🗎Files and documents

In three separate places, and the separation is intentional:

• Attachments — PDFs that are attached to campaigns and emails. Uploaded once, used many times.
• Candidate documents — CVs, references, profiles. Personal data and therefore handled more strictly.
• Generated documents — reports, contracts, optimised profiles. Created from data, rebuilt at the push of a button.

What this means in practice:

• A quote that goes to fifty recipients belongs in the attachments.
• A CV belongs to the candidate, not in the general store.
• A report is not filed but generated when it is needed.

Anyone who throws everything into one pot has a data protection problem and cannot find anything again.

For attachments to emails: PDF only. That is a deliberate restriction, not a gap:

• A PDF looks the same everywhere. A Word document shifts depending on the font and version.
• A PDF cannot be changed by accident. A quote that the recipient can edit is not a quote.
• Word files carry macros. Many mail servers filter them out — your attachment would not arrive at all.

For candidate documents, other formats are possible, because there you also accept whatever applicants send.

If you have a Word document: “Save as” → PDF. That takes ten seconds and is the better version for sending anyway.

For attachments to emails: 15 MB at most, and considerably less is better.

The reason does not lie with Aurora Hive Sales but with the receiving servers: many reject emails over 10 MB, some even over 5. So a large file lowers the delivery rate, and you do not always find out.

What to do if a file is too large:

• Make the PDF smaller. Almost every PDF program has a function for this; a file often shrinks by 80% without any visible difference. The cause is usually images in full resolution.
• Split it if it covers several topics.
• Link instead of attaching. A link to a page where the file is available is more reliable than a 12 MB attachment.

Rule of thumb: under 2 MB arrives practically everywhere.

So that the recipient can find them again — not you.

The file name sits in their downloads folder among a hundred others. “Quote.pdf” is worthless there.

What works:

• Your company name first: Nordwind-Quote-Bathroom-Renovation-2026-03.pdf
• Date in the format year-month, so that the sorting is right.
• No umlauts, no spaces, no special characters. Hyphens instead.
• No version numbers for the outside world. “Quote_final_v3_new.pdf” gives away more than you want.

Within Aurora Hive Sales, an attachment also gets a display name — that one is for you and can be descriptive.

Documents that Aurora Hive Sales builds from existing data: reports, contracts, optimised profiles, one-pagers.

The difference from uploaded files is important:

• They are regenerated at the push of a button. What you see reflects the current state of the data.
• They are not an archive. A report you sent in March is created in June with June’s figures.

What follows from this: keep what you have sent. A report that has been sent or a signed contract is a document with evidential value — it needs to be kept safe, not regenerated.

And check generated documents before sending. They carry your name, even if a machine built them.

Separately by type, and the periods differ greatly:

• Quotes, contracts, invoices: periods under commercial and tax law, usually six to ten years. This is an obligation to retain, not an option.
• Application documents: after the end of the process, usually six months (because of the deadline under the German General Equal Treatment Act, AGG), then delete — unless the person has agreed to longer storage.
• Candidate documents in an ongoing working relationship: for as long as the relationship lasts, plus whatever is legally required.
• Attachments to campaigns: no reason to keep them beyond their use.

The practical step: one date a year on which someone goes through and deletes what no longer serves a purpose. Without this date, it does not happen.

Four rules that together cover most of it:

1. Do not attach them to campaigns. An attachment to a campaign goes to all recipients. That sounds obvious and has happened all the same.
2. Candidate documents stay with the candidate, not in the general store.
3. Limit access. Anyone who maintains contacts does not need access to application documents.
4. Do not pass them on by unencrypted email if it can be avoided — especially with health or social data.

One more question that comes before every upload: does this file need to go into a system that several people can look into at all?

What you do not need, you do not upload. That is the best protection.

With one rule: there is exactly one valid version.

In Aurora Hive Sales, this means:

• Replace attachments instead of adding them alongside. A quote in three versions leads to the wrong one being sent.
• Archive the old one, do not delete it — in case someone asks what went out in March.
• Keep the display name the same if the file has the same role. Then you can see when selecting which one is meant.

What you should avoid: version numbers in file names that go to the outside world. The recipient does not need to know that it is version 4.

If a file has already been sent and changes: new file, new sending, a short note. Swapping it silently does not help anyone who already has the old one.

On the file itself — it shows which campaigns it is attached to.

That is the detail that counts before deleting: a file that is still attached to a running campaign must not disappear.

Check before you remove anything:

• Is a campaign running with it?
• Is it linked in a template?
• Was it sent recently? Then it should remain available for as long as recipients might ask about it.

If a file is no longer used anywhere and is older than a year, it is a candidate for the archive — not necessarily for the bin.

From within the program in which you created the document — “Save as” or “Export as PDF”, not print and scan.

What to watch out for:

• Text must remain text. A scanned PDF is an image: not searchable, not copyable, not readable aloud and three times the size.
• Bring images to a sensible resolution. 300 dpi for print; 150 is enough for the screen.
• Do not export comments and tracked changes. The classic: a quote with visible internal remarks.
• Check the metadata. Author, company and file path are stored in the PDF — sometimes the name of the customer for whom the template was originally built is still in there.

And: open it once before you send it. Twenty seconds.

The recipient gets a link, opens the document, draws their signature and confirms. The result is a PDF with the signature and a log.

What you should know:

• This is a simple electronic signature. It is sufficient for most business agreements.
• It is not sufficient where the law requires the written form — for example for terminating an employment relationship. There you need paper or a qualified signature.
• The log provides the evidential value. When, from which address, with which document. Keep it.

In practice: check the document in the preview before you send it — as the recipient will see it. A contract with a wrong amount is more embarrassing than any typo.

In this order — the first point almost always yields the most:

1. Old attachments that belong to completed campaigns and are no longer used anywhere.
2. Duplicate files. The same quote in three versions.
3. Documents for processes that are completed and whose retention period has expired.
4. Very large individual files — usually PDFs with uncompressed images. Make them smaller instead of deleting them.

What you should not touch: anything subject to a retention obligation, and anything attached to ongoing processes.

And the real reason for clearing out is not the space: it is the overview. Nobody uses a store with four hundred files any more.