What you get when you buy a PIN

A guided tour of the app from login to download. Six screens, in the order you'd see them. No accounts, no menus, no learning curve — you upload a .docx, you get back a journal-formatted manuscript and a structured report.

1. Unlock the app with your PIN

Your PIN is the only thing that gates access. No account to create, no password to forget, no profile to fill in. PINs are delivered by email within minutes of purchase and remain valid for 365 days from your most recent top-up.

PIN unlock modal — Enter your access PIN, with Unlock button

The unlock screen. Don't have a PIN yet? Get one at paperready.app.

2. The workspace — one screen, one job

After unlocking you land here. The five-step instruction panel at the top tells you exactly what to do next; the Upload & Confirm box on the left is where you pick your .docx and the target journal. Everything else on the page reacts to what you do there. There is no menu to learn.

The green banner at the very top is your at-a-glance account status: how many of your three runs remain and the exact date your PIN expires (365 days from purchase or your most recent top-up). You'll see it every time you log in, so you never have to remember on your own.

The Base Citation Style dropdown is pre-set to the style your chosen journal uses (APA 7, Vancouver, Chicago author-date, or Elsevier-Harvard). You can override it if you have a reason to, but you don't have to know which journal uses which style — that mapping is built in.

Empty Format Manuscript tab — upload panel on the left, detected identifiers panel waiting on the right

The green banner at the top shows your current PIN status — how many runs are remaining and when the PIN expires.

3. Privacy review — before anything leaves your computer

A typical accounting manuscript carries a lot of identifying information: your name, your co-authors, your institution, the partner firm whose data you analyzed, the agency that funded the work, the colleagues you thanked in the acknowledgements. The Formatter doesn't need any of that to format your paper — the journal style is the same regardless of who wrote it. So before anything is sent to the AI service, the app removes the identifying pieces and replaces them with opaque tokens; the originals are swapped back into the output after the AI returns it. This matters more for some papers than others — manuscripts under double-blind review, work covered by data-use agreements with partner firms, or research still under embargo — but the same review step runs on every upload so you can decide what to keep and what to scrub.

As soon as you upload, the app scans your manuscript locally and lists every identifier it found: author names, email addresses, ORCID IDs, affiliations, firm names, and acknowledgement lines. Each one is shown with its location in the document and the placeholder token it will be replaced with before the manuscript is sent to the AI service.

Click any row to deselect it if you'd rather leave that identifier in place (for example, a publicly cited firm name that's central to your study). Anything still highlighted gets scrubbed before the API call and restored afterwards.

Detected Identifiers table — emails, ORCIDs, and author blocks highlighted, with replacement tokens

Author paragraphs are captured as whole units (name + affiliation + email together) and replaced with a single AUTHOR_xxxx token, then swapped back in the output. Nothing leaves your computer until you click Run Formatter.

4. The formatter runs — typically 5 to 10 minutes

A modal opens with a live status line and an elapsed-time counter. The app moves through reading the document, scrubbing identifiers, applying the journal's style guide, running deterministic audits (CrossRef DOI verification, numeric-consistency, spelling normalization), and assembling the report. Long manuscripts can run longer — that's normal.

Formatting manuscript modal — Starting status, The Formatter is reading your paper, Elapsed 1:49

You can leave the tab open and come back. Just don't close it — the output exists only in the session.

5. Four downloads, one click each

When the run finishes, the panel on the left turns into a download row. You get four files per run:

Reformatted .docx — your manuscript in the target journal's style, with the title page intact.
Anonymized .docx — the same reformatted manuscript with the title page stripped, ready for double-blind review.
Report (HTML) — the copy-editing report, readable in any browser.
Report (Word) — the same report as a Word document for marking up.

Download row — Reformatted .docx, Anonymized .docx, Report HTML, Report Word, plus an After download note

Download before you close the tab. Nothing is stored on the server — the files exist only for the current session. Closing the tab is how you delete your manuscript.

6. The copy-editing report — your scan-and-fix list

The report is the artifact most copy-editing services do poorly. Ours opens with an at-a-glance summary table — a one-screen readout of every pass that ran and what state each section is in (DONE, TO DO, or DONE-placeholder). You can see the bottom line in 30 seconds, then dig in.

Underneath the summary, the report splits into three parts: Part 1 lists everything already applied to your .docx, Part 2 lists everything still needing your input (submission blockers tagged), and Part 3 is informational context — style decisions, deterministic audits, the spelling-normalization summary.

Copy-editing report header with at-a-glance summary table showing DONE and TO DO statuses per section

Every item is tagged DONE or TO DO; TO DOs that would block submission (missing required sections, citations without references, etc.) are flagged BLOCKER. Address them in your source and re-run — your second and third runs are for verifying you've cleared everything before submitting.