Document Automation Software for Business Users

What is document automation

If there is a choice to use a tool that auto-generates invoices, will you ever fill an invoice template manually? The answer is obvious. Manual filling of the templates is expensive, slow, and error-prone. Moreover, it’s one of the most boring jobs to do.

Document automation software reduces the risks associated with human errors, and time spent on quality checks. Hence you see a lot of organizations adopting document automation softwares. They help businesses to improve

1. Customer communications
2. Business efficiencies and employee productivity
3. Reduce cycle times

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The following are the three modes of document automation.

1. Interactive: In this, users fill the form (questionnaire) generated from the template to create a document. It's useful for creating onboarding documents, product guides, support manuals, etc.
2. Batch/Bulk: As the name implies, the system creates hundreds, thousands, or even millions of personalized and distinct documents. It automates the creation of documents by populating structured data into templates. Data could be residing in enterprise databases, applications, or data files such as XML/JSON/ Excel. It's useful for the creation of invoices, letters, etc. The modern systems not just create documents, they also distribute them to the recipients.
3. On-Demand: Based on a user action the document generation happens on the fly. For example, on inquiry submission, you can send out a proposal. You can even create complex document-based workflows.

Each organization's document automation needs are unique. They range from the creation of region-specific multi-lingual complex documents running into hundreds of pages to simple letters. It also depends on the industry.

1. Insurance - insurance quotes, proposals, policy documents
2. Telecom - Customer Communications, Product Guides
3. Financial institutions - customer on-boarding and loan documents

Basic document automation software features

Despite the many benefits, document automation software bring about, the vast majority of organizations haven’t adopted them. The problem is two-fold, low awareness and limitations of many of these tools.

Some of these document automation systems are in the market for the last 20-30 years. But they restrict themselves to few verticals and customer segments. This limits their utility as an enterprise solution. Let’s examine the basic features a good document automation system should have.

1. For an organization with a growing library of document templates and multiple offices, the system must support multi-lingual template documents and conditions.
2. The system must have a well-defined API for integrating into other systems and databases. These integrations bring about digital transformations.
3. It should support all three modes of document automation – interactive, bulk, and on-demand. The older systems support only interactive automation and at that time they were created for legal professionals. Most of the systems in the market address only one or two of these.
4. The system should support the document creation needs of the entire organization, not just legal or not just sales. The piecemeal approach of having multiple document automation systems drains organization resources. Each of these systems would have a different template notation and standardization becomes an issue leading to a lot of confusion.
5. Last but not the least, the system must support the generation of various document formats including PPTX, PDF, Word, HTML, Excel, Images, and TXT.

Next-gen document automation software

EDocGen is perfect for an organization with a large number of complex templates. It addresses every document type possible including invoices, contracts, proposals, legal documents, etc.

It’s a cloud document automation platform for generating documents from applications, databases, and structured data. What separates it from the rest is its business user-friendliness. Business users can use existing document templates for document generation. They can generate documents without IT intervention, with a minimal learning curve.

It supports on-demand, bulk, and interactive document automation.

1. For interactive, the system auto-generates fillable forms from existing templates. Business users can fill these forms themselves or share the form URL with customers and vendors. Submission of forms creates documents. For large forms, users can save partially filled forms as drafts before final submission.
2. Populate XML, JSON, Excel data for batch document generation. You can populate Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and MongoDB data directly for creating documents in bulk.
3. It is an API -first product. You can integrate it with every possible application in the organization including CRM, ERP, HRMS, etc. for on-demand document generation.
4. Supports almost all special cases including the
   1. The population of multiple templates in one go
   2. Sequential population
   3. 4-Level data population

The tool supports the dynamic population of text, tables, images, paragraphs, and reusable content blocks.

1. Text – Populate dynamic text fields in the document template
2. Table – Populate tables in document template by adding rows dynamically
3. Image – Populate images into the document template at runtime
4. Content Block – Reusable content blocks can be inserted into the document template at runtime
5. Hyperlinks - Populate clickable hyperlinks
6. Conditional Statements – IF/ELSE for customizing document creation as per business requirements
7. Calculations – Arithmetic operators +, -, *, / for performing calculations on dynamic data

Every organization has unique document requirements. EDocGen Document automation system is flexible to address these requirements.

Template and Digital Assets Governance

The system offers a central repository for storing the organization's business templates, digital assets. With a fine-grained authorization mechanism, template rights management is built into the system.

Business users can edit their templates in native editors. For example, Microsoft Word templates can be modified in Word itself. No separate designer or add-on is required.

After editing the templates, admins/managers can upload the templates into the system. Thus, the online central repository holds all approved templates. This ensures employees are using only the latest templates and other digital assets. This is especially useful for remote employees ensuring brand and process consistency.

Document Distribution

The tool allows document distribution through multiple channels - Email, print, E-Sign, document management systems, syncing to cloud storage etc.

The system auto-sends the generated documents at attachments from your business email.

The use-cases for the document automation software are endless. If your organization is on a path to digital transformation, using the right one is key to achieving success.

EDocGen is the best cloud document automation software. Give it a try.