The Documents library is a top-level menu item, and it works the way a file system does: a folder tree on one side, the open folder's contents on the other, with file counts that include everything beneath each folder.
- Folders start folded. The tree opens showing only the top-level folders; expand one to see its subfolders, one level at a time. The page itself opens on the directory home — the top-level folders, and no files at all. A file is listed only inside its own folder: open a folder and you see its subfolders first, then its own files — never another folder's. The path above the list is a breadcrumb: click any step to go back up to it.
- Your folders are yours: create them, rename them, nest them as deep as the business thinks. Deleting a folder refuses while it still holds anything — empty it first. Beside them stand the file plan's system folders, badged System and locked: the plan maintains them, so they cannot be renamed or deleted.
- Searching is its own mode. Typing in the search box changes nothing until you press Search — then the list becomes search results across all folders, and every result carries the folder it lives in and what matched (its name, one of its tags, or — for a file that arrived by email — its sender or its subject), so a result explains itself. Searching a supplier's mail domain finds everything they ever emailed in, wherever it was filed. Open the folder named on a result to work with the file where it lives; Back to folder returns to where you were browsing. The search matches the name a file is shown under, and a record's files are shown as "{record code} — {file name}", so searching an invoice number or a customer code finds its paper even when the file itself is called "scan.pdf". A tag filter sits beside the box. Words inside a document are a different search — that is Ask AI's job, over the read text (§14.6).
- Working in the library: upload into the open folder (or into Unfiled, the home of files with no folder yet), move files between folders, retag, delete (to the trash, §14.8). Browsing is open to everyone in the company; managing library files needs the manage documents permission (1.12).
- Reading without downloading: every row shows a small preview — a thumbnail of the image or of the PDF's first page — and clicking a file's name opens it in place: PDFs, images and text read in the window, videos and recordings play there, and Office documents and archives offer Download instead. The preview window names the file's folder and links to the record it is attached to. What you may view is what you may download — the same permission decides both.
- A file's story — Details: every file row, and the preview window, carries a Details button (the same button sits on a record's Attachments tab). It opens the file's own page as a side panel: the file's facts — type, size, folder, the record it belongs to, who uploaded it and when, how long it is kept under the retention rules and whether it is under a legal hold — and below them its history: who uploaded, viewed, downloaded, moved, retagged, emailed or filed it, and every print of the document it belongs to, counted — the first print reads Printed, later ones Reprinted (2nd), Reprinted (3rd), and so on. Under the history you can leave notes on the file itself — discussion, decisions, context for the team — with @mentions that notify colleagues, and replies that thread under the note or the history entry they answer. Anyone who may open the file may read its story; writing notes follows the same permission as managing the file. Files that were already in the library before this feature arrived start with an empty history — their story begins with the next thing that happens to them; nothing is reconstructed or backfilled.
The library keeps the chapter's work queues: the capture inbox (§14.6), the Trash view and the Ready to archive list. The chapter's administration — retention settings, the file plan, the media size limit, email-in capture, filing rules, year-end bundles and export — lives in its own home: System Setup → Document Management, under the same manage documents permission. The library's footer links there.