This manual teaches DOK Genius by having you build something real: the document setup of a small insurer, from an empty account to a working one. Every chapter has you do a thing, then explains every field you met while doing it.
You do not need the insurance part. Substitute your own work — a law firm's case files, a bank's onboarding, a hospital's admissions — and every step still applies. Insurance is used because it has all the awkward bits: documents that expire, decisions that need more than one signature, and regulators who ask a year later what you had on file at the time.
What you need before chapter 2
- An account. A free one is enough for everything in this manual.
- About an hour for the whole sequence, or fifteen minutes for the first three chapters.
- No documents yet. You will not upload anything real until chapter 4, and you can use any PDF.
The three words
Almost every question a new user asks turns out to be about the difference between these three. Learn them now and the rest of the product reads as obvious.
| Word | What it is | An example |
|---|---|---|
| Area | A folder for grouping. Nothing more. | Claims |
| Process | A template: what a case of this kind must contain. | Motor claim |
| Dossier | One actual case, made from a process. | Claim 2026-0184, Mr Silva's bumper |
They nest, and the nesting is one-way:
Area Claims
└ Process Motor claim
└ Dossier Claim 2026-0184
└ Dossier Claim 2026-0185
The Area does almost nothing, on purpose. It has no documents, no deadlines, no rules. It exists so that an insurer with forty processes can find them by department instead of scrolling one list. If you find yourself wanting an Area to enforce something, what you want is a Process.
The Process is where all the thinking goes. It is the longest chapter of this manual for that reason. Everything a case must hold, everyone who must sign it, and every rule that decides when it is finished, is declared once on the process and then applies to every case made from it.
The Dossier is the part your colleagues actually use. They rarely create a process; they open dossiers all day.
The one idea that makes DOK Genius different
Here is the sentence worth carrying through the whole manual:
A folder holds what you put in it. A dossier knows what is missing from it.
When you create a dossier, the documents the process expects are already inside it, listed, each marked as missing. Nobody has to remember what a motor claim needs. The empty dossier is the checklist.
That is why the product can refuse to let an incomplete case move forward, and why it can answer "what are we waiting for?" without anybody assembling a report.
What you are going to build
By the end of chapter 8 your account will contain:
- Six areas — Claims, Underwriting, Policy administration, Broker management, Compliance, Procurement.
- Nine processes, each with its own list of expected documents.
- One worked dossier, taken from creation to a decision.
- An approval chain that collects signatures in the right order.
- A Genius assistant answering questions about what you filed, with citations.
Signing in
Go to the address your administrator gave you, or to app.dokgenius.com for a free account. The sign in screen asks three things, and the first one surprises people:
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Organisation | Your tenant identifier — a short name like acme-corp, not a company's full legal name. If you signed up yourself, it is the one you chose. |
| Your own. | |
| Password | Your own. |
The organisation field exists because DOK Genius keeps each customer's data in a completely separate space. Two companies can both have a process called "Motor claim" and neither will ever see the other's.
If sign in fails and the password is right, check the organisation field first. It is the field people get wrong, because no other product asks for it.
How to read the rest
Chapters are in order and each assumes the one before it. If you only have fifteen minutes, do 2, 3 and 4 — Areas, Processes, Dossiers. That is the spine of the product; everything after it is refinement.