Creating initiatives from documents, and the Documents card

You can start an initiative from the documents you already have, such as a project brief, a slide deck or a budget. A spreadsheet can start many initiatives at once. Once an initiative exists, its Documents card keeps the business case, review deck and contracts behind it.

Uploading

Open Initiatives → New Initiative → Upload documents. Drop files on the page or click to browse. The upload starts as soon as you pick files, so choose them all at once. Each file can be up to 25 MB. Accepted file types:

• PDF
• Word (.docx)
• PowerPoint (.pptx)
• Excel (.xlsx)
• CSV
• Plain text
• Markdown

Older Excel (.xls) workbooks aren't read: save one as .xlsx or CSV and upload it again.

Anyone in the account can do this. Each initiative it creates counts toward your plan's initiative limit. Roiva reads the files and shows a review, usually within a few seconds per document, though a large file can take up to a minute. If reading fails, the page says why and offers Try again.

What you upload decides what you get:

• One initiative. A brief, a deck, a budget, or several files together are read as one bundle for one initiative. Roiva pulls out their text and sends it to Claude, Anthropic's AI model, which proposes the initiative's fields. Only the first 100,000 characters of the combined text are read.
• Many initiatives. A single XLSX or CSV, uploaded on its own, with a header row and one row per initiative. Roiva reads its columns directly, and no AI is involved. A spreadsheet uploaded alongside other files is read as part of one initiative's bundle. So is a sheet Roiva can't read as a list: one with no title column, or only one initiative.

From the setup guide, an upload creates one initiative only, and spreadsheets aren't accepted there.

Starting from the template

If you don't already keep a register, the upload page offers a blank one to download as XLSX or CSV. The XLSX has the header row frozen, a filter on every column, dropdowns on the columns with a fixed set of answers, and a second tab, named Definitions, explaining each column. Both files arrive with two example rows, marked so you can spot them; replace or delete them, and keep at least two real rows, because a sheet with only one row is read as a single initiative rather than a list.

Your own register works just as well. You don't have to use ours, and you don't have to delete the columns Roiva doesn't read.

What each column means

Only Title is required. Everything else can be left blank.

Column	What to put	Accepted values
Title	What the initiative is called. A row without one is skipped	Any text
Description	A sentence or two on what it does	Any text
Category	The part of the business it serves	Sales, Operations, Finance, Customer Support, HR, Marketing, Product, Engineering & IT, Supply Chain, Legal & Compliance, Other
Priority	How it ranks against the others	High, Medium, Low. P1/P2/P3 and 1/2/3 read too. Blank becomes Medium
Stage	Where it is in its lifecycle	Identified, Reviewing, Implementing, Live, Paused, Completed, Rejected, Dismissed. Blank becomes Identified
Owner	Who runs it	A teammate's email, or their full name as Roiva holds it
Hypothesis	What you believe it will change, and by how much	Any text
Department	The team that runs it	Any text
Business Unit	The division it rolls up to	Any text
Value Period	The period the next three columns are per	monthly, quarterly, annually
CapEx ($)	The one-time cost to build it	A number
OpEx ($)	The recurring cost to run it, per Value Period	A number
Cost Savings ($)	Measurable savings per Value Period	A number
Revenue Uplift ($)	Planned revenue increase per Value Period	A number
Time to Value (Months)	Months until the first meaningful value lands	A whole number
ROI time horizon (years)	How many years to calculate ROI across. Blank becomes 3	1, 2, 3 or 5
Confidence Score	How data-backed the estimates are	0 to 100

Three of these are worth spelling out:

• CapEx is the one-time build — implementation, integration, and vendor or consultant fees. OpEx is the recurring run cost: seats, subscriptions, tokens, hosting and maintenance. Both are what this initiative pays to run, not spend that serves other work on the same vendor's bill, and not your team's ordinary time doing the work the AI helps with — that time saved is the value, not the cost.
• Value Period governs three columns. OpEx, cost savings and revenue uplift are all per Value Period. Leave the column out and Roiva reads them as annual figures, so a register of monthly numbers imports twelve times light.
• Owner is matched against your members, by email or by full name, first-last or last-first. A name two teammates share matches neither. Someone who isn't a member yet isn't assigned or invented: the review shows them as an owner to invite, with a box for their email, and the initiative waits for them until they join. Get a name wrong and you'll see it in that box, where you can pick the right teammate instead.

Reviewing one initiative

The review is the new-initiative form, filled in. A note at the top names your files, gives a confidence percentage, and lists what the read left unclear or had to leave out, each note on its own line.

• What it fills in: only what the documents support. That can be the title, description, hypothesis, category, department, business unit, planned CapEx, OpEx, savings and revenue uplift with their value period, time to value, ROI time horizon and confidence score.
• Defaults: priority starts at Medium, and the owner is you unless you pick someone else or choose — Unassigned.
• Approval chain: empty to start, as on the new-initiative form. Steps you add are saved with the initiative, and its approvers review it when it's submitted for review.

It can also propose records to create alongside the initiative, listed under Associated records to create:

• Cost entries, one per cost line item in the documents.
• Metrics, each with a baseline where the documents state a before figure. The baseline is recorded as an estimate.
• Draft value entries, as monthly estimates. Each cites the documents it was read from, so an approver can open them from the entry. They count toward approved value only after someone chooses Submit for review and an approver approves them.

Edit anything, then choose Create Initiative. The initiative starts in Identified. Anything proposed that couldn't be recorded is named in a "Not added" message, for you to add by hand.

If you already have an initiative with that title, Roiva asks whether to create a numbered copy or add to the one you have. Adding fills in only the existing initiative's empty fields and attaches your files. It leaves out the cost entries, metrics and draft value entries, so nothing is counted twice.

Reviewing a spreadsheet

The review table shows each row's Title, Category, Priority, Stage, Owner, CapEx ($), OpEx ($), Savings ($) and Uplift ($) for you to edit.

• How headers are matched: loosely. "Name", "Project" or "Use case" works as the title, and "Status" or "Phase" as the stage. An owner can be a teammate's name or email.
• Read but not shown in the table: Description, Hypothesis, Department, Business unit, Value Period, Time to Value, ROI time horizon and Confidence Score.
• Columns Roiva doesn't recognize are listed as not imported.
• Values that don't fit (a category Roiva doesn't have, "TBD" for an amount, an owner who isn't a member) are left blank, with what the sheet said shown beside them.
• Defaults: priority is Medium, and a row with no owner shows you as its owner. Choose — Unassigned to leave it without one.

Then:

• Tick Skip at the start of a row to leave it out. Every row is created unless you skip it.
• A row whose title you already have asks what to do: Add to it (fills its empty fields) or Create a separate, numbered one. A title repeated within the sheet gets a number.
• Choose Create initiatives. If any row can't be saved, nothing is created: the table comes back with each problem beside its row.

A spreadsheet creates initiatives only, with no cost entries, metrics or value entries.

Which stage imported initiatives start in

• Single document: the initiative always starts in Identified.
• Spreadsheet, Identified or Reviewing: a row starts at the stage in its sheet, or in Identified if the sheet gives none. Anyone can import at these stages. Rows imported into Reviewing go to their approvers, who get one notification for the whole import.
• Spreadsheet, a later stage: only someone who could approve the initiative can import it later than Reviewing. Importing it counts as their decision: the initiative shows them as its approver on the day of the import, and the decision appears under Closed in Approvals, marked as made by importing it.
• Anyone else: the Stage column offers only Identified and Reviewing. A row the sheet puts further along starts in Reviewing, with a note saying so, and its approvers decide.

See Approving value and initiatives.

Where your files go

The uploaded files are attached to the initiative as documents of kind Other on its Overview's Documents card, where every member can see them. From a spreadsheet, the file is attached to each initiative it creates.

Only a one-initiative upload sends its text to an AI provider (Anthropic), to propose the fields. A spreadsheet import doesn't. Files you add on the Documents card are never sent to one.

The Documents card

The Documents card is on the initiative's Overview. Choose Add document, then fill in:

• Kind: Business case, Review deck, SOW, Contract or Other.
• File: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, CSV, text, PNG or JPEG, up to 25 MB. Roiva judges the type by the file's contents, not its name.
• Or a link: a web address for a document kept in SharePoint, Google Drive or Box. Readers need access to it there too. Add a file or a link, not both.
• Title: defaults to the file's name. A link needs one.

Then choose Add document. Adding and removing documents show on the initiative's Activity tab.

Who sees SOWs and contracts

Any member can add, open and remove a business case, a review deck or an Other document.

An SOW or a contract carries commercial terms. Only these people can add, see, open or remove one:

• Owners
• Admins
• The people named in the initiative's Approval chain, who have to read what they're approving

Everyone else doesn't get those kinds in the Kind list. Their card says how many more documents are held back. A lock icon marks restricted documents. The Activity tab names an SOW's or contract's kind, but not its title.

Opening and removing

• Files: clicking one downloads it. Roiva checks that you may see it first, so a copied download link stops working after a few minutes. Each download is recorded in the account's audit log.
• Links: a link document opens where it lives, in a new tab. Roiva checks that you may see it first, and each one followed is recorded in the audit log too.
• Malware: uploaded files are scanned for malware. A flagged file shows Flagged, and nobody can download it. Remove it and upload a clean copy.
• Removing: use the trash icon at the end of the document's row and confirm. There's no undo. Deleting an initiative removes its documents too.

The whole-account export includes every document's file. See Your data: exports and deletion.