Uploading and Analysing Documents
The AI Chat page (Sidebar > AI Chat) lets you upload documents so the AI can answer questions using their actual content, rather than general knowledge. Document upload is only available on the AI Chat page, not the AI Assistant side panel.
Availability
Document upload is available to firms on the Growth and Elite plans. On the Solo plan, the AI Chat page shows a plain "Upgrade to start chatting with your firm data" message in place of the chat interface, so uploading isn't possible until you move to Growth or Elite.
How to upload a document
- Open Sidebar > AI Chat.
- Select "Upload Files", or drag and drop a file onto the page.
- Wait for the file to finish processing. You'll see a spinner with a "Processing..." label while Accupe extracts and analyses the text.
- Once processing finishes, the document appears in the document tray above the chat, ready to reference in your questions.
Supported file types
Anything outside this list is rejected on upload with a message telling you the file type isn't allowed.
Important: the upload filter accepting a file type does not always mean Accupe can read its contents yet. Modern Word (.docx) and modern Excel (.xlsx) files have their text extracted automatically. Older binary Word (.doc) and Excel (.xls) files, and PowerPoint files in either format (.ppt or .pptx), are accepted on upload but Accupe does not currently pull any text out of them at all: they land in the document tray marked "No text", and the AI cannot read them. If you need the AI to work with an old .doc, .xls, or a PowerPoint file, convert it to .docx, .xlsx, or export it to PDF first, then upload that instead.
How text is extracted
- PDF: if the PDF has a genuine text layer, Accupe reads it directly.
- Scanned PDF (no text layer): Accupe automatically runs optical character recognition (OCR) on the first three pages to pull out readable text. This happens without you needing to do anything.
- Images (JPEG, PNG, WEBP, GIF): always run through OCR, since an image has no text layer to read directly.
- Excel (.xlsx only): each sheet's content is extracted and labelled with the sheet name. Older .xls files are not extracted, see the note above.
- PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx): not currently extracted at all, see the note above.
- Word (.docx only): the document text is extracted directly. Older .doc files are not extracted, see the note above.
- Plain text, CSV, JSON, XML, Markdown, RTF: read as-is.
OCR currently recognises English text only. If a scanned document is in another language, extraction may come back empty or garbled, so it's worth checking the extracted content before relying on it.
Very large documents have a practical ceiling too: if the text Accupe extracts from a single file exceeds 500,000 characters, the upload is rejected after processing and you're asked to upload a smaller document.
Storage and file guidance
The document tray shows a running count, for example "3 / 15", along with a progress bar and a "Max {size} MB/file" caption, based on your plan. Treat these as guidance to keep uploads manageable, what actually determines whether an upload succeeds is your firm's total storage allowance, shared across your regular files and any documents uploaded to AI Chat.
If your combined storage (regular files plus AI Chat uploads) goes over your plan's overall storage allowance, further uploads are rejected until you free up space or upgrade.
One more limit sits underneath all of this: whatever your plan's guideline, each individual chat message can only draw on up to 10 documents at a time. This rarely bites on Growth, but on Elite, where the document count is otherwise unlimited, growing a single chat session past 10 uploaded documents will make every further message in that session fail until you delete some back down to 10 or fewer, or start a new chat. If you're working through a large batch of documents on Elite, it's worth splitting them across a few separate chats rather than piling them all into one.
Other things worth knowing
- If you upload a photo, any location and device metadata (EXIF data) is automatically stripped before the file is stored.
- You can upload up to 10 files within any 60-second window. If you go over this, wait a moment before uploading more.
- Documents you upload are scoped to your own firm. You can't see, and Accupe can't return, another firm's uploaded documents.
Note: once a document is uploaded, you can turn on "Docs Only" mode to restrict the AI's answers strictly to what's in your uploaded documents, with citations back to the source. See the "Docs Only Mode and Citations" article for details.