Every company already runs on a set of tools: email, spreadsheets, a CRM, an accounting system, a shared drive. Documents rarely live in any of them. They arrive as attachments, someone reads them, and the part that matters gets typed somewhere else — by a person, later.
DocReveal reads and understands documents. But understanding that stops in a database is not much of a result. This article is about the part that makes the difference for the business: how DocReveal hands what it learned to the tools your teams already use, on your rules — and how a non-technical person sets that up in an afternoon.
Understanding is not the finish line
A validated invoice, a confirmed shipping document, a contract with its key dates extracted — all of that becomes valuable only once it moves: into the ledger, into the customer record, into an email to the person who is waiting, into the spreadsheet the team meets over on Monday.
In most companies that last mile is manual. Someone opens the document, copies the numbers, chooses the recipient and hopes nothing was missed. It is slow, invisible, and where errors are born.
We think of DocReveal as a cognitive fabric: one AI layer woven through every document a company has. It is autonomous — it processes on its own. It is agentic — it reasons and works with agents. And it is actionable — it delivers data to the place where the work happens. This article is about that third quality.
Step one: connect a service, once
Everything starts in Connection Hub, the one place in DocReveal where your workspace connects to the outside world. Think of it as the company’s key cabinet: every key is created once, labelled, and reused by whatever is allowed to use it.
Ready-made connectors cover more than 140 business applications — email, spreadsheets, file storage, CRM, accounting, payments, e-signature, project management. You search by name or browse by category, and each service signs in the way its provider requires: an OAuth sign-in for services such as Gmail, Google Sheets, HubSpot or Salesforce, an API key for others. For your company’s own systems, a custom service accepts an API key, basic authentication or custom fields, and Connector Studio lets your IT team describe an internal system as a connector of its own.
Two details matter more than they look. First, a connection has a name of your choice, so a shared mailbox and a personal account can exist side by side as two connections to the same service, each with its own credentials. Second, when you sign in with a provider such as Google, you approve access in your own account and can withdraw it there at any time. DocReveal never sees your password.
- Secrets are encrypted with dedicated encryption keys bound to your workspace and are never displayed again — not even to the administrator who entered them.
- Only workspace administrators create connections; everyone else uses them in flows without ever seeing the credentials.
- Sign-ins that expire are renewed automatically in the background, so a flow does not stop on Monday morning because a token ran out on Sunday.
- Deleting a connection also revokes DocReveal’s own access at the provider, and a connection that a live flow depends on cannot be deleted by accident.
One definition, no copies. That single principle is what makes the rest of this article possible.
Step two: design what happens next
Integration Manager is where a connection goes to work. It is a visual canvas on which a business user draws a flow: something happens, and the flow reacts. No code, no developer ticket.
A flow begins with a trigger, and there are three kinds. An Event is something that happened inside DocReveal — a document was parsed, mapped, enriched or validated. A Catch Hook is a web address an external system can call to start the flow. A Schedule runs the flow at times you define. Conditions narrow the trigger down — react only to invoices, only above a certain amount, only from one supplier — and they read the document’s own data to do it.
Then come the steps. Every connected application brings its own — send an email, insert a row, create a deal, upload a file, request a signature — more than 1,500 ready-made actions in total. Alongside them sit the logic pieces every real process needs: a Condition to branch, a Loop to repeat, a Delay to wait, a Router to split the path. Required fields are marked, and a small badge on each step counts down as you fill them, so you always know what is left.
The detail that makes a flow feel alive is the pill: a placeholder that inserts live data from the document — its name, its type, an amount, a date — into any field. When the flow runs, the pill becomes the real value. An email subject can say which invoice was just validated. A spreadsheet row can carry the exact figures.
A worked example from our “Build your first integration flow” video: trigger on Document validated, add a Gmail Send Email step, place the document’s name in the body, publish. From that moment, every document that passes validation announces itself to the mailbox of your choice. Setting it up took minutes.
Templates shorten the path further — ready-made flows for deliveries to spreadsheets, accounting tools or e-signature services. Flows can be exported and imported, and every change is saved and versioned automatically. A flow stays a draft until you publish it, you can test it against a sample event first, and the list always shows which version is live.
What the director sees
Automation nobody can inspect is a liability. Integration Manager keeps score in the open.
- Overview shows usage against your plan — runs this month, flows and connections in use — so cost never becomes a surprise.
- Every flow lists its successful runs and its errors, at a glance.
- Activity is the audit trail: every run, its trigger, its version, each step with its status and duration, and the option to replay or export it. Operations can always see what ran, when, and why.
- The DevOps view of any single document shows its whole pipeline, stage by stage — including the flows it fed.
Flows are deterministic. They do exactly what was drawn, every time. The AI does the understanding upstream; the delivery follows your rules to the letter. That separation is deliberate — it is what a finance director can sign off on.
The same connections serve your AI agents
Connections made in Connection Hub are not reserved for flows. The digital colleagues you define in Agent Pool use the same connections and the same catalogue of actions, under the same policies — and they never see the credentials either. Define the mailbox once; your flows and your agents can both use it.
What to take away
- Start with the last mile. Ask where document data is retyped today — that is your first flow.
- One connection per service: named, owned by IT, reused everywhere. No shared passwords in chat, no copies.
- Let the person who owns the process draw the flow. They know the exceptions.
- Insist on a trail: every run visible, replayable, and counted against a plan you can read.
Documents in. Action out. The rest of your tools finally get to hear what your documents have been saying.