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The other lane: uploading a document

Most documents are not composed. They arrive. A supplier emails a PDF; someone photographs a receipt. That is the upload lane, and it joins the golden path at the same intake queue, with the same two gates.

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Put the file on the Clerk’s desk

From the landing, open the Clerk - from the Chat with picker, the agent roster, or the Upload card under Apps, which goes straight there. Its workspace has three tabs; Upload is the one that starts an intake. There are two drop zones, and picking the right one is the only decision you make.
The Clerk's upload tab with its document and transaction-list drop zones and the intake feed

The Clerk's Upload tab. Two typed drop zones above, the live intake feed below.

Typing the contents of a document into the chat does not start an intake. Only a file on this tab, or a file dropped onto the composer, does. A pasted table is a conversation; an intake row exists because a file arrived.
A spreadsheet is stored in Files but not parsed. Export it as JSON for the list lane, or hand it to the Typewriter, whose job is turning a list into schema-valid JSON.
You can still drag a PDF straight onto the composer on the Chat tab and add a one-line instruction such as “Please process this supplier VAT invoice.” Both surfaces use the same attachment builder. At the current web and backend source revisions, that builder stores the Files row but drops the server-minted upload authority the Clerk requires to adopt it, so this browser handoff is not claimed end to end. Upload to posted journal entry separates the intended storage and Clerk contracts from this current source-boundary gap.
The composer plus-button menu showing upload, switch agent and tool call options

The composer menu: attach, switch agent, hide tool calls, in one place.

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Read what the Clerk did with it

The Clerk replies with what it decided and, crucially, what it was not sure about. It states the classification, how many items it flagged, who it staged the row for, and the status it left it at. Then it stops.
A Clerk conversation showing a classified upload, the flags raised, and the resulting queue status

An upload-lane conversation. PDF attached, classified as supplier_vat_invoice, 3 items flagged, staged as flagged in the intake queue.

“I don’t fix or approve, so it waits for a human” is the Clerk describing its own boundary accurately. It never edits a document and it never approves one. Its whole job is to read, classify, link, check for duplicates, and name what it could not settle.

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What just happened underneath

The Clerk is a LangGraph graph in its own lane. It classifies the document against your SOPs, extracts the fields the document type declares, links related documents, checks for duplicates against the existing queue, and stages a row. Two properties are worth knowing. It writes to the queue, never to the ledger. There is no path from the Clerk to a journal entry that does not pass through both gates. Confidence is calibrated, not decorative. On a legible document the Clerk’s field confidences run high. On a degraded fax they drop, and when they drop far enough the money fields come back empty rather than guessed and the document is flagged. A blank field you can see is worth far more than a plausible number you cannot check.

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Watch it land, without leaving the tab

Under the drop zones, the intake feed fills in as the Clerk works: the file, the derived name it gave the document, the doc type it decided on, and the state it left the row at. The link at the end of a row says whether there is anything left to do: Open in review → while the row is still actionable, View review record → once it is posted or rejected. There is an Open the review inbox → link above the table too. They all go to the same place, because the feed is a view onto the queue rather than a second queue.

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Then continue exactly as before

Go to Books → Review. Rows drafted by clerk sit alongside rows drafted by typewriter in one inbox, with the same tabs and the same two gates. From here the path is identical to gate 1 onwards.
One difference worth knowing. A flagged row can be sent back to the agent for another extraction pass. A Typewriter-composed row, which arrives unflagged, cannot: there is no agent extraction to redo. See Working the review inbox.

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Where uploaded files are listed

Files in the left rail is every file stored in GreatBook, including the ones intake does not parse: the file, where it came from, who uploaded it, its size, when it arrived, its status, and the classification the Actions pipeline gave it. You can also drop files here directly - any business file up to 25 MB, whether or not the Clerk can read it, because this page stores rather than parses. The Timeline view includes direct and chat-borne uploads in newest-first order. The Folders view keeps unfiled evidence visible at the root and reports the read-only Drive reconciliation state separately from GreatBook’s canonical upload record. See Files: Timeline and Folders for the two views and their unavailable states.

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Actions: the work an agent says needs a person

Actions is the run ledger for agentic work, including failed, blocked, stale and legitimate no-change outcomes. It is separate from Audit → Actions, the human worklist over Assurance findings. See Actions agent-run inbox for the distinction.