The Question We Kept Hearing
"Which version of the template was current when this contract was signed?"
For most document creation tools, the honest answer is some variant of "the one in the file you have." If the template has been edited since, the live version is different from the version that produced the PDF. Word doesn't track this. Google Docs has version history but only on the live document, not on templates used to generate hundreds of variants. Canva keeps the last 30 days in a thin sidebar.
For regulated industries, "the one in the file you have" is not enough. Annual reports, investor decks, signed contracts, compliance disclosures: someone will eventually ask which template language was in effect on a specific date. If you can't answer with a snapshot and a timestamp, you don't have an audit trail. You have a guess.
So we built version history. It ships on the Business plan and covers both documents and templates.
How It Works
The model is deliberately simple. Three rules:
- Every save is a snapshot. Not every keystroke, not every autosave: every time the user clicks Save, that state is preserved in an audit row tied to the document or template.
- Diffs are computed at the block level. When you compare two versions, you see what changed paragraph by paragraph, table by table, image by image, with edits highlighted inline.
- Restore is itself a snapshot. If you restore an earlier version, that restore writes a new audit row. So the restore is undoable, and the history reads as a continuous timeline rather than a destructive overwrite.
Open any document or template, click the version history icon, and the timeline appears. Pick two versions, click Compare, and the diff renders side by side. Click Restore on any older version and that state becomes current.
What the Diff Actually Shows
The diff is not just "the text is different now." It surfaces five categories of change:
- Added blocks, new content that wasn't in the older version.
- Removed blocks, content present in the older version but not the newer.
- Modified blocks, same logical block, different content. Word level highlighting in green for additions, red strikethrough for deletions.
- Moved blocks, the same content at a different position in the document. The editor regenerates block IDs on certain operations, so we detect moves by matching content fingerprints across the unmatched IDs in both versions. Without this, a move would surface as a delete plus add and you'd have to guess.
- Settings changes, page size, margins, headers, footers, print settings. These often carry legal weight (a contract template where the margins changed between approvals is, arguably, a different document) and most version control tools miss them entirely.
Each change also carries attribution. The diff header shows who saved each version and when, pulled from the user's display name with a fallback to their email. For compliance teams the typical question is "who approved this version" rather than "who typed this specific paragraph", and approval happens at the save boundary, not the keystroke boundary. The attribution model matches how the question actually gets asked.
Snapshots Across All Tiers, UI Gated to Business
A pricing decision worth being explicit about: snapshots are written for every account on every tier. The viewing and restoring UI is gated to the Business plan, but the underlying data is captured from day one.
This matters for a specific reason. Customers who start on Free or Pro, then upgrade to Business six months later, get their full history back from the moment they joined. Not "your history starts now." Not "you lose what came before." A returning user who upgraded specifically because they need the audit trail for a regulated filing won't discover that their history is incomplete.
Most SaaS products gate the data behind the paywall, not just the interface. We chose the opposite because the friction at upgrade time is what kills these conversions. If the customer has to think "do I trust that I can rebuild what I need from scratch," they will postpone the upgrade. If they can upgrade and have it just work, they will.
The Compliance Story
This is the use case the feature was designed around.
Regulated industries, finance, healthcare, legal, pharma, have document retention rules that require knowing the state of a template on a specific date. EU GDPR data retention rules, US SOX (7 years for financial documents), HIPAA (6 years), Swedish bokföringslagen (7 years for accounting records). Each requires more than just the final PDF. They require the ability to demonstrate which template produced the PDF, and how the template has changed over time.
Version history gives compliance teams three things they previously had to bolt on with screenshot folders and email threads:
- A timeline of every meaningful change to the template.
- Attribution at the save boundary, with display name and timestamp.
- A reversible state so a compliance officer can confidently restore an earlier version for review without worrying about destroying current work.
For legal teams reviewing contract templates, the same applies. "What did this clause say in the version that was sent on 23 April" is now a two click answer.
The Retention Policy
A common follow up question: how long are versions retained?
For the lifetime of your active Business plan subscription. We've codified this in our Terms of Service so it's contractually binding, not just a footnote. We reserve the right to introduce reasonable storage caps with prior notice if an account's snapshot volume would meaningfully impact service operation, but we won't silently prune your history. The defensive backstop is in the terms; the daily reality is that you keep what you save.
On termination, version history is retained alongside your other data under the standard termination policy.
What's Not in This Version
A few features compliance customers sometimes ask for and which are not yet shipped:
- Named version tags. "v1 approved by legal" or "Annual report 2026, final filed" as a label on a specific version. On the roadmap.
- Per role restore permissions. Restrict who can actually click Restore. On the roadmap.
- Branching. Working on two parallel versions and merging later. Probably not, branching is a designer iteration feature and we don't see strong demand from the compliance segment.
- Per block authorship. Knowing who wrote a specific paragraph rather than who saved the version. Compliance teams don't actually need this, the save author attribution covers the regulatory question, and it would require CRDT style tracking that adds substantial complexity for marginal value.
The version history available today is complete enough for the use cases above. The roadmap items are independent improvements rather than missing pieces.
When to Use It
If you produce documents externally (annual reports, contracts, compliance disclosures) and someone could legitimately ask "what did this say on X date," you need version history. The free business report template and project proposal template are good places to see how the feature behaves on a real document, save a few versions, edit between them, compare and restore.
If you're a designer iterating on templates and want to compare what you tried last week against today, version history covers that too. Same mechanism, same UI; the use case is just different.
Try It
Version history is on the Business plan at $30 per month per organization (team members included on the same plan). Start with the free tier to build a template, then upgrade when you're ready for the audit trail.
For the compliance specific FAQ, see the version history Q&A in our FAQ. For how the broader Quaterio editor compares to Word, InDesign and Canva for document work, the comparison pages cover the trade offs.
