Every small team ends up with documents split across three places — a Google Doc here, a Dropbox folder there, a PDF someone emailed as an attachment — and nobody remembers which version is current. Creating and editing those files inside the same platform that holds the client record keeps them in one place instead of scattered across other companies’ clouds.

This is the “New” screen in EmpireVault’s euro-office module, mid file-creation: a File Name field, a Folder picker already set to “Contracts,” and two rows of format choices below it. One row creates a Document, Spreadsheet, or Presentation in native Word, Excel, or PowerPoint formats — .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, with Spreadsheet currently selected — and the other creates the same three as Open Document Format files instead: .odt, .ods, .odp, for teams standardized on LibreOffice rather than Microsoft’s formats. A separate panel below handles PDFs directly: upload one, and it opens for viewing, annotating, and filling right in the browser editor, filed into whichever folder is chosen.

Whichever format gets created, editing from then on happens in the built-in browser editor, with no separate app to install. Documents and folders are private to whoever created them by default, visible only to people they’re explicitly shared with, and a Trash holds anything deleted long enough to recover it by mistake. Every file downloads in its original format, and most convert to another on the way out — a Word document as a PDF, say — without touching the source file.

The point of building it this way is that a contract, a proposal, or a client’s filled-out PDF never has to leave the platform it lives in just to get edited. Six format choices up front — three proprietary, three open — mean a team isn’t forced onto one vendor’s file type to get work done, and a document created here stays here, off Big Tech’s cloud stack, right next to the client and deal it belongs to.

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