For Consultants

Master the client's documents - with every claim sourced.

Sidenote is a browser extension (Chrome and Firefox) that reads client documents wherever they live: Notion, SharePoint, Google Docs, Confluence, Slack canvases, PDFs and the data room. Group them into a collection per engagement, ask across the set, and every answer cites the exact passage in the client's own material.

Notion, SharePoint, Google Docs, Confluence & PDFs · Read-only

notion.so · client-workspace · discovery-notesSidenote
Discovery notes - finance workstream

Month-end close is still a 14-step manual process spread across three spreadsheets, owned by two people. The CFO's stated priority is cutting close from nine days to five by the end of Q3, ahead of any tooling change.

Sidenote · What does the client want first?

Close time cut from nine days to five by end of Q3 2 - the current close is a 14-step manual process across three spreadsheets 1.

The problem

Week one is an archaeology dig through someone else's tools.

Every engagement starts the same way: a Notion workspace you've never seen, a SharePoint full of decks, a data room of PDFs, and a clock that started billing on Monday. You're paid for judgement, not for scrolling - and a deliverable can't say “the AI told me”. Every claim in it needs a source the client recognizes.

Sidenote reads the client's documents where they live and pins every answer to the passage it came from - so the insight arrives with its evidence attached.

How it works

How Sidenote works on an engagement.

STEP 01

Open the client's docs where they live.

Read-only connections for Notion, SharePoint, Google Docs and Confluence - plus any PDF, web page or upload. No software on the client's side, nothing written back.

STEP 02

Build a collection per engagement.

Bundle the SOW, interview notes and data-room PDFs, then ask one question across all of them. Each citation names the document it came from.

STEP 03

Circulate summaries that cite themselves.

Turn a cited summary into a share link your team or client can open with no account - snapshot-frozen, revocable, every claim linked to its source.

See how collections and share links work in detail, or browse every connected source on the solutions hub.

Use cases

From kickoff to close, with sources attached.

  • “What exactly is in scope per the SOW?”

    Deliverables, exclusions and assumptions quoted from the statement of work itself - so scope conversations start from the words on the page.

  • “What did the stakeholder interviews actually say?”

    Ask across the interview notes in a collection and get themes with citations - each finding traceable to who said it, where.

  • “Find the number the client quoted.”

    The budget figure, the headcount, the churn rate - retrieved with the passage it came from, not remembered approximately.

  • “What systems does the client run today?”

    A current-state inventory assembled from the IT docs you've ingested, every entry cited back to its source document.

  • “Brief me before the workshop.”

    A one-page grounded summary of the pre-read pack, with citations, built in the minutes between calls rather than the night before.

  • “Onboard the new analyst to this engagement.”

    Share cited summaries of the key documents so a new team member reads the map first and the territory second.

Verified citations

Traceability the client can click.

A finding is only as strong as its source. Sidenote verifies every quoted passage server-side against the document before you ever see it - a citation either matches the client's text verbatim or it's dropped. When a stakeholder asks “where does that come from?”, the answer is one click, not a scramble.

That's the difference between an AI summary you have to re-verify line by line and a working document you can put in front of a client.

Client material, handled carefully.

Read-only connections, per-document ingestion (nothing is crawled), UK (eu-west-2) storage behind row-level security, tokens encrypted at rest, and no model training on user content. Disconnecting a source deletes its token immediately - useful when an engagement ends.

FAQ

Common questions from consultants.

Confluence, Notion, SharePoint & OneDrive, and Google Docs via read-only connections, plus anything in your browser: PDFs (scanned ones too, via OCR), web pages, Word documents, PowerPoint uploads and Slack canvases. One extension (Chrome and Firefox) covers the lot - no per-platform AI license.
Usually not: you connect accounts you can already sign into, and every connection is read-only. The one caveat is SharePoint & OneDrive, where organizations that restrict third-party app consent may need a one-time admin approval before you can connect. Nothing is ever installed on the client's side.
Access is read-only and per-document: Sidenote only reads a page or file when you open or ingest it, and never crawls an account. Content is stored in a UK (eu-west-2) region behind row-level security, tokens are encrypted at rest, and no user content is used to train models. Disconnecting a source deletes its token immediately.
One collection per engagement works well: the SOW, the interview notes, the data-room PDFs, the client wiki pages - bundled so one question spans all of them, with each citation naming its source document. Collections are a paid-plan feature: the trial allows 3 documents per collection, Pro 5, Pro+ 10, Pro Max 25.
Yes. Any summary or cited answer can become a public share link: snapshot-frozen, revocable, and openable in a normal browser tab with no account. Anyone with the link can view it, so share deliberately - and revoke from the dashboard when the engagement closes.
There's a free tier forever and an opt-in 7-day Pro trial (one click, email only, no card). Individual plans run £10 to £100 per month; the Team plan is £18 per seat per month with centralized billing.
Try it on your current engagement

Know the documents. Show your sources.

Add Sidenote to your browser, open the client's docs, and ask across them. Free tier forever, opt-in 7-day Pro trial, no card required.

Team plan £18/seat/month · Read-only client connections