Files is where your documents live — statements, capital calls, tax forms, legal agreements, wires, valuations, and anything else you want to keep beside the holdings and people they belong to. It’s a document vault: you upload a document once, file it in one place, and then point it at as many holdings, owners, contacts or activities as it actually relates to.

This guide walks through uploading documents, organizing them with folders and tags, finding one again, reading it, and connecting it to the rest of your portfolio.

Find what you need#

A few ideas carry the whole screen:

  • Everything sits in one tree. Your owners, holdings and contacts are already in it, and you can add folders anywhere you like. See How Files is organized.
  • A document lives in exactly one place, but can point at many things. Filing (moving) decides where it lives; attaching decides what it’s about. See Filing vs. attaching.
  • Folders and tags are separate ways to navigate. A folder is where a document sits; a tag is a label you can browse across the whole vault. See Organize with folders and Tag your documents.
  • The details panel is the editor. There’s no edit mode and no Save button — you click a value and change it. See The details panel.
  • Deleting is two stages. Delete moves a document to the Trash; only Delete forever — from inside the Trash — actually destroys it. See The Trash.

Jump straight to a task:

Open Files#

Files is a destination in the left sidebar, alongside Reports, Explorer and Contacts. It’s available to admins and to the wrangler role — the people who do the filing — so if you don’t see it in the sidebar, your role doesn’t include it.

Two shortcuts worth knowing:

  • The sidebar follows you. When you’re looking at a holding or an owner and then tap Files, you land in that holding’s or owner’s documents rather than at the top of the vault.
  • A holding’s ⋯ menu has an Add File entry (web) that takes you to the same place — the holding’s own folder in Files, ready to upload into.

How Files is organized#

Files is one tree, and your portfolio is already in it. At the top level you see:

  • Your owners — the people and legal entities that hold your assets.
  • Your holdings — assets, accounts, liabilities, deals.
  • Contacts, grouped under a single Contacts heading.
  • Any folders you create, which can sit at the top level or nest inside anything, as deep as you like.

The icon tells you which kind of node a row is; nothing else about it differs. You can create folders inside a holding, an owner or a contact, so an account can have Statements, Tax and Legal underneath it.

Above the tree there’s Home — the top of the vault, which shows everything — and below it a short list of views:

  • Inbox — documents that haven’t been filed anywhere yet.
  • Favorites — documents you’ve marked with the heart.
  • Recent — documents added or changed in the last week.
  • Trash — documents and folders you’ve deleted.

The Inbox#

Anything uploaded without a destination lands in the Inbox. That’s where a document goes when you drop it while looking at Favorites or Recent rather than a folder, and it’s where documents imported from Data Operations (Data in the sidebar) arrive.

Treat the Inbox as a work queue: open it, and move each document to where it belongs.

Filing vs. attaching#

These are two different things, and the distinction is what makes the vault work:

  • Filing (the Move action) puts a document in a folder. A document is filed in exactly one place.
  • Attaching points a document at something it’s about — a holding, an owner, a contact, or a single activity. A document can be attached to as many things as you like, and attaching never moves it or copies it.

So a wire confirmation might be filed under the account’s Statements folder and attached to the specific activity it evidences.

Upload a document#

There are two ways in, and both file the document into wherever you’re standing.

The Upload button#

  1. Open the folder (or the holding, owner or contact) you want the document to land in. If you don’t open one, it goes to the Inbox.
  2. Tap Upload at the top of the tree.
  3. The dialog title tells you where the document is going — “Upload to Statements”, or “Upload to the Inbox”.
  4. Choose one file or several.
  5. Set the As of date — the date the document is about, such as a statement’s period end or a notice’s effective date. It defaults to today and applies to the whole batch, so a pile of mixed-date documents is easier as two uploads.
  6. Tap Upload.

The dialog closes right away and the upload continues in the background, showing progress as “Uploading 3 of 20…” so a long batch never looks stuck. Each file keeps its own filename as the document’s name; you can rename it afterwards.

Drag and drop#

On the web, drag files from your desktop straight onto the Files screen. An overlay confirms the destination — “Release to file into Statements” — before you let go, so a drop is never a guess.

Drag and drop is turned off while you have a document open for reading, because a drop landing in the folder behind the viewer would be a surprise. Close the document first.

Not everything you want filed is a file. A fund’s portal page or a Google Sheet can be saved in the vault as a link, so the folder holds everything about the entity rather than only the things you could download.

  1. Open the folder you want it in.
  2. Tap Add link at the top of the tree (web only).
  3. Paste or type the address. You can type it the way you’d type it in the address bar — www.example.com works, and Trac fills in the rest. Only ordinary web addresses are accepted.
  4. Give it a name, or leave the name empty and Trac uses the address.
  5. Tap Add link.

A saved link behaves like any other document — same folders, tags and attachments — except that opening it takes you to the page in a new tab instead of showing a preview.

Find a document#

The search box at the top searches the whole vault, not just the folder you’re in, and it finds folders as well as documents — so you can search your way to a place, not just to a file. It matches on names, notes and tags.

Tap the × in the box to clear the search and go back to browsing.

Tag your documents#

Tags are freeform — there’s no fixed vocabulary. Type whatever you want on a document (see The details panel), and it shows up in the TAGS section of the tree with a count beside it.

Two things make tags more than labels:

  • Tags nest. Put a / in a tag and Trac reads it as a hierarchy: tax/2025 and tax/2024 appear as two rows under an expandable tax. Nothing has to be set up first — a slash starts meaning something the moment you type one.
  • Selecting a parent selects the branch. Tapping tax shows everything under it, and the number on the row is what tapping it returns.

Tapping a tag replaces the current tag filter; hold Cmd (or Ctrl) while tapping to add a second tag to the selection. Clear at the top of the section drops them all.

Browsing a tag is its own view of the vault, not a filter on the open folder: picking a tag leaves the folder you were in, and opening a folder clears the tag.

Views, sorting and layout#

  • Home, Inbox, Favorites, Recent, Trash are the views described in How Files is organized.
  • This folder only / Including subfolders — the toggle above the list. Off, you see what’s filed directly in the open folder; on, you see everything beneath it too. (A search or a tag filter always covers everything, so the toggle only applies while you’re browsing.)
  • Sort by tapping the NAME or ADDED column heading; tap the same heading again to reverse it. Documents start sorted by name, which for a run of same-shaped statements is also chronological.
  • List or grid — the two buttons at the top right switch layout.
  • The count above the list tells you how many items there are, and says “40 of 512 items” while more remain. Scroll to the bottom and the next page loads by itself.

Standing in a holding’s or an owner’s documents, a View holding / View owner button appears above the list so the thing itself is one tap away.

Read a document#

Tap a document’s name to open it. The viewer fills the screen, with the document on the left and its details on the right.

  • PDFs open fitted to the width of the frame, with + and − controls to step the zoom.
  • Images, plain text and JSON display directly.
  • Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents are rendered through Microsoft’s web viewer.
  • Anything else says plainly that there’s no preview — you can still download it, and all of its details stay editable.

The controls across the top are Close, Download, and Details (the ⓘ), which shows or hides the panel beside the document. On a narrow window the panel takes the whole screen when you open it.

A few conveniences:

  • Each document is its own page. Cmd-click (or Ctrl-click) a document name to open it in a new tab, with the same folder underneath it, and the list you were on keeps its place — folder, filters and scroll position undisturbed.
  • The browser’s back button steps back one folder at a time rather than leaving Files altogether.
  • Downloads save the file on the web. On a phone or tablet the button says Open instead, and the document opens in your device’s browser.

The details panel#

The panel beside a document is the editor. There’s no edit mode and no Save button — click a value, change it, and it’s saved. If a change can’t be saved, the value snaps back to what’s stored and a message says so.

From top to bottom:

  • Name — click it to rename the document.
  • Note — a free-text line under the name. It also shows under the name in the file list.
  • LOCATION — the folder the document is filed in, or Inbox with “Not filed yet” if it isn’t filed. Tap the row to go there, or Move to file it somewhere else.
  • ATTACHED TO — everything the document points at, each with an × to detach it. Tap Attach to… to add more. Detaching never moves or deletes the document.
  • Download / Open, Favorite (the heart), and Delete.
  • TAGS — the chips already on the document, each removable with its ×, plus a box to type a new one. Tags you’ve used elsewhere are offered as suggestions as you type, which is what keeps “Tax” and “tax” from becoming two different tags.
  • DETAILS — facts about the file itself, which nobody edits: when it was added and by whom, when its details were last changed, and its size. (The document’s bytes never change — re-uploading is a new document — so “Details updated” only ever reports a rename, a re-tag or a move.)

You can also open the panel without opening the document: tap the ⓘ at the end of a row in the list.

Work on several documents at once#

In the list, each row has a checkbox.

  • Tap checkboxes to select documents.
  • Shift-click a second row to select the whole run between it and the last one you clicked.

Once anything is selected, a bar replaces the breadcrumbs with the count and what you can do:

  • Move to… — file all of them into one folder (or into the Inbox).
  • Tag… — add a tag to all of them, or switch to Remove to take one off. Trac skips documents the change wouldn’t affect.
  • Delete — move them all to the Trash.

The × at the left of the bar clears the selection. Selection also clears when you change folder, view or tag.

Organize with folders#

Folder actions act on the folder you’re standing in:

  • + Folder at the top of the tree creates a folder inside the current one. Each row in the tree also has its own “new folder inside” button, and there’s one beside Home for a new top-level folder.
  • Creating a folder leaves you where you are, so you can carry on filing from the list you already had set up.
  • The toolbar above the list has rename (the pencil) and delete (the trash) for the open folder.

Owners, holdings and contacts can hold folders, but they’re renamed where they live in the rest of the app, not here — so they only offer “new folder inside”.

Deleting a folder takes its contents with it. Trac asks first, and tells you how many documents will go: “Move ‘Statements’ to Trash? 12 files inside will go with it, and restoring the folder brings them back.” Restoring the folder puts every one of them back where it was.

On the web you can drag the right edge of the tree to make it wider or narrower; Trac remembers where you left it.

Attach a document to something#

Attaching says what a document is about. Do it from the details panel:

  1. Open the document (or its ⓘ panel).
  2. Tap Attach to… in the ATTACHED TO section.
  3. Search. Two groups come back:
    • ENTITIES — your owners, holdings and contacts.
    • ACTIVITY — individual activities, shown as the activity type, its description and its trade date so two similar entries are still distinguishable. Type at least two characters to search these.
  4. Tick everything the document relates to and tap Attach.

Things already attached are greyed out and marked “Attached”. Folders aren’t offered here — putting a document in a folder is what Move does.

To undo one, tap the × on its row in ATTACHED TO. The document stays exactly where it’s filed.

Where your documents show up elsewhere#

Files isn’t the only place your documents appear:

  • A holding or an owner — open it and tap Files in the sidebar to land in its documents. On the web you can also drag files straight onto a holding’s page to upload them there.
  • A contact — the contact form has a Related Files section where you can attach files you’ve already uploaded, or upload a new one without leaving the form.
  • An activity — an activity’s detail view shows its source document as a row you can tap to open, and lists every vault document attached to that activity underneath it. When you’re editing an activity, the Source Upload field is where that link is set.
  • An update — an update shows its source document the same way.
  • Data Operations (Data in the sidebar) → Tools → Import Files uploads a batch of documents in one go. They all land in the Inbox for you to file.

Where another screen lists a document, the line under its name is the folder it’s filed in — or Inbox if it hasn’t been filed yet.

The Trash#

Deleting is two stages, and only the second one is permanent.

  • Delete on a document, or on a folder, moves it to the Trash. A message confirms it, and the document is out of your folders, searches and tags.
  • Open Trash to see what’s in it. Deleted folders appear as folders, with the number of documents they took with them — so a folder deletion reads as one event rather than as a spill of loose rows. Walk into one to see what went down with it.
  • Restore puts a document back where it was. Restoring a folder brings its documents back with it.
  • Delete forever destroys the document and its contents for good. Trac asks for confirmation and says exactly what’s about to go: “Permanently delete ‘Statements’ and 12 files inside it? This cannot be undone.”

Searching while you’re in the Trash searches the Trash; searching anywhere else finds only documents still standing.

On your phone#

This section is about the web app in a phone browser — the Files screen reflowed for a narrow window. It isn’t the Trac mobile app, which has no Files screen of its own; see In the Trac mobile app below.

The phone layout isn’t the desktop screen squeezed down — it’s built for the two things you actually do on a phone: capture a document, and look one up.

  • Search and the view chips (All, Inbox, Favorites, Recent, Trash) sit at the top.
  • Navigation is drill-down: tap a folder to go in, and use the back link at the top to come out. The folder’s name and its document count show above the list.
  • Tap a document to read it; the details open as a full screen with a back control rather than docking beside it.
  • Scroll to the bottom and the next page loads by itself.
  • Selecting several documents at once and the grid layout stay on the laptop, where a wide list is what makes them worth having.

Uploading from the Files screen is a web capability — and it works in a narrow browser window on a phone, so this layout can still capture a document.

In the Trac mobile app#

The Trac mobile app has no Files screen and no upload form. What it does have:

  • Reading a document. Files is one of the panes on the Browse tab, and a document opens in a reader inside the app. It’s read-only — renaming, moving, tagging and deleting stay on the web.
  • Getting a document in. Attach the file to a Traci chat and ask Traci to keep it. That’s the only route from your phone’s camera roll or Files app into Trac, and it’s the same one that can file the document against a holding, owner or contact, or set it as the source behind a note or price update. See Files: from a chat attachment to a source document.

Ask Traci about your documents#

Traci can read the vault and work in it with you:

  • Ask what’s in a folder. When you’re standing in one, Traci already knows which folder you mean — “what’s in this folder?” resolves without you naming it.
  • Ask it to find documents by name, note or tag, across the whole vault.
  • Ask it to read a document you point it at.
  • Ask it to rename, move, attach, detach, or create and delete folders. Traci proposes those as changes for you to review and approve, the same as any other action it takes — nothing is applied behind your back.

Traci isn’t available to the wrangler role, so if that’s your role you’ll have Files without the assistant.

One thing to keep separate: a file you attach to a chat message is context for that conversation. It isn’t filed into Files. To put a document in the vault, upload it on the Files screen.

Troubleshooting#

  • I can’t find Files in the sidebar. The screen is available to admins and to the wrangler role. Ask whoever administers your portfolio.
  • I uploaded something and can’t find it. Check the Inbox. Anything uploaded while you weren’t standing in a folder — including everything imported from Tools → Import Files — lands there.
  • My search found nothing in this folder. Search covers the whole vault, not the open folder, so a genuinely empty result means the document isn’t in the vault under that name, note or tag. If you’re in the Trash, search only finds deleted items.
  • Tapping a tag emptied the screen. Tags and folders are separate views: picking a tag leaves the folder you were in and shows every document carrying that tag. Tap Home to get back to browsing.
  • The document won’t preview. Some types have no in-browser preview. Use Download — the details are still fully editable either way. A document that shows “This file is empty” was uploaded with no content; re-upload it.
  • I deleted the wrong thing. Open Trash and tap Restore. Nothing is actually destroyed until you use Delete forever from inside the Trash.
  • A folder disappeared with my documents in it. Deleting a folder moves its contents to the Trash with it. Restore the folder and every document comes back where it was.
  • An upload failed. A message names the file that failed. The files before it in the batch are already filed; re-upload the rest.
  • Adding Your Data — adding holdings, activities, contacts and owners by hand.
  • Importing data — bringing in spreadsheets of records, as opposed to documents.
  • Activities — the money activity your documents are usually evidence for.
  • Traci, the AI Assistant — the assistant that can read and organize the vault with you.
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