The numbers that run your organisation live in a workbook someone emails around; the policies your staff follow live in a document nine revisions deep. Bureau Insights leaves those files exactly as they are, an xlsx or a docx anyone can open, and moves the parts that were never safe in a file (the questions, the reporting, the dashboards, the change history, the sign-off) into Foldr. Bureau Insights is in beta.
Open a workbook and ask Grace which lane earned the most this quarter, or where a figure comes from. She totals, counts and groups across the sheet on the server (up to a quarter of a million rows) and shows her working, formulas included. She answers from the values last saved in the file rather than recalculating it, and very large or password-protected files aren’t read.
Finance gets answers without pivot tables, and nobody has to remember which of the four tabs the totals are on.
Glasgow earned the most in Q1.
A scheduled workflow pulls the data, fills your template (charts, formulas and formatting intact) and drops the finished workbook in the right folder, on time, every time. The logic lives in the workflow rather than in cell G47, so next quarter’s report is built the same way this quarter’s was, and the person who used to spend Friday afternoon assembling it now spends Friday afternoon reading it.
Ask Grace for a dashboard and she writes the headline and the layout, but every figure comes from a query she can’t type over. Each number carries where it came from, how many rows sit behind it, and a seal that breaks if anyone changes it. Readers drill down to the rows (with their own access, not yours), the dashboard refreshes itself every hour, and it can email the right people when a figure crosses a line.
Spreadsheets (streamed, so millions of rows are fine), form responses, a folder’s Captur fields, saved searches and a lookup join between them. Data from other systems comes in through an approved script rather than a one-click connector, for now.
Full-screen dashboards with targets and pacing, year-on-year comparisons and calculated measures, plus PDF, Word and OpenDocument exports drawn from the seal. A public link lands on the dashboard with the seal checked, and a report can be embedded on sites you list.
There are no slicers or click-to-filter yet, no forecasts, no live streaming (hourly is as fresh as it gets) and no row-level security inside a single sheet. Reports and dashboards are in beta, and the report editor itself isn’t built yet: Grace and your scripts make them today. They come with Business and Enterprise on Foldr Cloud.
Every save on a governed area is recorded against the version it produced. The record lives in Foldr, not in the file, so it covers every way a file gets saved (the web editor, a desktop app, an automation) and it survives renames, moves, and even deletion.
Which cells changed and from what to what, formula edits included. A figure that went from 30 to 14 is recorded as exactly that, whoever changed it and whichever app they used.
Which paragraphs changed, shown against the nearest section heading, with meaning-changing formatting (a struck-through price, a newly bolded clause) called out by name, and any tracked changes shown with their author.
Tracked changes in Word is the author keeping a diary, and whoever holds the file can rewrite it. This is the platform keeping the record.
Switch on publishing approval for an area and saved changes go to named approvers before they’re published. Authors keep working on the latest version; everyone else, including anyone on a shared link, keeps seeing the last approved version until sign-off. The person who made a change never approves their own, and if the file is saved again mid-review the approvers are always judging the newest draft. Decline a change and the published version simply stays put. Authors ask for approval from inside the editor, and approvers see the change in the file itself. (The in-browser editors are still in beta; the Bureau page says what that means.)
One honest limit: recording and approval need storage that keeps a version for every save, and Foldr Storage does, out of the box. An SMB file server only offers scheduled snapshots (Windows Previous Versions), so it can’t be governed this way, and the setting tells you so.
Version control, change evidence, separation of duties, controlled distribution.
The same workbooks and documents, in the same folders, with nothing to migrate and no new tool to learn.
Asking Grace about a spreadsheet and building reports come with Business and Enterprise on Foldr Cloud (they use Grace and MaSH), while approval before publishing is part of Reviews and approvals, which is Enterprise. On your own appliance the same pieces are the MaSH and Reviews licences, plus Grace switched on in Settings. It works with any storage that keeps a version for every save. If your organisation runs on a handful of spreadsheets that everyone’s slightly afraid of, we built this for you.
Try it free for 30 days, no credit card. Or get in touch about self-hosting.
