First Steps for Teams

Team accounts only

This page is for team accounts. For private accounts, see First Steps.

When you create a team account, you become its admin. This page walks you through the first setup: inviting your colleagues, creating a shared place for the team’s documents, and archiving the first document.

The examples on this page use a team of three people: you (the admin) and two colleagues, Anna and Ben. A team of this size needs exactly one shared cabinet, and that is what you will set up here.

What You Have at the Start

A new team account contains:

• one user: you, with the admin role;
• the default roles: admin, user and auditor for the whole company, and viewer, editor and manager for cabinets;
• your own private Inbox and Files folders.

There are no other users, groups, cabinets or categories yet.

Step 1 — Invite Your Colleagues

Invite everyone who will work with documents before you run the setup wizard in Step 2. The wizard puts every user who exists at that moment into the shared team group.

1. Open the Users page and click Invite.
2. Enter Anna’s email address and choose the role user.
3. Click Send Invitation.
4. Repeat for Ben.

Anna and Ben receive an email and are listed as Invited until they sign in for the first time. You don’t need to wait for them to accept.

The user role lets your colleagues create tags, metadata and categories, and manage their own API tokens. Only give the admin role to people who manage users and settings. See Users & Groups.

Step 2 — Run the Setup Wizard

Open the Categories page. As long as there are no categories, the page offers the setup wizard: click Run Wizard.

The wizard asks for your main currency and which kinds of documents you handle, and shows you the retention periods it will use. After you confirm, it creates:

• metadata fields, categories and retention periods for the document kinds you selected;
• a group Team with all current users: you, Anna and Ben;
• a cabinet Team, owned by the group Team.

Every category the wizard creates files its documents into the Team cabinet, and you are the deletion approver of these categories.

This is the whole team setup: everyone in the group Team has full access to the documents in the Team cabinet.

Note

Only the admin can run the setup wizard, because it creates categories, metadata and retention periods at the same time. You can run it again later: it only adds what is missing and never deletes anything.

If you invite someone after running the wizard, add them to the group Team yourself: in the Invite User dialog, pick Team in the Groups field, or edit the group on the Groups page.

Step 3 — Upload to Your Inbox, Choose a Category

In Papermerge, nobody has to decide where a document goes. Everyone, you included, works the same way:

1. Upload the document into your own Inbox.
2. Choose the document’s category, e.g. Invoices.

The category is the only decision. Papermerge does the rest: the category decides in which cabinet the document is stored and, through its filing rule, in which folder. This is why the categories are set up first, by the admin (in Step 2, the wizard did this for you): with the wizard’s categories, every categorized document ends up in the Team cabinet.

Until it has a category, a document in your Inbox is visible only to you. When you choose a category that files into the Team cabinet, Papermerge asks you to confirm the move, because the document becomes visible to more people. The dialog Who Can See These Items Changes shows who gains access: in this case, Anna and Ben.

If you don’t want to confirm every time, tick Remember my decision. Papermerge then moves such documents without asking, until the list of people who gain or lose access changes.

Tip

This is the main difference to a shared drive: people don’t sort documents into folders by hand, so documents don’t end up in the wrong place.

To look at the Team cabinet’s documents, switch to it with the breadcrumb at the top of the panel. See Navigation.

Step 4 — Archive Your First Document

From here on, the everyday workflow is the same as in a private account: upload, fix pages if needed, assign a category and fill in its metadata, then archive. See Your Everyday Workflow.

Try it with one document:

1. Upload a document, e.g. a supplier invoice, into your own Inbox.
2. Open it, assign the category Invoices (or another one the wizard created) and confirm the move to the Team cabinet.
3. Fill in the metadata, e.g. the invoice date and amount.
4. Click Archive.

Ask Anna or Ben to open the Team cabinet: they see the document too.

Where Teams Differ

The setup above fits most small teams: one cabinet for everything, shared by everyone. Change it when your team needs it:

• Some documents must stay private to a few people, e.g. payroll: create a second cabinet that only these people can access, and a category (e.g. Payslips) that files into it. Users still only choose the category; Papermerge stores the documents in the right cabinet. See Cabinets.
• Someone should only read documents, e.g. a working student: don’t add them to the group Team; give them the cabinet role viewer on the cabinet instead. See Roles & Permissions.
• Your tax advisor or a tax auditor needs access: see Auditor Access and Full Data Export.