing studio places the areas and routes the signers; every envelope then lands on this desk.
3. When the chain stalls, press Remind; when the signer changed jobs, press Re-route.

Related: The agreement file, The API, MCP, and agent-to-agent

Renewals: the decision runway

Where: AI Contract Management › Renewals (key 8) · /office?room=renewals
Who: everyone in the organization

Every renewal placed by the day it must be decided: the last day written notice still stops a renewal, or the day a term simply ends. The runway draws each one at that date, sized by the money on it and colored by urgency and by whether a decision with a name on it exists; brick means undecided and closing, green means decided.

On the screen

• The headline — the money that decides inside twelve months, who closes first, and how much is riding on auto-renew with no decision on it. Doing nothing is a decision with a price, and the page states it.
• The what-if lever — hold the biggest capped renewals flat instead of at their caps and watch the money kept move. Deterministic on your own figures: the caps come off your own papers.
• Runway, Calendar, Ledger — the same queue three ways. The calendar names the heaviest month with its total and exports as an .ics file, so your own calendar argues the deadlines; the ledger adds the uplift meter: next year's price computed from this year plus the cap the read found, with no cap called out where nothing limits the vendor's quote.
• The decision — Let it renew, Renegotiate, or Give notice, per contract, with who decided and when. The same decision the Contracts room keeps, so the two can never disagree.
• Your reminders — 90, 60 or 30 days before the window closes, yours alone; nobody else is emailed.
• Draft the notice — for a paper with a notice clause, one press puts a non-renewal letter on your clipboard, drafted from the paper's own terms with the clause quoted. It goes nowhere until you send it.

How to use it

1. Press 8 in the AI Contract Management.
2. Work the runway left to right: the first brick dot is the next undecided deadline.
3. Press a dot, decide, set your reminders, and export the calendar file once so the dates live in Outlook too.

Related: Contracts: the renewals, Renewals

Estate: every vendor you hold

Where: AI Contract Management › Estate (key 9) · /office?room=estate
Who: everyone in the organization

The standing view over the whole relationship set, and the one room that answers "what do we actually hold, and what is it about to cost us". Two boards, one rail: By vendor rolls the ledger up per company, and The watch lists every right your papers grant you and every duty they ask of you. Both came across when Contract Management folded into this window on 25 August 2026; the arithmetic is the same, so no figure changed in the move.

*In plain words: one row per company you buy from, and one list of every deadline hiding in the paper.*

On the screen

By vendor

• The headline — what the estate costs a year and across how many vendors, with the largest position named and its share of the total stated. Leverage and exposure are the same number, and the sentence says so.
• Four figures — the annual run rate, the vendor count with the agreements between them, how many families renew inside a year and what they are worth, and the largest position as a share of the run rate.
• The lever — move what a renegotiation lands, from nothing to 30 percent better, and the run rate moves with it across the families renewing inside a year. Deterministic on your own ledger, and it remembers where you left it.
• One row per company — the agreements you hold with them, the money a year with a bar sized against the largest family, the next renewal, and the notice date. A notice date inside a month reads brick; a renewal inside ninety days reads gold.
• The vendor file — select a row and everything you hold with that company opens on the right: the four figures, a read that says whether the near date is the notice window or the renewal, and doors into the largest agreement's own file, the benchmark, and the runway.

The watch

• The headline — how many windows shut inside a month, or inside ninety days if none is that close, with the first one named and its days left.
• Four figures — rights you hold, duties you owe, and how many of each close inside 30 and 90 days.
• Rights and duties, never confused — a right is something the paper gives you (a true-down, a swap window, a price hold, an SLA credit); a duty is something it asks of you (a non-renewal notice, a commitment). The register reads the side off the paper rather than assuming, so a duty you owe is never shown as a concession you hold.
• Every row carries its window — the day it shuts, the days left, and the recurrence when a right repeats every year, with the turn you are on.
• The row's file — the verbatim line the right was read from, what happens if the window shuts, and the door into the register or the agreement.
• Filters — everything, rights only, duties only, or closing inside thirty days.

How to use it

1. Press 9 in the AI Contract Management.
2. Read the headline, then work the top of the vendor board: it is already ordered by what each relationship costs a year.
3. Pull the lever to what you believe a renegotiation lands, and take the resulting figure into the renewal.
4. Switch to The watch and work Closing in thirty days first. A right that lapses is money you paid for and did not take.

If something looks wrong

• The watch is empty: it fills from two places, the rights register harvesting what your contracts grant you, and the ledger's own notice deadlines. Both come from the read, so read the papers first in Index.
• A vendor shows no money: the ledger has no annual value on that family's agreements yet. Open the largest agreement's file and the read will have it, or type it in.

Related: Rights register, Contracts: the renewals, Vendors

What next: the close on every room

Where: the foot of every AI Contract Management room · /office
Who: everyone in the organization

No room dead ends. The close is where a finished read turns into a decision.

On the screen

• After a read — up to three cards: put the due renewals on the calendar, send the biggest spend to the Spend Optimizer, and ask the analysts to benchmark the contracts worth it. Each card says what it will do and how much of your allowance it uses.
• Open the intake brief — the forwardable executive record of that scan.
• When nothing is pending — two moves that make sense from the room you are in.

How to use it

1. Scroll to the foot of any room.
2. Press a card. It turns into a confirm that states exactly what happens.
3. Press Confirm, or Back to change your mind. Not now puts the card away for good.

Tips

• Nothing here is automatic. A move that spends money, allowance or a vendor's attention is always a press.
• The renewal card only offers the agreements the calendar does not already carry.

Related: Renewal calendar, Spend optimization

AI Entitlement: what you own, read off the paper

Where: Contracts & documents › AI Entitlement · /entitlement-office
Who: everyone in the organization; confirming register lines is an owner's move

The second window over the same estate. Where the AI Contract Management works the papers, AI Entitlement answers the question an audit letter asks first: what exactly are we entitled to, at what price, until when, and under which limits. Five rooms on keys 1 to 5, and everything it reads lands in the organization itself, so a paper scanned once answers in every chat, in document search, and on the renewal calendar.

The workspace inside the window wears the full layered Fluent treatment, the same material system as the Benchmark Library: the stage behind your work is translucent so the window's weather drifts under every room, the drop bay, the paper list, the shelves and every report card float as lit cards on it, the inspector frosts like the rail, the room strip is a set of sliding pivots, and the sun and moon in the titlebar flip the whole account between light and dark. Figures always sit on opaque cards, never on frosted glass.

On the screen

• Intake (key 1) — drop files or a whole folder (the tree is walked file by file), browse, or forward to the estate's email address. Your papers lists every file the moment it arrives: a live row while it copies, a coverage count once its read lands, and any file the intake refused stays in the list with the reason spelled out, never only a passing toast. Files dropped while an earlier batch is still running wait in the list, visibly, and start by themselves the moment it clears; a drop is never refused for timing. Every landed paper is then read in full by itself: the landing scan lifts the vendor, dates and money, and the deep read walks the whole document for all nineteen answers, including the audit clause, divestment, acquisitions, price protection on additional purchases and any reference to a master agreement, each carrying the verbatim sentence it stands on, checked against the paper's own text, plus every product on the order with its quantity, unit price and the table exactly as printed. While a deep read runs, its row wears a Reading now pill and the header counts the reads in flight; when it lands, the pill becomes the coverage count. Papers read before a question existed catch themselves up: the read stamps its answer set, and older reads re run on your next visit so the whole estate answers the current questions. Until a paper's read lands, its answers say the read is running rather than showing an empty value. The ask box at the top answers questions across the estate in plain language, grounded in your own papers and quoted to the line, and states matching register lines exactly. Below the standard answers sit the scan template shelves: vendor standards for Microsoft EA, Oracle ordering documents, Salesforce orders, IBM, Workday, SAP and ServiceNow, plus MSA and SOW shapes. Press Customize and save on any standard, bend its terms, name the copy anything you like, and it runs on every matching paper and everything that lands later.
• Vendors (key 2) — the estate rolled up per vendor, however many legal entities the vendor signs through. The room opens on a figures band: vendors on file with their signing entities, the year on the paper, the next date that matters with its vendor named, and what is lapsed or expiring. Each row below states the year on the paper, the next date that matters, and the signature lines; opening a vendor shows its papers as a family and every register line it grants. The bell watches a vendor: a note lands 90 days before its next date, only because you pressed it.
• Entitlements (key 3) — the register. The room opens on a figures band: priced lines, the year where quantity and price are both on file, papers with no lines yet, and lines sitting on expired paper. Below it, one row per priced product: quantity, unit price a year, the paper it stands on, and its state. Papers that price something but have no lines yet appear once each with Read the lines one press away: the read proposes the products, counts and unit prices, you strike anything wrong, and Confirm writes them to the same register the licensing tools read. Cut by state, source or vendor, and export the register exactly as it is cut.
• Reports (key 4) — the room opens on a figures band: reports on file, how many need your eye, how many are verified, and the money on the paper. Below it, the estate, counted: pick a question (which papers carry an audit clause, which renew by themselves, which end dates have rolled forward), refine it with filters for vendor, name, value band, renewal window, auto renewal, audit, cross references and your own tags, and the office answers with the count, the share, the money on the matches, a split by vendor, and the list itself. Excel, Word and PDF export the same cut as a themed workbook, an executive brief document, or a table. The reports themselves are a dense grid, one row per paper: the year, the term, the answer count with its ring, the term state beside the human fact (needs your eye, verified once a person walked the answers, shared once someone beyond the team can read it), and when it was last read. Press a row and its paper answers in the inspector; double press opens the report.
• The Report (key 5) — the paper, answered. The verdict line is derived from the read, never typed: an expired term, a renewal clause that has quietly rolled the stated end forward, a perpetual grant assumed active. Beneath it, the products read off the order (one press confirms them onto the register) with As printed on the paper, a picture of the very page the product table sits on, the term story with its notice window, a lever that moves next year's cost on the paper's own figures, and all nineteen answers with the verbatim line each stands on and a Correct control beside every one. Your own fields takes any name and any value worth keeping on the paper. A vendor standard on the scan template card reads in one press: Read these off this paper saves the standard under Yours and its answers land on the same card. Tags show under the title, and the two controls at the top right minimize the report back to the rooms or close it to the wall.
• Right click, anywhere — every row and card answers a right click with the same menu: view the uploaded document, open the report, rename, tag (For renewal, For termination, Master agreement, or your own words), comment, read it again clause by clause, export that one paper to Excel, Word or PDF, and delete, which asks twice and removes the stored file with the rows.

How to use it

1. Open AI Entitlement in the rail. The window draws over whatever you were looking at; Close returns you to Home.
2. Drop a contract onto Intake. It appears in Your papers at once, files under its vendor, and reads on landing; if a report shows most answers as Not stated, press Read it deeper and the office walks every clause again.
3. Open its report from Reports, walk the answers, correct what needs it, and press Mark verified.
4. On any paper that prices something, press Read the lines, strike anything wrong, and confirm the rest onto the register.
5. Ask the estate anything in the Intake ask box: the answer quotes the papers it stands on.

Tips

• A correction here goes through the same gated operation the AI Contract Management uses, so a fix in either window is the same fix everywhere.
• The uplift lever is arithmetic on the paper's own figures, not a model: the same inputs always draw the same result.
• Confirming register lines is deliberately an owner's move; the platform refuses politely otherwise and says why.
• Share on a report invites a colleague or outside counsel to that one paper and its thread, never the rest of the estate, and openings land on the audit log.

Related: The AI Contract Management, Renewal calendar

The one-by-one door: proposals and agreements

The right door when the point is the document itself, not the volume.

For anything you want benchmarked, use Upload a proposal: drop up to 20 files, watch the vendor, value, term, and seat chips fill in per file (shaded by how confident the read is), correct anything gold or red, and confirm the batch once. PDF and DOCX, 40 MB each, verified by contents rather than name.

For signed contracts with dates to watch, add Agreements: vendor, expiry date, notice period (30, 60, or 90 days), annual value, and up to five files per vendor for safe keeping. You can also type an agreement in beside the ledger and let the AI fill the details, or drop the signed paper straight into the upload panel. Up to 40 vendor agreements are tracked this way; past that scale you want the folder or estate door.

Time: minutes. A proposal batch reads as it lands; an agreement is a one-minute entry.

The folder door: Contracts

The door most organizations should start with. Drag your contract folder, subfolders and clutter included, onto Contracts; Vera reads every document, files it into one folder per vendor, and judges each agreement current, due for renewal, expired, superseded, or perpetual. The judgments respect how vendors actually work: an old perpetual license is a current asset, and only your newest enterprise agreement counts as live.

What to expect during the run. Up to 300 files per run, 40 MB each, PDF and DOCX; every unreadable file type is named in the results rather than silently dropped. A live ticker narrates the filing, and you can leave at any point: a floating chip follows you with the percentage, and a notification brings you back when the archive is ready, even if you closed the tab mid-scan.

The three questions at the end. The Next moves rail asks, with the money named on each: which genuinely due renewals go on the calendar (never ten-year-old paper, and vendors you already track are advanced, not duplicated), whether to review your top 20 vendors by spend, and which contracts deserve an analyst benchmark. Nothing happens without your confirmation.

The Estate Intake Brief. Every scan also produces an executive document in the house brief style: the vendor table, the renewals inside the window, the lifecycle findings, and a bottom line. It prints clean, which makes it the fastest way to show a CFO what the estate actually holds, usually on day one.

What lands where. Archive uploads land as contracts, so everything you drop also feeds Documents AI Agent, the spend portfolio, and the vendor pages automatically. Documents the scan could not read queue behind the Needs a look chip; fill in a vendor, end date, or value and the contract refiles instantly.

Time: one drag, then the scan works while you do something else. Plan for the three follow-up questions to take ten minutes of actual decisions.

The estate door: the Enterprise Uploader

When the estate is hundreds to thousands of agreements, plus a register spreadsheet someone maintains, use Enterprise Uploader. Chapter 00 walks the full run step by step with screenshots; this section is the decision view.

Why this door is different. Three properties the folder door does not have:

1. Staging. Nothing a migration loads is visible anywhere on the platform until sign-off. No alert fires, no digest counts it, no agent reads it. Your estate becomes real in one transaction when an owner presses Go live, and the acceptance is written to the audit log with the scorecard attached. Big estates promote in waves (top vendors first, the tail later), a go-live stays reversible for seven days, dual-control sign-off is one press away for desks that require it, and the run's acceptance certificate prints as an executive document with a filing reference, a signature block, and a Word export. Since August 2026 the whole Studio is one page that follows the run: load paper (the register rides in the same drop and maps itself), let the ambient read work, then decide by exception from a single inbox, with Vera's own judgements applied and reversible on her ledger.
2. The register comes along. Your master spreadsheet (CSV or XLSX) is mapped column by column with a dry run that shows exactly what it would create, update, and reject before anything is written. Columns the platform does not recognize are kept on each contract as custom fields, exactly as you wrote them; nothing in your register is thrown away.
3. Reconciliation with evidence. Same-company vendor names merge themselves, for every vendor, and each merge sits on Vera's ledger with the evidence and a one-press Undo; byte-identical duplicates clear themselves the same way, while agreements that supersede one another still arrive as proposals for you to decide. Binding is where renewal dates become true: a master agreement and its amendments become one contract whose terms in force are computed across the whole stack, newest document winning on each term separately, and documents of one company that print the same contract number bind into one agreement by themselves, the number named on the ledger entry. A document with no home states what the paper does say, the customer it is made out to and the contract number it carries, and takes a real three-way decision: bind it to the agreement named (or any agreement you pick from the list), keep it as its own contract, or file it as reference so it stops counting against completeness. The Where the live terms come from panel then shows each contract's document stack and names the exact document every live figure was read from.

What the desk keeps for you. The scan brief you set before your first drop, the optional fields, the date order and the questions you write for Vera, is kept in this browser and rides with whatever opens the run: a drop on the door, a drop on the load panel, the demo estate, or a connector import. Once the run exists the run itself owns the brief. On a run in flight, the answers you type on the sign off page are kept against that run and come back in their own fields if you leave the page or close the app window: waiver reasons, the materiality floor and its reason, vendor names and values you read off the paper, the vendors ticked for a wave. Each clears as it is saved, and the whole draft clears when the estate goes live. Your documents themselves are never kept in the browser, so a queue picked in an earlier session still asks you to re-pick the folder.

Who runs it. An owner, because a run writes thousands of records. The desk itself is open to every organization; the owner can start the run and hand the working of it to someone else.

How long a scan takes

Two clocks run, and only the first one needs you at the keyboard.

The transfer moves your documents from the browser to the platform, six at a time, and finishes in minutes: a hundred documents of ordinary size take about two minutes on a decent connection, a thousand about twenty. Keep the tab open while it runs, because the bytes are on your machine and nowhere else until they land. If you close it early, re-pick the same folder and the run carries on from where it stopped.

The reading is Vera working through each agreement, and it does not need the tab, your laptop, or you. Reckon on roughly a hundred documents an hour: nearer sixty when the estate is long master agreements, over two hundred when it is short order forms. In round numbers:

Reading starts as soon as the first documents land, so terms appear on screen while the rest are still transferring, and the run continues on its own overnight and through a closed laptop. There is nothing to restart. Drop the estate on Monday afternoon and work the exceptions queue on Tuesday morning.

From a scanned estate to a live renewal calendar

Scanning fills the contract ledger. It does not, by itself, fill the renewal calendar: those are two records, because a contract is a document and a renewal is a commitment to act by a date. The runway on the sign-off page is where one becomes the other.

1. The runway shows every dated agreement in the run across the next fourteen months, sized by annual value, with an amber flag on each speak-by date. The speak-by date is the end date minus the notice period read from that agreement's own paper, so a contract with a 180 day window flags six months out and one with 30 days flags one month out. Where a document states no notice period, 90 days is assumed and the record says so.
2. Put them all on the calendar in one press, or arm them one at a time from the runway or from a document's preview pane. Either way the renewal is created staged: invisible to the rest of the platform, and no alert, digest, or agent can see it.
3. Go live promotes them with the estate. The renewals land on the live calendar the same moment the contracts do, never a day before.
4. Alerts stay off until someone opts in, per vendor. Arming a renewal never sends anyone an email.

If an agreement is already on the calendar, importing newer paper for the same vendor moves the date forward when the documents say the term was extended, and fills a blank notice period or annual value from what the paper states. A figure you set by hand is never overwritten by a scan.

What is not put on the calendar: anything without a vendor or without an end date (there is nothing to count down to), and superseded paper, because its successor carries the live date. Fix a missing vendor or end date in the review table and arm it afterwards.

Sending a contract into a tool

From a document's preview pane, Send to hands the paper to a tool with the document already loaded, instead of opening an empty upload box asking for the file you were just looking at.

• It is routed directly. The document is copied server side into the tool's own staging area and the tool's normal start path takes over, so its limits, quotas, and audit trail apply exactly as if you had dropped the file there yourself.
• The tool opens on a run that is already reading that document, in the app window over the page you were on. Close the window and the run carries on; the answer is waiting when you come back.
• It is saved, and it stays attached to the contract. The run belongs to the contract you sent it from, so you can find the answer again from the record rather than by remembering you ran it.
• It sends the agreement, not the newest file. Where a contract holds a master agreement and its amendments, the governing document goes, not the most recent amendment.
• Sending the same contract twice within an hour takes you back to the result you already have rather than paying for a second run of the same work.

Only PDF and DOCX documents can be sent, and only up to 40 MB.

What a scan cannot read, and what to do instead

Every limit below is a real ceiling in the product, stated so you can plan around it rather than discover it.

The length ceiling is the one worth planning for, because it is silent in a way the others are not: a 200 page master services agreement transfers cleanly, reads cleanly, and produces a record built from its first 40 to 50 pages. Commercial terms usually sit at the front, so the answer is often right. The exhibits, the pricing schedules, and the rate cards usually sit at the back, and those are exactly the pages a benchmark needs.

The platform no longer hides this. A document read only in part is recorded as partly read, cannot score as a confident read, and carries the worth a look chip in the review table so it surfaces instead of blending in with the finished rows.

What to do with a very long agreement. Any of these, in order of preference:

1. Split it and upload the commercial part on its own. Extract the order form, the pricing schedule, or Exhibit A as its own PDF and drop that alongside the full agreement. Vera reads the short document properly, and the two bind into one contract because they carry the same contract number.
2. Add the contract by hand. Go to Contracts, press New contract, and type the vendor, the term dates, the annual value, the notice period, and the uplift cap off the paper yourself. Attach the full PDF to the record for the file trail. Six fields take about two minutes, they are certain rather than read, and every figure you type outranks anything a scan produces.
3. Ask for a hand. Escalate the document to Redress from the exceptions queue and a person reads it.

The same advice applies to any agreement the scan flags as worth a look, whatever the reason: you typing the number is always better than the platform guessing it, and the record marks your values as yours.

Time: the run is three steps and opens itself on the first drop; there is no questionnaire, and reading starts as documents land, so the first extracted terms are on screen while the rest still transfer. Reading a large estate takes several passes over hours and continues while the tab is closed. Budget real person-time for two moments: the register mapping decisions, and the reconciliation and exceptions queues, which are sorted by annual value so the top of the list is what matters. Each exception line takes an assignee from your team, or escalates to Redress with one click, and the queue's foot shows how many are cleared and the clearing pace per day, which is the burn down your champion reports upward. A run that started wrong can be abandoned from the sign-off rail: one button removes the whole staged estate, and nothing live is touched because nothing went live.

Coming from a spreadsheet

Most estates arrive with a register: the spreadsheet that lists vendors, values, and dates. Three preparations make it map cleanly, all drawn from how the mapping step actually reads your file:

1. Know what your value column means. A column headed something like Contract Value is read as the total over the term and divided by the term length to get the annual figure. If your column is already annual, map it to Annual value instead. Getting this one mapping right is the difference between a correct portfolio and one inflated by every multi-year deal.
2. Expect the date question. If nothing in a date column proves whether 01/04/2024 means 1 April or 4 January, the mapping deliberately stops and asks, because guessing moves every date in your register by up to eleven months. Answering once unlocks the dry run.
3. Keep your odd columns. Internal owner, cost center, procurement reference: leave them in. Unrecognized columns are preserved on each contract as custom fields rather than discarded.

Run the dry run before applying: it states how many contracts would be created, how many updated, and how many rows cannot be used with the reason for each, and rejected rows download as a CSV you can fix and upload again. A register alone, with the documents to follow later, is a legitimate way in: rows create and update contracts, and paper attached later adds the evidence behind the terms.

Coming from another tool

Leaving a contract management or SAM tool for this platform is an export plus one of the doors above, not a special project. What to expect:

• What carries over cleanly: the documents themselves (export them to a folder tree, ideally one folder per vendor, and use the folder or estate door), and your register (most tools export their contract list as CSV or XLSX; map it in Migration Studio). Terms are re-read from the paper itself rather than trusted from the old tool's fields, which is a feature: you arrive with evidence-backed data, and folder names become the first guess at each contract's vendor.
• What is recomputed rather than imported: renewal dates and lifecycle states. The old tool's flags are ignored in favor of what the bound document stack actually says, which is usually the moment teams discover renewal dates their previous system had wrong.
• What you rebuild by choice, not necessity: your clause standard in the Clause library, notification choices per person (strictly opt-in here), Teams for confidential access, and any saved views and workflows. The owner's handbook sequences all of this.
• A SAM or ITAM tool you are keeping should not be exported at all: connect it instead (next section), and its entitlement and deployment data flows in continuously.

The connector door: keeping it current

Migration is an event; currency is a pipeline. Once the estate is in, an owner connects the systems that keep it true under Integrations:

• Contract intake — five email-in rails, DocuSign and Ironclad, and folder watch on Drive, SharePoint, or Box, subfolders included, so newly signed paper files itself from now on. A connected folder also carries an Import everything button that walks the whole existing tree across in background chunks, hundreds of files per pass, with each pass logged under the connection's recent activity.
• Spend and usage — Coupa, Okta, Entra ID, the CSV importers, and Smart import, feeding the spend and license pictures.
• License and deployment discovery (SAM and ITAM) — the systems that know what you own and run; the license intelligence table then shows entitled against deployed against active per vendor, with estimated shelfware.
• Procurement and ERP (P2P) — purchase orders, requisitions, and supplier records, with maverick spend flagged.
• Invoices — the forward-in address, so invoice lines get checked against contract terms as they arrive (see Invoices).

The full catalog, with what each connector feeds, is Chapter 12; the per-connection setup walkthroughs are Chapter 19; the working recipe is Connect your data and close the gaps.

Data health: the finish line

"Migrated" is not a feeling; it is a score. Data health scans on every load and states the share of data checks you have covered, with each open gap naming the feature it would unlock and a plan ranked by value. It also carries the audit exposure estimate, built from whatever entitlement data is connected so far, which is your early read on how defensible the license position is.

Treat the finish line as three checks, in order: every agreement that matters carries an expiry date and a notice period (without both, there is no window to watch), annual values are on the agreements so the Portfolio lenses mean something, and the top-ranked gap on Data health has either been closed or deliberately parked with an owner. From there, the day 30 health check covers the rest of the workspace.

Migration FAQs

Will re-dropping the same folder create duplicates? No. Duplicates are detected by content, not file name: identical documents are counted and skipped on every door, and in Migration Studio the skipped row names the file it matched, with Import anyway beside it if you truly want the copy. Two different documents that share a name are both kept, because they are both real.

Will loading the estate spam my team with alerts? No. Renewal alerts are opt-in and start silent on every channel, so intake never generates email on its own. Migration Studio additionally holds everything in staging, where no alert, digest, or agent can see it until sign-off.

My register dates are ambiguous, like 01/04/2024. The mapping stops and asks rather than guessing, and stays locked until you choose, because the wrong answer moves every date by up to eleven months. Answer once; the dry run then shows you your own rows as the platform understood them.

My contracts write dates day first, like 01/04/2026 for 1 April. Set the date order in the scan brief before your first drop and every reading pass follows it, on the documents as well as the register. Contracts that spell the month out, and dates already in ISO form, read the same either way. If an estate was read before 13 August 2026 with day first chosen, re-read the affected documents from the review table: the setting was not reaching the reader, so numeric dates in those runs were read month first.

My contracts are priced in European notation, like EUR 1.500.000. Both notations are read as the number on the paper. So are contracts in Canadian dollars, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish krone, and yen, each recognised as its own currency and then argued in US dollars at the day's rate, with the original currency and the rate recorded in the notes.

Some documents I picked never appeared in the run. Check the line under the drop panel: it names everything that stayed behind and why, counting files over the size limit, empty files, unsupported types, and anything past the document ceiling. An empty file (zero bytes, usually a failed export or a placeholder) cannot be read and is named there rather than transferred.

How long will my estate take to read? Roughly a hundred documents an hour, so a few hundred agreements is an afternoon and a few thousand is a couple of days. It runs unattended, so the honest answer is to drop the estate and come back to the exceptions queue. See How long a scan takes for the numbers.

My agreement is 200 pages. Will it be read properly? The first 40 to 50 pages of contract text, yes. Past that the tail is not read, and because pricing schedules and exhibits live at the back, that is the part a benchmark needs. The record is marked as partly read and flagged worth a look rather than presented as complete. Split the commercial schedule out as its own PDF and drop it alongside, or add the contract by hand and type the six figures off the paper. See What a scan cannot read.

Should I ever type a contract in by hand instead of scanning it? Yes, in three cases: an agreement past the length ceiling, a scan of poor quality that comes back thin, and any deal important enough that you want the figures certain rather than read. Typing vendor, dates, value, notice period and uplift cap takes about two minutes, and a value you enter always outranks a value a scan produced. Attach the PDF to the record either way, so the paper is still on file.

My spreadsheet has columns the platform will not recognize. They are kept on each contract as custom fields, exactly as written. Nothing in a register is thrown away.

My value column is the total contract value, not annual. That is the expected case: a Contract Value column is read as the total over the term and divided by the term. If yours is already annual, map it to Annual value instead.

Should I exclude old and expired paper? Include it. History is judged as history (superseded and expired paper visibly sits in the past), it never pollutes your renewal calendar, and it powers the reads that need a past: year-over-year comparison, the Time machine, and binding, which needs the full stack to compute the terms in force.

Some documents are scans with no text layer. Scans transfer like anything else, and one the read cannot make out queues its own transcription, its pages read image by image in the background and the terms extracted from the transcription, after which the record fills in and becomes searchable. Only a scan too illegible to transcribe is filed as unreadable, named in the explorer and the exceptions queue with the reason and a Retry, and a value you fill in by hand always outranks the automatic read.

We run several agreements with one vendor at once. So do most enterprises, and reconciliation knows it: overlapping agreements with one vendor are never proposed as superseded. Superseding is only proposed where the evidence supports it, and you decide each proposal.

Our contracts are in several currencies. Enter values in the currency the row carries; rows keep their own currency, and the workspace display currency covers rows that did not record one. Benchmarks stay in USD so market comparisons hold, and nothing is silently converted.

We only have the spreadsheet today; the documents are scattered. Start anyway: map the register, let rows create the contract ledger, and switch on the watching that dates enable. Attach paper as you find it, through Agreements or the Archive; binding recomputes terms as evidence arrives, and your corrections always outrank the automatic reading.

Related: Contracts · Enterprise Uploader · Connect your data and close the gaps · The owner's handbook

Next: Chapter 01 · Contracts & renewals