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Plane gives you a central place to store and manage all the documents associated with your team—from tax forms and identity documents to company policies and uploaded files. Documents are organized by worker, labeled for easy filtering, and accessible from anywhere you need them in Plane.

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How documents work

Every document in Plane belongs to a subject: either a specific worker or your workspace as a whole. This distinction lets you keep worker-specific files (like a signed agreement or W-9) attached to the right person, while company-wide documents (like an employee handbook or policy document) live at the workspace level. Documents can be:
  • Uploaded files—PDFs, images, and other files you upload directly
  • Authored content—Documents created and edited inside Plane
  • Auto-generated artifacts—Documents created by other workflows, like a signed agreement that gets stored as a document after signing

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Uploading documents

You can upload documents from several places in Plane: the main documents section, a worker’s profile, or as part of a compliance workflow.
1

Navigate to documents

Go to the documents section from the main navigation, or open a specific worker’s profile and find their documents tab.
2

Upload your file

Click upload and select the file from your computer. Plane accepts common file formats including PDF, images, and office documents.
3

Name and organize

Give the document a clear name. Plane will suggest a name based on the file, but you can change it to something more descriptive.
4

Set visibility

Choose whether the document should be shared (visible to the worker) or private (visible only to admins). More on this below.

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Labels and categories

Documents can be organized with labels, which help you filter and find documents quickly. Plane applies some labels automatically—for example, documents created by tax form or agreement workflows are labeled with their type. Labels are useful for:
  • Filtering the document list to find a specific category (like all tax documents or all agreements)
  • Understanding context at a glance—a document’s labels tell you what it is for without having to open it
  • Organizing large document libraries across many workers
Your workspace has a set of default label categories, and you can search across all documents by name or label.

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Worker-specific vs. workspace-level documents

Documents in Plane are scoped to either a worker or the workspace: Worker documents are attached to a specific person. These include their tax forms, signed agreements, identity documents, and anything else specific to that worker. You can view all of a worker’s documents from their profile. Workspace documents belong to the company, not a specific worker. These might include company policies, templates, or reference documents that apply to everyone. When browsing documents, you can filter between these scopes to find what you need.

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Public vs. private documents

Every document has a visibility setting that controls who can see it:
  • Shared (public) documents are visible to both admins and the worker they belong to. Use this for documents the worker needs access to, like their signed agreement or a company policy.
  • Private documents are visible only to admins. Use this for internal documents that workers should not see, like internal notes or sensitive records.
You can change a document’s visibility at any time. Toggle a document between shared and private from the document detail view.
When uploading compliance documents like tax forms, consider whether the worker needs to access their own copy. Signed tax forms are typically shared so workers can download them for their own records.

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Downloading and sharing documents

You can download any file-type document directly from Plane. From the document detail view, use the download option to save a copy to your computer. For authored content (documents created inside Plane), you can view the content directly in the browser. Documents that are shared with a worker are accessible from the worker’s own Plane account, so they can download their own documents without needing to ask you for a copy.

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Documents created by other workflows

Many documents in Plane are created automatically by other parts of the system:
  • Signed agreements—When an agreement is fully signed, a document artifact is created and stored automatically
  • Tax forms—Completed tax forms (W-9, W-8BEN, I-9, etc.) are stored as documents attached to the worker
  • Compliance documents—Documents collected during onboarding or compliance workflows are filed in the worker’s document library
These auto-generated documents are labeled with their source type, so you can easily distinguish them from manually uploaded files.

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API access

The Documents API gives you programmatic access to view documents associated with your workers and workspace.
Workers can submit documents as part of compliance and onboarding workflows (like uploading identity documents or tax forms). The documents section in the admin dashboard is where admins manage and organize the full document library.
Plane supports standard document uploads. For very large files, contact support@plane.com if you run into any issues.
Yes. The documents section includes a search bar that searches by document name across all documents in your workspace. You can also filter by label to narrow results.