--- title: What is Essal Office? description: Essal Office is a cloud-hosted document management system that turns your physical and digital documents into a fully searchable, organized archive — ... --- [Skip to content](https://help.essal.cloud/en/article/1373-#main-content) English Show submenu for translations [More support](https://help.essal.cloud/en/kb-tickets/new?hsLang=en) [Customer portal](https://clients.essal.cloud/tickets?hsLang=en) [![logo](https://help.essal.cloud/hubfs/logo.svg)](https://help.essal.cloud/?hsLang=en) - [Home](https://essal.cloud/) - [Products](https://essal.cloud/products) - [Industries](https://essal.cloud/industries) - [About](https://essal.cloud/about) - [Contact](https://essal.cloud/contact) Open main navigation Close main navigation - [Home](https://essal.cloud/) - [Products](https://essal.cloud/products) - [Industries](https://essal.cloud/industries) - [About](https://essal.cloud/about) - [Contact](https://essal.cloud/contact) - English Show submenu for translations - [More support](https://help.essal.cloud/en/kb-tickets/new) - [Customer portal](https://clients.essal.cloud/tickets) - [Home](https://essal.cloud/) [Home](https://essal.cloud/) Essal Help Center - There are no suggestions because the search field is empty. 1. [Help Center](https://help.essal.cloud/en?hsLang=en) 2. [Essal Office](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en) 3. [Getting started](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#getting-started) # What is Essal Office? Essal Office is a cloud-hosted document management system that turns your physical and digital documents into a fully searchable, organized archive — so your team spends less time hunting for files and more time getting work done. --- ## What can Essal Office do? At its core, Essal Office connects four things: - **Component**: \*\*Document archive\*\* - **What it is**: A secure, searchable library for all your organization's documents - **Component**: \*\*OCR engine\*\* - **What it is**: Automatically reads and indexes the text from scanned documents and images - **Component**: \*\*Organization tools\*\* - **What it is**: Tags, correspondents, document types, and custom fields to classify every document - **Component**: \*\*Automation\*\* - **What it is**: Workflows, mail rules, and auto-matching that handle routine filing without manual effort --- ## Key Concepts ### Documents A **document** is any file you store in Essal Office — a scanned invoice, a signed contract, a PDF statement, a photograph of a receipt. Each document gets its own record in the archive, complete with extracted text, metadata, and a history of every change made to it. Essal Office preserves your **original file** alongside an archival copy in PDF/A format, which is specifically designed for long-term storage. ### Tags A **tag** is a label you attach to documents. Unlike folders — where a document can only live in one place — a single document can have as many tags as you like. This makes tags far more flexible: - An invoice can be tagged `Finance`, `Pending Approval`, and `Supplier: Acme` all at once. - A contract can be tagged `Legal`, `Signed`, and `2026` simultaneously. Tags are the primary way to organize your archive. See Organizing with Tags for a full guide. ### Correspondents A **correspondent** is the person, company, or institution that a document originates from or is addressed to — your bank, a vendor, a government office, a client. Assigning a correspondent makes it easy to pull up every document associated with that party in one click. ### Document Types A **document type** classifies what a document *is*: Invoice, Receipt, Contract, Bank Statement, Letter, Report. While tags describe what a document is *about*, the type describes its nature. Together, they give you two independent axes of classification. ### Custom Fields **Custom fields** let you add structured data to documents beyond the built-in fields. You define the fields your organization needs — Invoice Number, Contract Expiry Date, Project Code, Approval Status — and they become searchable, filterable attributes on every document you attach them to. ### Workflows **Workflows** are automated rules that run when documents are added, updated, or on a schedule. A workflow can automatically tag a document, assign it a correspondent, send a notification email, or forward it to another system — with no manual effort required. --- ## How It All Fits Together A typical Essal Office workflow looks like this: 1. A document arrives — scanned from paper, uploaded from a computer, dragged into the browser, or imported from an email inbox 2. Essal Office reads the document with its OCR engine, extracts the text, and creates a searchable index 3. Automatic matching assigns tags, correspondents, and a document type based on rules you define 4. The document appears in your archive, ready to find in seconds using full-text search or filters 5. Workflows can take additional automated actions — filing, notifying, reporting --- ## What Essal Office Is Not - It is **not** a file storage drive. You do not create folders or manually move files around. Organization happens through tags and metadata. - It is **not** a collaborative editing tool. Documents are archived, viewed, and annotated — not edited in place. - It is **not** limited to a single user. Essal Office supports multiple users and groups with granular permissions on every document. - [Essal Office](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#main-content) - [Getting started](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#getting-started) - [Searching and saved views](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#searching-and-saved-views) - [Correspondents and document types](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#correspondents-and-document-types) - [Email import](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#email-import) - [Users groups and permissions](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#users-groups-and-permissions) - [Sharing documents](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#sharing-documents) - [Working with documents](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#working-with-documents) - [Pdf tools](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#pdf-tools) - [Uploading documents](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#uploading-documents) - [Archive serial numbers](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#archive-serial-numbers) - [Workflows and automation](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#workflows-and-automation) - [Organizing with tags](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#organizing-with-tags) - [Troubleshooting and faq](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#troubleshooting-and-faq) - [Account and security](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#account-and-security) - [Custom fields](https://help.essal.cloud/en/essal-office?hsLang=en#custom-fields) - [Portal](https://admin.essal.cloud/) - [Newsroom](https://newsroom.essal.cloud/) - [Careers](https://careers.essal.cloud/) - [Help](https://support.essal.cloud/) - [Status](https://status.essal.cloud/) - [Contact](https://essal.cloud/contact) - [Terms](https://legal.essal.cloud/terms) [![logo](https://help.essal.cloud/hubfs/logo.svg "logo")](https://essal.cloud/) Essal LLC Copyright © 2026, Essal