How Papers fits together

Papers has four moving parts: templates, the documents they produce, the libraries they draw on, and the settings that let your own systems call in. Ten minutes here saves you guessing at the rest.

Templates are the design, not the document

A template is one kind of document with the changing bits left blank: an invoice, a contract, a salary certificate. You design it once in the editor, marking where the data goes, and Papers fills it in every time you produce a document from it.

If the document already exists in Word, Import Word document on the Templates page turns it into a template you can finish in the editor.

Nothing about a template is a finished document. A finished document only exists once you give Papers some data to put in it.

A template has a draft and published versions

The template you are editing is the draft. It is for working on. The documents your business sends out come from a published version.

Publish turns the current draft into a numbered version, and that published version is what produces real documents. This is what lets you redesign an invoice on a Tuesday afternoon without changing the invoices going out that afternoon. See versions and publishing.

How documents come out

You can download a document straight from the editor, which uses your draft and is meant for checking your work.

You can send a document for signature, which builds it from a published template and emails it to the people who have to sign. See send a document for signature.

Mail merge in the sidebar makes one letter for each row of a spreadsheet. You choose a published template, upload a CSV or Excel (.xlsx) file of up to 500 rows, and match its columns to the template's fields. Papers builds the letters for you to download as a zip, and it can email each letter to its recipient as well.

Your own system can call the Papers API and get a PDF, Word, HTML, Markdown or plain text file back. See generate documents from your own system.

You can also ask an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT to produce a document, once you have connected it to Papers. See connect E·BIZI Papers to your AI assistant.

Signing and mail merge always use a published version. The API and the AI assistant do too, unless whoever is asking requests the draft on purpose.

Templates in Microsoft Word

A template can also go to Word, as stationery your staff start their letters from. Switch on Available in Word for the template and it appears in Papers for Word, the Word add-in, and as Download for Word on the template's page. See use your stationery in Microsoft Word.

Three libraries the templates share

The sidebar lists Templates, Signing and Mail merge first. Below them sit Assets, Fonts and Fragments, and all three exist so a template does not have to carry its own copy of something.

Assets holds images: your logo, a scanned signature, a product photo. The asset library covers it.

Fonts holds font files you have uploaded, so a document can print in your brand's typeface rather than a substitute. See upload your own fonts.

Fragments holds blocks of content you reuse across templates, like a letterhead or your banking details. See reusable fragments.

Change one of these in one place and every template that uses it follows.

Environments, if you have developers

Every Papers company starts with three environments: DEV, UAT and PROD. Publishing puts a version into the first of them, DEV. From there you promote it to UAT and then to PROD, so a template change can be tested against your integration before it reaches the documents your customers get. See environments and promotion.

You can add, rename and delete environments in Settings if three is not the right number for you.

If nobody is calling the Papers API, you can ignore all of this. Publish and carry on.

Where the settings are

Settings is not in the sidebar's list of sections. It is in the menu under your name, at the bottom of the sidebar.

It shows your Workspace (your name and company), and it holds your environments, your API keys and your webhook endpoints, which are the three things your developers will ask you for. See environments and API keys.

Plan & Usage, at the bottom of Settings, shows your current plan and its limits. View usage details opens the Usage page, with what you have used so far this period.