Most Docutrain problems come in a handful of shapes, and most of them have a cause the message on screen is already telling you about.

That is the general rule, and it is worth internalizing before the specifics: the messages here are written to name the actual cause rather than to apologize. Read the one you got before working through the list.

Cannot sign in

"Invalid email or password." Check the address you registered with, and use the eye icon to see what you typed. If that fails, skip passwords entirely: the Email code tab signs you in with a six-digit code sent to your inbox. It is usually faster than resetting a password.

"Please check your email to confirm your account." Your address is not verified. Find the email, open it, and press Verify Email Address on the page it opens.

That last step is deliberate rather than clumsy. Verification never happens just from following the link, because corporate email scanners follow links in incoming mail and would otherwise consume your verification before you ever opened the message. If the link has expired, sign up again with the same address for a fresh one.

"Your account is pending approval." Your account exists and an administrator has not approved it yet. You will be emailed when they do. If it drags on, contact that group's administrator directly, because join requests are not emailed to them and there is a good chance nobody has noticed.

Cannot open a document

Sent to the Start page with a message. This is the catch-all, and the message says which of three things happened: the document does not exist at that address, you do not have permission, or the owner has taken it offline. Only the first two are yours to fix.

"Incorrect passcode." Passcodes are set by the owner and can be changed, and changing one locks out everybody who knew the old one. If careful re-entry still fails, the passcode has probably been rotated. Ask whoever shared it.

"Access Token Required." There is nothing to type on this screen, by design. The document opens only through a share link carrying a token, so you need the exact link rather than a password. If yours reports an invalid or expired token, ask for a fresh one. See access levels explained.

Uploads and processing

The file is rejected. Only PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Markdown and the supported audio formats are accepted. Re-export from whatever produced it.

It exceeds the maximum size. Split the document, train on the first part, then add each remaining part through Retrain with Add to existing data. Very long PDFs hit a page limit the same way, and a genuinely large document sometimes needs three or more parts. See retraining and history.

Stuck in processing. First check whether it has actually stalled. The card shows the stage a run has reached even while the badge still reads Queued, and some stages legitimately take a while: reading a scanned PDF, or the extra pass on a document full of diagrams.

If there is genuinely no progress for over five minutes, the badge changes to Stuck and offers Force Retry. You can also wait, since Docutrain sweeps for interrupted runs every fifteen minutes and either resumes them or releases them.

If it sticks again, check three things about the file itself: whether it is password-protected, whether it is very large or scanned, and whether it opens correctly in its own application. A corrupted file cannot be processed no matter how many times you retry.

Processing finished but the assistant knows nothing. The file almost certainly has no extractable text, which usually means a scanned PDF that is only pictures of words. The quick test: try to select text in the original. If you cannot, neither can Docutrain, and you need a version with a real text layer.

Questions and answers

"Not in this document." This is the design working rather than a failure. The assistant answers only from its training material and says so plainly instead of guessing.

If you think the answer should be in there, rephrase using words that appear in the document, check the keyword cloud to see what it actually covers, and confirm processing finished. Inside a collection, the reply also offers to search the other documents. On a document you manage, raising the chunk limit increases retrieval depth.

The answer stopped mid-sentence. A network interruption can cut a streaming answer. Re-send.

An outage at the AI service is no longer a reason to retry, though: another takes over automatically, and the reply may arrive all at once rather than word by word. That is the hand-over, and the answer itself is unaffected. Similarly, when the assistant says it is still thinking, a first attempt did not find a good answer and it is trying a second way.

Told to slow down, or that the daily limit is reached. Two different things. A rate-limit message tells you how many seconds to wait. An amber banner saying the assistant has reached its daily question limit is the publishing organization's allowance, shared across all their readers, and it returns on a rolling 24-hour window.

Missing citations, or answers in an unexpected language. Both are usually settings rather than faults. Citations are the owner's to switch on or off, and very general questions can produce answers with no specific reference. Many documents instruct the assistant to answer in the language of their content, so a French document gives French answers.

The Quiz button is missing. Two things have to be true: a question bank has been generated, and the quiz toggle is on. Generating requires Pro or above. Downloads and galleries behave the same way, and a gallery needs actual content before its button appears, which is why a tool you enabled can still be invisible.

Embeds and integrations

An embedded widget shows a message instead of chat. Open the document directly in a browser first. If the direct link shows a message, the embed shows the same state, and the fix belongs to the document rather than the embed.

An embedded widget shows nothing at all. This one confuses people, so it is worth stating outright. An embed that is still a Draft, switched off, or deleted renders empty space rather than an error. There is no broken-widget icon to notice. If the space where your chat should be is simply blank, check its status in the Embeds tab and publish or reactivate it. See embedding on your website.

The Telegram bot does not respond. Open the document's chat in a browser and use the Telegram tool to get the correct bot link. An old or wrong link is by far the most common cause. If the tool is not there, Telegram is not enabled on that document.

Plan messages

"Document Limit Reached" means what it says: delete something or upgrade.

Documents "archived by plan limit" are paused rather than deleted. That happens when your limit drops below your document count, and upgrading restores them automatically. Nothing was lost, whatever the wording feels like in the moment.

A feature not on your plan is always named in the message, along with the tier that includes it. And downgrading is blocked while you hold more documents than the target plan allows, with a picker offering to archive the excess. See plans and limits.

When none of it helps

The Contact link in the top navigation opens a form that pre-fills your details when you are signed in. Owner admins have Support under Account for anything touching an account, documents, or billing.

Whichever route you take, three things make the difference between a fast answer and a week of correspondence: the document's name or address, what you were doing, and the exact message you saw. If it is an answer-quality problem, add ?debug=true to the chat address and copy the prompt panel, which is covered in conversations and moderation.