Files

Files is your firm's document drive: folders and files with in-place previews, the usual file operations, and a shared space with each client that they can see and use from their own portal. The same drive implementation backs your view and the client's portal view, so a file you place in a client's space is exactly the file they see.

Everyone on your team uses Files for working documents, engagement letters, exports, and anything else that needs a home, a preview, and sometimes a client's eyes on it.

Where to find it

Open Files from the dock for the firm-wide drive, or open Data › Files from inside a specific client for that client's own space. Signature requests, form responses, and recordings you share with a client also surface inside the file tree alongside your uploads.

Key concepts

Personal drive. Files only you can see, until you share them.
Firm drive. One per firm you operate in. Anyone active on that firm's team can

see and edit what's in it.

Desktop. A folder inside your Personal drive, shown as its own row in the

drives list because it's also what appears on your Bitment desktop behind your windows. Moving something out of it takes it off the desktop; anything you drop into it from the desktop shows up here too.

Client space. One per client, reachable both from the firm-wide drive's drive

list and from inside that client. Files here can be shared into the client's portal.

Drives (the left rail). Personal, Desktop, then one drive per firm, then your

clients.

Browse, upload and organize

Open Files for the firm-wide drive, or Data › Files inside a client.
Upload by dragging files into the window, or use the New button (the +

button on a phone) for Upload Folder or New Folder.

On a phone or tablet, the same menu adds Take Photo, Record Video and

Photo Library, so you can add a picture straight from the device instead of only uploading a file that already exists.

Create folders, rename, move, copy and delete from a row's menu or the toolbar.

Copy a selection, then right-click a folder to paste it there. The copy is independent of the original.

On a phone, use Move to… in the row menu. Drag-and-drop is a mouse gesture and

doesn't exist on touch.

Select several rows to act on them at once (bulk move, copy, share, download, or delete). On mobile, enter Select mode from the overflow menu first.

Very large single files upload as a resumable transfer that can survive a dropped connection. Folder uploads and smaller files upload in one request.

Hide the side panels

On a computer, Files shows two panels on the left: the drives list, then the folder tree for whichever drive you're in. Each closes independently with the small collapse button at its top right, giving the file list the whole window. Bitment remembers which panels you've closed. With the drives panel closed, the trail across the top of the file list still names the drive you're in.

Previews

Clicking a file opens a preview instead of downloading it:

Documents, PDFs, images, audio, video, and .eml email files render in place.
Spreadsheets and CSVs open as a table you can page through. Choose how many

rows to show from the Rows control at the top right. An Excel workbook shows its sheets as tabs along the bottom of the preview, exactly like Excel: click a tab, use the left/right arrow keys, or Home/End to jump to the first or last sheet. Very large files show only the first slice of rows, marked Truncated. Download the file for the rest.

Extract a zip

Upload the archive, then use Unzip on it. Extraction runs in the background so a large archive doesn't block the screen. The extracted contents appear in the drive when it finishes, in a fresh folder named after the archive.

Download a file, or several

Click a file's Download action for a single file. Select multiple rows and download them together: Bitment streams a single .zip of the selection instead of one download per file.

Use the share control on any item to grant a colleague, or a whole firm's team, view or edit access. A file or folder in a client's space is automatically visible to that client in their portal, and by default editable there too. The firm can downgrade a specific item to view-only from its share control, in which case the client can see it but not change it. Anything in your Personal space stays private until you share it. Files has no public link surface of its own, unlike Signatures and Forms. Client access always runs through the portal.

Clients have full edit rights over files you've shared with them at edit level, plus anything they uploaded themselves. A file you mark view-only stays read-only for them.

Search for a file

Search matches file and folder names, not the contents of documents. Use the folder tree and drive list to narrow down first when you're hunting for something in a large drive.

Ask the AI to work on your files

The AI can list, read, create folders, rename, move, copy, delete and unzip on your behalf, at your permission level. Try "file everything in this folder by year" or "find the engagement letter for Northwind LLC." Destructive operations are staged for you to approve rather than done silently. It can also pull a file's raw bytes into its sandbox, process them, and save the result back into the drive, so "pull the text out of this PDF and save it beside the original as a .txt" is one request. When the AI reads a scanned or non-text PDF it can't extract, it asks you to attach the file directly rather than pretending it wasn't found.

Tips

Bitment's Terminal app can open directly into a folder in Files. Look for **Open in

Terminal** on a folder's row menu if you need to run a script over a batch of documents.

A folder delete removes its entire subtree in one action. There's no separate step

to empty it first.

Rename, create, and delete refuse a name that collides with a sibling in the same

folder, so you'll never end up with two identically named items by accident.