Why not just paste the documents into a chatbot?
Honest answer first: for reading one document once, a chatbot is faster and free, and you should use one. The portal earns its place when deals keep coming and the reads need to be complete, consistent, comparable, and defensible, which is exactly where a chat falls apart.
How much can it read
One conversation's worth. Long documents get silently truncated, and a full deal package rarely fits.
Every document is extracted separately under an explicit budget, models and spreadsheets included, and anything truncated is marked so the analysis treats it as partial instead of pretending it read everything.
Same answer twice
Ask twice, get two different reads. There is no record of which one to trust.
Extraction is cached per document, the score is pure arithmetic over the extracted record, and the rating recomputes identically every time. Re-reads happen only when you ask for one.
Comparable across deals
Every conversation starts from zero. Deal 40 is not comparable to deal 1, because nothing was held constant.
Every deal answers the same standardized question set and is scored by the same published methodology, category-relative, against a corpus of real deals.
What it did not see
Silence. A chatbot answers from whatever it got and does not volunteer what is missing.
Coverage sits inside the score: unanswered Standard questions are listed, priced, and turned into the exact question list to send the sponsor.
Defending the number
"The AI said 48" does not survive committee.
Every point traces to a ledger line, every fact to a document and page, and the methodology is public and versioned. The score is an argument, not an oracle.
Getting gaps filled
You copy questions into an email and paste answers back in, and the analysis does not update.
One link puts the open questions in front of the sponsor; their written answers are reviewed, published, and re-scored into every record of the deal, with the asker notified.
Where the documents end up
Depends on the tool, the plan, and settings nobody reads. Often retained, sometimes trained on.
Private storage, authenticated reads, per-account isolation, no training on your data, deletion that deletes. The details are on the security page.
Does it improve
A chat learns nothing between deals.
Every scored deal deepens the category benchmarks, and the Expert Lens folds practitioner judgment into every subsequent analysis.