Dokumentum: I just need a document

I need a document quickly. I know what happened and what I want to say. What I do not want is to work out where the heading goes, how to address the recipient, how much space to leave for a signature or why the last line has decided to move onto a second page.

That was the need behind Dokumentum: a free tool for everyday paperwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Somewhere to bring the facts and leave with a document I can review and use, without having to become good at making documents first.

A bill, a blank page and one wandering signature

Imagine this ordinary situation. It is Sunday evening. You open your internet bill and find a charge you do not recognise. You want to send a written complaint before you forget about it.

You already have the important parts: the bill, the disputed charge and the correction you want. Writing it down should be a small job.

Then you open a blank document.

Does your name go at the top left? Where does the company's address go? Do you need a subject line? Should the title be “Complaint” or “Request for correction”? You find an example online, but it belongs to someone else, mentions a different problem and comes with formatting that seems to resist every edit.

You replace the old details. Delete a paragraph. Add your own. The signature moves onto page two. You reduce the spacing. Now the whole thing looks as though it is trying to fit into a bus seat with its knees against the chair in front.

There is always AI. But the request quickly becomes: “Write a complaint, include my details and theirs, refer to this bill, leave room for a signature, make it formal but not dramatic, and please do not invent anything.” Then comes copying the answer into an editor and sorting out the page again.

At some point, you have spent more effort setting up the complaint than explaining the charge.

This is an illustrative scene, but the friction is the reason for the project. The person knows their situation. The document structure is the part getting in the way.

Bring the facts; the page already has a shape

In Dokumentum, that same task starts with the bill complaint form. You enter the relevant details, explain which charge you dispute and say what correction you are asking for. The document takes shape in the preview as you fill it in.

The heading, recipient, subject, body and signature space have an existing structure. You still need to check the facts and read the result. You can then download the PDF or print it.

The useful saving is all the small decisions you no longer have to make before you can say what happened. You do not have to borrow somebody else's story as a template, or explain an entire document layout to a chatbot.

That became a design rule for us: ask people for what only they can know, and give the recurring parts of the document a sensible starting point.

A request, a statement or a handover record brings a different set of facts. The same principle applies. The tool should help someone finish the task they came with, and the basic path should be free, without mandatory registration or payment per document.

Where AI helped us build it

There is a small irony here: we used AI to build a tool whose basic workflow does not require the user to talk to AI.

During development, AI helped shorten the distance between an idea and something we could inspect. We could describe a form, make a working version and then look at what it actually did. Missing fields, awkward wording and poor page breaks became concrete problems to fix.

A shared document model helped that work accumulate. Fields, required information, previews, local drafts and PDF output repeat across documents. Once those parts had a common foundation, the next document could reuse them.

The repository carried the context too: document definitions, architecture notes and verification commands. Each iteration could build on the existing project rather than start with another explanation of what we were making.

The speed mattered because it kept the idea moving alongside other work. A change could reach a working version while the reason for it was still fresh. I do not have a measured comparison for a claim such as “ten times faster”; I do have a project that became easier to build, examine and improve.

That also meant spending time on checks. The document audit loads the real definitions and renders previews with both empty and populated data. It catches structural errors. Visual inspection still matters for spacing, page breaks and the signature that should stay where it belongs.

The user should still be able to finish without a prompt

Dokumentum also offers optional AI writing help in selected text fields. It can help phrase a request or revise a paragraph. Using it sends the active text and the context needed for that request through the backend to an external AI provider.

But the bill complaint in our example can be prepared without it. The person can write a few plain sentences about what happened. The structure is already there.

The basic workflow runs in the browser, including the preview, local draft and PDF output. Cloud saving is a separate, explicit choice. Those decisions follow the same need: making a small document should not first turn into another setup task.

The structure also has limits. A neatly formatted PDF does not prove that a claim is correct or that a receiving institution will accept it. The document guides provide sources and next steps, and the legal notice explains the scope of the general templates. Checking the facts and the requirements of the particular procedure remains part of using the document.

Back to Sunday evening

What I want from Dokumentum is a less eventful ending to that little story.

You notice the charge. You find the right form. You enter the facts, read the complaint and save the PDF. The signature has its place. You can send the document through the appropriate channel and get on with your evening.

Whether the tool delivers that experience is the useful test now. If someone gets stuck on a field, cannot find the document they need or still has to fight the output, that gives us a specific thing to improve.

I wrote earlier about how AI has changed the way I work. Dokumentum gave that change a practical purpose: use the shorter development loop to remove a bit of everyday friction for someone else.

The public tools are at dokumentum.org. The next time you need a small document, that is the situation I would like you to try them in.