Building a Data Room in Under 5 Minutes

A step-by-step walkthrough of creating your first data room in ShareAndGo — from empty dashboard to first invited viewer — in under five minutes. This is what the admin flow actually looks like.

Minute 1: create the room

From the dashboard, click "Create Data Room." You'll see three fields: name, description, and password (for legacy admin password access — most users don't need this).

Give it a meaningful name. "Q1 2026 Tax Audit - ABC Pty Ltd" is better than "Audit." Put a one-line description if you want ("Quarterly tax audit documents for ABC Pty Ltd, due 30 April"). Click Create.

The room is created and you land on the empty data room page.

Minute 2: upload documents

Drag and drop your files onto the data room. PDFs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images — all supported. You can drag individual files or entire folders at once. The upload starts immediately; OCR and AI categorisation run in the background.

For a typical engagement with 20-50 files, the upload takes a minute or two. For a single test file, it's a few seconds.

Minute 3: organise into folders

As the files upload, click "New Folder" to create a folder structure. Standard structure for a tax audit might be: Financial Statements, Prior Year Returns, Supporting Documents, Correspondence, and Notes. Drag and drop files into the relevant folders.

Don't over-organise. A flat structure with 20 well-named files is better than a deeply nested structure. You can always reorganise later.

Minute 4: configure the room

Open the room settings (gear icon in the top right). Set: expiry date (when should access end? typically 30 days after the engagement), watermarking (on, with viewer email and timestamp), and NDA requirement (if applicable).

If you're adding a custom logo for brand consistency, upload it here. It appears in the header for all viewers.

Minute 5: invite a viewer

Click "Users" in the sidebar, then "Invite User." Enter the email address of the person you want to give access to. Choose their permission level (Viewer is the default and covers most cases). Optionally add a custom message.

Click Send. The recipient gets an email with a link. When they click it, they'll be asked to verify their email with a six-digit code (sent to the same address). Once verified, they see the data room, scoped to only the documents they have access to.

What happens next

Every action in the data room is logged automatically. When the recipient views a document, you'll see it in the audit trail. When they download, you'll see that. When they close the session, the session ends. If you need to revoke access, you can do it instantly from the Users tab.

That's the full flow. Five minutes from empty to shared, with audit trails, watermarking, and controlled access — all of it in place without any manual configuration.