Document intake that files itself
Documents do not arrive in a tidy stream. A signed agreement comes back from the copier in a batch of forty. A vendor emails a PDF. Counsel sends a side letter as an attachment. A gift officer photographs a signed page in a donor’s living room. Every one of those is the same kind of record, and yet most teams file each source a different way, or not at all, until the backlog becomes its own project.
Intake is the front door that makes all of those arrivals behave the same.
One door for every source
Whether a document is scanned, emailed, uploaded, or photographed, it enters through the same intake. That means you are not maintaining three separate filing habits for three separate channels. An intake email address is often the quiet workhorse here: forward a message, or point a scanner at it, and the document lands in the archive without anyone deciding which drive and which folder it should go to.
It comes through one door
Scanned, emailed, uploaded, or photographed, every source enters the same intake.
Every page is read
PaperlessZen™ reads the full text the moment the document arrives.
A filing is proposed
The system works out what the document is and which record it belongs to: a donor, a fund, a vendor, a board.
You confirm with a click
Accept or correct the suggestion. No naming files, no dragging into folders.
It comes through one door
Scanned, emailed, uploaded, or photographed, every source enters the same intake.
Every page is read
PaperlessZen™ reads the full text the moment the document arrives.
A filing is proposed
The system works out what the document is and which record it belongs to: a donor, a fund, a vendor, a board.
You confirm with a click
Accept or correct the suggestion. No naming files, no dragging into folders.
Read first, then file
The moment a document arrives, PaperlessZen reads every page. That reading is what makes the next step possible. Instead of asking you to tell the system what a document is, the system works it out from the text, proposes a classification, and proposes which record it belongs to. You confirm or correct with a click.
The distinction matters.
You are reviewing the machine's suggestion, not doing data entry.
People stay in charge of the judgment calls; the tedious part, reading and sorting, is handled.
The backlog stops being a project
The boxes in the storage room are the reason most teams never feel caught up. Intake changes the math. Because the documents are read and pre-sorted for you, bringing in a decade of agreements is a matter of confirming filings, not transcribing them into a form. Most teams start with a single box or one donor’s file, watch it become searchable the same week, and widen from there.
Nothing is altered on the way in
The original file is kept exactly as it arrived. Reading and classifying happen alongside the document, never by changing it, and earlier versions are retained. What you put in is what you can always get back out.
Intake is step one of the whole system. From here a document becomes searchable to the page, its obligations get tracked, and it attaches to the right record in your gift agreement workflow. Want to see it run on your own paper? Bring a box to a demo.
Frequently asked questions
Where can documents come from?
Scans from a copier, PDFs emailed in, files uploaded from a drive, or a photo taken in the field. An intake email address lets a document go straight from an inbox to the archive without a stop on someone's desktop.
Do we still have to file things by hand?
No. PaperlessZen reads each document, proposes where it belongs and which record it connects to, and you confirm. You review a suggestion in one click instead of naming files and dragging them into folders.
What about a decade-old backlog?
It comes in as-is. Because intake does the reading and proposes the filing, clearing a backlog is an afternoon of confirmations rather than a summer of temp staff re-keying data.