SmartDMS
// Getting started

The SmartDMS Guide

Everything from your first upload to approval chains and plain-English search — in thirteen short chapters.

// Chapter 03

Upload your first documents

Drop in a PDF, a photo of a receipt, or a whole scanner batch — SmartDMS reads it, understands it, and shows you everything it found. Here's what to expect the first time.

What you can upload

  • Formats: PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, DOCX, and XLSX — up to 50 MB per file.
  • Scans and photos work. Text PDFs are read directly; scanned PDFs and images are OCR'd automatically at high resolution. You never have to choose — SmartDMS detects which is which.
  • File types are checked by content, not by file extension, so a mislabeled file is caught rather than mis-read.

Your first upload, step by step

  1. Click Upload and pick one or more files.

    Selecting several files at once starts a batch import (more below).

  2. Watch the status badge.

    Each document moves from pending (queued) to processing (being read and classified) to ready. The list refreshes itself every few seconds while anything is still in flight. If something goes wrong the badge shows error — your file is kept safely either way.

  3. Open the document.

    The viewer shows the document type the AI chose with a confidence score, a one-sentence summary, and a Details tab with everything it extracted.
Document lifecycleIllustrative demo
Upload lifecycle — the document moves from pending to processing, its routing rule files it, and processing completes as ready with extracted details.

What the AI finds

  • Document type — invoice, contract, receipt, purchase order, and many more (your industry setup adds its own; see chapter 12).
  • Structured fields — for an invoice: vendor, amount, currency, invoice date, due date, invoice and PO numbers. Fields the AI couldn't find show as a dash you can fill in yourself (chapter 6).
  • Barcodes — type and value, listed in the Details tab.
  • Signature ink color — black, blue, red, or purple, when a signature is detected.
  • Scanner separator pages are recognized automatically as separator-page artifacts.

Uploading in bulk

Select 2 to 500 files and SmartDMS starts a batch import. While the dashboard remains open, its progress panel tracks completed and failed counts. Once the background queue accepts a batch, server-side processing continues if you navigate away or close the tab.

  • One bad file (wrong type, empty, oversized) is skipped without stopping the valid files in the batch.
  • If the batch queue is briefly unavailable, SmartDMS automatically falls back to uploading your files one at a time and tells you so.
Prefer email? Vendors can send documents straight into SmartDMS — no upload needed. That's chapter 4.