Compliance work is mostly evidence work. Documents — policies, procedures, records, audit reports — are what gap analyses assess against and what agents read when they answer questions or draft changes. This guide covers getting documents into a project, organising them, and the versioning and states that keep your evidence auditable. Everything here is scoped to the active project; there is no cross-project document search.

## Getting documents in

From the **Documentation** area you can add evidence two ways:

- **Upload** files directly — PDF, Word (`.docx`), PowerPoint (`.pptx`), Excel (`.xlsx`), HTML, and plain text. Drag them onto the page or pick them with the file browser. You can also drop a **ZIP or RAR archive** and Regnora will extract the files inside, optionally preserving the folder structure.
- **Import** from **Google Drive**, picking the files you want to bring across.

When you upload something that matches an existing document, Regnora asks how to resolve it rather than guessing — keep it as a **new document**, add it as a **new version** of the existing one, or skip it.

**Manage:** [Documentation](https://app.regnora.com/documentation)

## What happens after upload

Every uploaded document is processed: Regnora extracts its text and indexes it so the AI can search your evidence *by meaning*, not just by filename. A document shows a processing state while this runs and becomes searchable once it completes. Large files take a little time; an analysis or agent will wait for processing to finish before relying on a document.

## Organising into directories

You can group documents into **directories** (folders), nest them, and move documents between them. Directories are a convenience for you — they don't change how the AI searches, which always spans the whole project's evidence.

## Versioning and the audit trail

Documents are **versioned**. Re-uploading a policy creates a new version of the same logical document rather than a duplicate, and only one version is *current* at a time. Older versions stay available in the document's version history, so you keep a full audit trail of how a policy changed.

## Document states

A document is always in one of a few states:

- **Staged** — uploaded or proposed but not yet committed. This is the typical state when an upload needs a decision from you, or when an agent has proposed a change for you to approve.
- **Draft** — a working document, not yet treated as live evidence.
- **Active** — live, indexed, and searchable; the evidence gap analyses assess against.
- **Archived** — kept for the record but out of the active set.

Understanding these matters most when an agent stages a change: the document sits in **staged** until you approve it, at which point it becomes part of your active evidence. See [Drafting & revising documents](/guides/drafting-and-revising/) for that flow.