What makes a document "controlled" is that its content can only change through a numbered revision that somebody other than the author has approved. Crew never see work in progress — only the approved revision.
Controlled documents are managed in the company office, not on a vessel. Leave the vessel with Back to Fleet, go to Database → Controlled Documents, pick a category on the left, then open a document. The document page has four tabs — Versions, Details, Vessels and Audit.
The cycle
- Draft. On the Versions tab, Add new version starts a new revision. You pick a
Patch, Minor or Major bump of the current number, or Custom to type one; the format
is always three numbers such as
1.2.0, and the new number must be higher than every number the document already has. Only one unpublished revision may exist at a time, so Add new version is disabled while a draft or a review is open. - Author it. Open the revision with Open. For a built-in-editor document, Edit puts you into the rich-text editor and Save stores the draft. For an uploaded-file document you get Upload file instead (Replace file once something is there), which takes a PDF. Only drafts can be edited — once a revision leaves draft, its content is fixed.
- In review. Send for review locks the revision and hands it to a reviewer. The confirmation says so explicitly. For an uploaded-file document, the button stays disabled until a file has actually been uploaded to the revision.
- Published, or back to draft. A reviewer chooses Approve or Reject, either on the revision's row or with the revision open. Confirming with Approve & Publish publishes the revision and retires the previous published one — that is the moment the crew's view of the document changes. Rejecting sends it back to Draft so the author can rework it; a Rejection reason is required, while a Review comment on an approval is optional.
Each revision in the list carries its number, a status chip — Draft, In review or Published — and, for the newest published one, a Latest chip. Alongside it you see when it was last touched and who edited, submitted or approved it. Every revision also has a download button: Download PDF for a built-in-editor document, Download for the uploaded file.
Who may author and approve
Drafting, sending for review, approving and rejecting are company-office actions: company administrators and company users can do them, and read-only company accounts cannot. Crew accounts have no access to this page at all.
The important rule is separation of author and reviewer: you cannot approve or reject a revision you submitted for review yourself. In place of the buttons, the row tells you that another reviewer must approve or reject it. Company administrators are the single exception — they can approve a revision they submitted, so a one-person office is not deadlocked.
Carrying content forward
When you add a new revision to a document written in the built-in editor, it starts as a copy of the currently published content, so you edit forward rather than starting from a blank page.
Drafting with Nauticare AI
When you click Edit on a draft of a built-in-editor document, the Nauticare AI chat opens by itself in Edit mode, with a chip naming the document you are working on. Type what you want written or changed (up to 300 characters per message), or use the attach button to have a file converted — PDF, image, plain text, Markdown or Word. If the AI needs more detail it asks with answer cards. While it works, the editor shows a progress view and Save is disabled; its change then lands in the editor, and Undo this change reverts the latest one. You can switch the chat to Ask for an ordinary question and back to Edit.
Nothing the AI writes is stored until you press Save, and it still has to be sent for review and approved like any other edit. Leaving edit mode — Save, Cancel, opening another revision or switching tab — ends the conversation and closes the Edit chat; the next edit starts a fresh one. If you close the chat while still editing, the Nauticare AI button in the header reopens it in Edit mode. This needs Nauticare AI to be available to you, and a company administrator or company user account.
Seeing what changed
Each revision on the Versions tab of a built-in-editor document has a Compare dropdown that puts it side by side with another revision and highlights the differences — the quickest way for a reviewer to see what an edit actually did before approving it. The same view offers Restore this version for turning an older revision back into a new draft.
Following the history
The Audit tab records the whole life of the document — created, edited, moved to another category, archived and unarchived, each revision created, its content updated or file uploaded, submitted for review, approved or rejected, and each change of published revision — with who did it and when.