PaperlessZen™ for Microsoft Dynamics 365
Last reviewed September 13, 2026
Your team lives in Dynamics. The account, the contacts, the history of the relationship, all of it is there. What is almost never there is the paper: the signed contract, the grant agreement, the amendment that changed a renewal date. Those sit in a different system, and the two only meet when someone goes hunting.
PaperlessZen™ closes that gap by putting the documents where your team already is.
CRM without the paper
The account and its history are in Dynamics.
The signed contract and its amendments are in another system.
Finding them means hunting, or asking someone to dig.
CRM with the document layer
A documents panel sits on the account or contact record.
Agreements and amendments are filed and full-text searchable.
No second tab, no separate login, no digging.
What connects
PaperlessZen links each document to its Dynamics record through the record’s identifier, so the connection holds even as records are renamed or reorganized. Your CRM remains the system of engagement; PaperlessZen is the system of record for the documents attached to it.
What syncs, and in which direction
The sync runs one way. PaperlessZen reads the identifier off an account or contact record in Dynamics and uses it to decide where a document belongs. It does not write anything back: no field on the record changes, no note is added, no workflow fires inside Dynamics because a document arrived. The account and contact tables stay exactly as your team left them. What changes is what a person sees when they open the record, because the documents panel now has something in it.
Where documents show up
Inside Dynamics, on the record. Open an account or contact and the documents panel shows everything filed against it, from the original agreement to the latest amendment and correspondence. The same information is also reachable from a tab on the record form, and, for anything logged as a note along the way, from the timeline wall, so a reviewer scanning recent activity sees the filing alongside calls and emails rather than in a separate place.
Note attachments, out of Dataverse
There is a second direction to this integration. Years of scanned contracts and signed letters are sitting inside Dynamics as note attachments, counting against your Dataverse capacity and unreadable to search. A managed solution extracts them into your PaperlessZen archive, new notes and the existing backlog alike, while the note keeps rendering its attachment. Nothing changes for your users; the file underneath becomes a real document: read by OCR, searchable, filed on the record, and governed by retention.
The full story, including the honest storage math, is in the Dynamics attachments workflow.
A worked example: a renewal nobody had to chase
A five-year services contract comes up for its two-year renewal window. The signed original was filed against the vendor’s account when it first arrived, and the amendment that extended pricing last year filed itself the same way. When the renewal notice period opens, the account owner does not go looking. They open the account, click into the documents panel, and the current contract, the amendment, and the notice-window date sit together, already matched to the record identifier that ties them to this vendor and no other. The renewal gets handled from inside Dynamics, on the record where the relationship already lives, instead of from a search across a shared drive.
A three-step recipe
A signed agreement travels from arrival to the record in three steps, starting with intake.
The agreement arrives
Intake reads the signed contract and files it against the right party.
The party is matched
PaperlessZen matches that party to its Dynamics record by identifier.
It appears on the record
The agreement shows up in the documents panel on that record, where whoever owns the relationship sees it before the next call.
Availability
The Dynamics 365 embed is our most developed integration and the one behind our contract workflow. It is included in the Team and Institution plans, attachment extraction and all, with no per-seat charge. If you run Dynamics, this is the fastest way to see PaperlessZen in your own environment. Book a demo and we will show it on your records.
Frequently asked questions
Where do documents appear in Dynamics?
On the record itself, as a documents panel. Open an account or contact and its agreements, amendments, and correspondence are one click away, without leaving Dynamics.
Does PaperlessZen change our Dynamics data?
No. Dynamics stays the system of record for accounts, contacts, and relationship history. PaperlessZen links documents to those records by identifier; it does not rewrite your CRM data.
Can it move attachments out of Dataverse?
Yes. A managed solution extracts note attachments into your PaperlessZen archive, including the existing backlog in bulk. The note still renders its attachment, and the file becomes a searchable, governed archive document.
Which Dynamics records can carry documents?
Any record with a matching identifier, most commonly accounts and contacts. If your team also wants documents on opportunities or a custom entity, tell us the table name and we will confirm it during setup.
Does the sync run both ways?
No. PaperlessZen reads record identity from Dynamics so it knows where to file a document. It never writes a field back into Dynamics. Dynamics stays the single source of truth for account and contact data.