Creating documents
The three ways to start a document in Alchex — from scratch, from a marketplace template, or by uploading a file you already have.
There are three ways to get a new document into Governance: start from a blank one, download a template from the Marketplace, or upload a file you already have. All three land in the same place and follow the same lifecycle.
Who can create
Creating a document needs author access in the team the document will belong to. Owners and workspace admins qualify too. A Reader who tries is refused with "You do not have permission to create documents", and the New Document button is hidden from them rather than failing after the fact.
From scratch
Go to Governance → New Document. A dialog asks for a title.
- Nothing is saved when you open the dialog. The document is created only when you click Create. Opening it and cancelling leaves no trace in the list.
- The title is optional and capped at 200 characters. Leave it blank and the document is named "Untitled Document"; you can rename it later from the document workspace.
Once you click Create, Alchex opens the editor on the new draft and sets the following for you:
| Field | Value on creation |
|---|---|
| Status | Draft |
| Version | v1.0 (nothing is published yet) |
| Owner | You — taken from your signed-in account, not from anything you type |
| Type | Document, until you pick a more specific one |
| Code | Minted automatically, once the type and team are known |
| Team | The team you are currently scoped to, if you are a member; otherwise your default team |
You cannot set the status, version or owner yourself at creation time. The server decides all three.
Naming, type and code
Set the Type in the document's side panel: Policy, Procedure, Form, Record, Manual, or the generic Document. The type drives the document code, which is assigned automatically on save and follows a per-team scheme — a prefix for the type, your team's code, and a running number.
Two limits to plan around:
- Once a document is published, the type and code are fixed. The panel says so: to reclassify it, supersede the document with a new one.
- While a document is in review, the type is locked until the review closes. A rename made during review applies after the current review publishes.
From a Marketplace template
Marketplace holds prepared documents and agents mapped to the clauses of the standards in your catalog. Go to Marketplace, use the Documents tab or search by clause, topic or name, and open the item. You can read the outline and preview the body before committing.
Click Download v… to copy it into your workspace. Before it is created you can:
- Choose the destination team. You must have author access in that team; picking a team you do not belong to is refused, never quietly redirected.
- Rename the copy. The rename applies to your copy only; the catalog item is untouched.
- Answer the template's questions. Templates carry their own fill-in questions. Your answers are substituted before the document is created, so the copy arrives already personalised. A question you skip leaves the original placeholder in the text exactly as the author wrote it.
The copy arrives as a normal Draft at v1.0, owned by you, and remembers which catalog item and version it came from. Downloading the same item again creates a second, separate copy — it does not update the first one.
If the template was linked to clauses, those clauses also come into scope for the owning team, so the new document shows up in readiness views straight away instead of sitting unlinked. See Controls and evidence.
By uploading an existing file
If the document already exists outside Alchex, drag it onto the Governance page. You can drop Word (.docx), Markdown or PDF files — one document per file, up to 20 files at a time, 25 MB each. An import queue appears where you set a type per file before confirming, and you can cancel or retry an individual file.
Word and Markdown files are converted into editable Alchex documents. PDFs stay as the original file, readable in the app but not editable. Importing needs the same author access as any other create.
Full behaviour, including what happens to formatting and how uploaded files are stored, is in External documents.
What happens next
Whichever route you took, the new document is a draft that only your team can see. Readers cannot see it at all until it publishes for the first time. Write it in the editor, then hand it over through Submit and approve.