How to get through a folder of PDFs and contracts without reading every page
Summaries you can check, numbers pulled into a sheet, and a report written from the source: a better way to deal with a pile of documents.
Some work is just reading. Forty supplier contracts before a renewal. A 120-page tender. Three quotes that each format their prices differently. Nobody wants to read all of it, but skimming is how a renewal date or a hidden fee gets missed.
AI summaries help — if you can trust them. Here's how to use them on real documents without guessing.
Ask for the thing you need, not "a summary"
"Summarise these" gets you a generic page. Say what you'll do with the result:
- "Put every renewal date and fee from these contracts in a sheet, soonest first."
- "Compare the three quotes and tell me which is cheapest per unit, with the delivery terms."
- "Write a two-page summary of this tender for the board, with the deadlines at the top."
Insist on sources
The danger with AI on documents isn't that it writes badly. It's that it writes confidently — the right length, the right headings, and a number that isn't in the file. A trustworthy result shows where every fact came from: which document, which page.
That's how Saywork works with documents. It reads every page, gives each source and page a reference, looks facts up in the files instead of recalling them, and checks what it wrote against the files before it tells you it's done. A spreadsheet it edits is read back after writing.
Let it do the whole job, not one step
The time sink is rarely the reading alone. It's reading, then copying numbers into a sheet, then writing the report, then exporting it. Handed off in one sentence, that's one job:
"Go through the 40 contracts in this folder, put every renewal date and fee in a sheet, and write me a summary for the board."
Saywork reads the folder, builds the sheet, writes the summary in Word, and checks each date and fee against the contracts — then tells you what it did and anything it couldn't confirm.
Keep it findable
Once Saywork has read a file, you can ask about it later from the Ask page — "when does the Delta contract renew?" — and the answer points back to the page it came from.
What to check yourself
Even with sources, a person should sign off anything binding. Use the references to spot-check the figures that matter most — the totals, the dates you'll act on — before they go anywhere. That takes minutes instead of the afternoon the reading would have.
More on the agent's approach to accuracy: Why an AI agent should ask before it sends anything.