What Are Correspondents?
A correspondent is the person or organisation that a document comes from, or is addressed to. It answers the question: who is this document from?
Every real-world document has an origin — a bank, a supplier, a client, a government agency, a colleague. Correspondents let you record that origin in a structured, searchable way.
Why Correspondents Matter
Without correspondents, finding "the invoice from Acme Supplies" requires remembering keywords in the document title or searching its full text. With correspondents, you can filter your entire archive to a single company or person in one click.
Correspondents also power auto-matching: once Essal Office has seen enough documents from the same source, it can automatically assign the correct correspondent to new incoming documents — no manual tagging required.
What Counts as a Correspondent?
A correspondent is any recurring source or recipient you want to track. Common examples:
- Type: Financial institutions
- Examples: Your bank, credit card provider, insurance company
- Type: Suppliers and vendors
- Examples: Raw material suppliers, software vendors, service providers
- Type: Clients
- Examples: Companies or individuals you invoice
- Type: Authorities and agencies
- Examples: Tax authority, chamber of commerce, regulatory bodies
- Type: Internal
- Examples: Other departments, branches, or offices within your organisation
- Type: Individuals
- Examples: A freelancer, a landlord, a business partner
One Correspondent per Document
Each document is assigned a single correspondent. If a document genuinely involves two parties — for example, a contract between your company and a client — assign the other party (the client), since your own company is implied.
Correspondents vs. Tags
These two features serve different purposes:
- Feature: Correspondent
- Answers the question: Who is this document from or for?
- Feature: Tag
- Answers the question: What is this document about, or what status does it have?
It is common for a document to have both a correspondent (e.g. Acme Supplies) and tags (e.g. Finance, Pending Payment). They work together rather than competing.
Correspondents on the Document List
In the document list, each document card shows its assigned correspondent below the title. This makes it easy to scan a filtered list and immediately understand where each document originated. You can click a correspondent name in the document list to instantly filter to all documents from that source.