Preparing a building's documents for Savoir

An assistant that cites its sources is only worth the documents it was given. This guide says which ones to upload, in what shape, and what happens between the moment a file lands and the moment an answer can stand on it.

Which files to upload, and in what order

Start with the documents co-owners ask for most often:

• The declaration of co-ownership, with its amendments.
• The building's by-laws and the rules of the house.
• The minutes of the general meetings and of the board's own meetings.
• The financial statements and this year's budget.
• The insurance policies and their endorsements.
• The maintenance logbook and the contingency fund study.

A library of six well-chosen documents answers more questions than a library of sixty files whose versions nobody is sure of. The rest can follow later.

The formats accepted, and the size

Seven kinds of file are accepted, up to 100 MB each:

What it is	Formats
A document	PDF
A word processor file	.doc, .docx
Plain text	.txt
A scan	PNG, JPEG, TIFF

TIFF is on the list because it is still what half the office copiers and the multi-page faxes produce. A file of any other type is refused before a single byte moves, with the limit written in your own units.

The eight categories

Every document is filed, and the category is what the library filters on: declaration, by-laws, rules, minutes, financial statements, notices, forms, other. All eight come with the community and can be changed from the console — they are reference data rather than a list frozen into the code.

Filing is worth doing for two reasons: finding a document in the console, and giving an answer a label a co-owner recognises.

What "processed" means

An uploaded file is not immediately answerable. It moves through three states, shown in the console beside each document: queued, reading, then ready. Until a document is ready the assistant does not stand on it — and does not pretend to have read it.

That delay is the engine reading the document and cutting it into quotable passages. For an ordinary declaration of co-ownership it is measured in minutes. A document that fails is marked as failed rather than left waiting forever.

Replacing a version

An amended by-law is not uploaded a second time beside the old one: the console replaces a document's version, and the history stays. That is what avoids the nastiest case — two versions of the same by-law in the library, and an answer that cites the one from 2019.

A deleted document is also forgotten by the engine that read it, rather than merely hidden from the list.

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