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Your first transmittal in 10 minutes

For: engineers, designers, project managers

Goal: upload a set of documents, get them approved, and issue them to a recipient — end to end.

This walkthrough uses a realistic scenario: you're issuing two revised structural drawings to the project architect.

Prerequisites

Step 1 — Create a draft transmittal

  1. Open your project and go to Transmittals.
  2. Select New transmittal and give it a name (e.g. Structural drawings — for construction).

A draft transmittal is your working area: you can add and remove documents, choose recipients, and collect approvals. Nothing is sent until you issue it.

Draft transmittal with document list A draft transmittal — documents, recipients, and approvals in one place.

Step 2 — Add your documents

  1. On the draft transmittal, select Add documents and drop in your PDF files.
  2. Watch the magic: Fluvial reads each drawing's title block and pre-fills the document number, name, and revision. This usually takes a few seconds per file.
  3. Review each pre-filled row and confirm it. If a field is blank, Fluvial wasn't confident enough to guess — type it in yourself.

Confirming extracted details Extracted details are pre-filled for you to confirm — never applied blind.

If a document number already exists in the project register, your upload is added as a new version of that document automatically — that's how revisions work. See Automatic metadata extraction for the details.

Step 3 — Set up a contact group

Transmittals are addressed to contact groups, not to individual email addresses typed in at issue time — so the architect needs to exist as a contact in a group before you can send to them. If your project already has a suitable group, skip to Step 4.

  1. In the left-hand menu of your project, select Contact Groups, then + New group.
  2. Name it after the distribution list rather than the person — e.g. Architect Team. Select Create.
  3. Open the new group and add the architect: fill in the row at the top (email is required; first name, last name and company are optional) and select Add contact. Repeat for anyone else on the list.

Adding a whole distribution list at once

Click Bulk add contacts, copy the recipients directly out of an existing email, and paste them into the presented dialog input — e.g. Jane Doe<jdoe@consulting.com>; John Smith<john.smith@example.com>. Fluvial splits out the names and addresses, skipping duplicates and anything that isn't a valid address.

Groups belong to the project, so they're reusable across every transmittal in it. See Contacts and contact groups.

Step 4 — Choose recipients

  1. Back on the draft transmittal, in the recipients section, choose your group under Issue to.
  2. If you're distributing manually instead, select No distribution. A share link will be provided once the transmittal has been issued.

Step 5 — Get approvals

If your account requires approvals (many do), the transmittal shows which roles — drafter, designer, manager — still need to sign off. Anyone holding that approval role can open the transmittal and approve it.

Approvals protect the document set

If anyone adds, removes, or replaces a document after sign-off, all approvals reset — an approval always refers to exactly the documents that will be issued.

Step 6 — Issue

  1. Select Issue. If the button is inactive, hover over it — Fluvial lists exactly what's blocking (e.g. "Awaiting manager approval").
  2. Confirm. Fluvial now:
    • locks the transmittal permanently (it can never be edited again),
    • generates a transmittal PDF with your company logo,
    • emails each recipient their own secure portal link with the transmittal PDF attached,
    • starts recording the access history.

Result

The architect receives an email, clicks their link, and downloads the drawings from the portal — no account or password needed on their side. You can see every download in the transmittal's access history.

Issued transmittal An issued transmittal — a permanent, unchangeable record of what was sent.