Document automation, or document generation, is the automated process of creating personalized, data-merged, branded documents like contracts, sales proposals, reports, and invoices.
Understanding document generation
Document automation usually involves customizing a document template with its own layout and individual data inserted from any data source based on a set of if-then rules.
For example, a bank’s contract for a loan needs to be customized for every customer. It will use the same template, but the details will be different. Manually inserting the customer’s data and loan details takes time and effort and is subject to human errors. When automated, these issues disappear.
With the right document generation tools, organizations can automatically create digital documents using custom templates and branding, and pull data from multiple customer relationship management systems (or “CRM systems”) using pre-defined rules. Document generation software delivers precise and compliant documents either on-demand or in scheduled batches at scale.
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The benefits of document automation
Automated document generation improves customer and employee experiences by eliminating the need for manual data entry, reducing human error, and producing documents in seconds, rather than hours or days.
Reduced chance of error
Generating documents manually involves continuous cutting, pasting, and double-checking for typos and mistakes. Automated document generation eliminates this manual work because it pulls data directly from any source, ensuring every document—whether one or thousands—is accurate and error-free.
Increased efficiency
Your employees’ time is too valuable to spend on repetitive tasks. Automating document generation increases employee efficiency and frees them up for higher-value work. Your employees no longer have to spend their time locating customer-specific information, copying/pasting this data into the document, and designing and formatting the document.
Consistency and compliance
Automated document generation also provides consistency in language and appearance, ensuring compliance with government and industry regulations and with corporate brand guidelines. Organizations can create compliant Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents using pre-defined and internally approved templates and language. They can also do this within the environments they already work in daily, such as Microsoft Office 365 or Salesforce.
Better customer experience
An organization’s customers, partners, and suppliers benefit from automated document generation when they receive a personalized quote, invoice, contract, letter, or report faster than expected on their device of choice. With streamlined processes come more sales, lower costs, and greater profitability.
Improved collaboration
Automated document generation provides more than just a document – it furthers collaboration by enabling multiple stakeholders to route, review, redline, approve, and eSign. With automation, teamwork improves between all parties.
Automatic delivery and storage
Any-channel delivery and secure storage of the document can also be automated. When a document is created, it usually has an intended destination—either a customer, colleague, or another organization. You can automatically route a completed document to the appropriate individual or team for sign-off and, at the same time, securely save the most up-to-date version in your organization’s document repository.
Increased security and tracking
Document automation also brings security and tracking benefits. Instead of emailing documents back and forth as attachments and having to keep track of multiple versions of the same document, document automation stores all documents and versions in a secure cloud environment with a clear audit trail of document versions, authors, edits, and dates.
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Documents types: What should I automate?
Legal agreements, financial reports and spreadsheets, marketing mailers, data-heavy presentations, sales quotes and contracts, invoices, leases, licenses, estate documents, and employment offer letters are just a few examples of documents that can be automatically generated and distributed using document generation tools. Here we will focus on three common document categories to automate.
Legal document automation
An Ernst & Young survey found that 32% of law firms with more than 1,000 employees spend nearly one out of every three hours on self-described “low-value” tasks. A full 2/3 of in-house lawyers feel buried in low-value work, according to another industry survey.
Much of this low-value work involves contract creation, collaboration, and delivery – tasks document automation can handle with minimal human intervention. This automation is especially valuable with more complex contracts that include detailed clauses or addenda with values, names, and dates.
Corporate in-house legal teams can leverage document automation to self-serve, allowing admins to add common clauses to routine documents like NDAs or MSAs and route for approval and delivery. This legal self-service trend also extends to outside parties such as partners and consumers. Services such as Legal Zoom for the production of legal documents are now commonplace, as are law firms offering online legal services and associated legal agreements for certain matters in addition to their traditional in-person services.
Legal document automation software simplifies the creation of custom contracts with standard clauses and templates and generates templates automatically. Using online questionnaires, the software populates a well-formatted document that reflects user responses while applying underlying logic and rules.
Financial services and insurance document automation
Document automation software is also widely used in the financial services and insurance industries. For instance, corporate leaders find that keeping their financial presentations up to date with the most accurate stock fund or insurance policy data, for example, is only possible with automation that feeds the latest data into their spreadsheets, slides, and reports with a few mouse clicks.
Document automation ensures timely and accurate data and saves countless hours of manual data copying. It frees up financial services and insurance professionals for higher-value work and gives them the peace of mind that they are in full compliance with legal requirements in these highly regulated industries.
Two types of transactions can especially benefit from document automation due to the number of documents generated, the length of each document, and document content variations and paragraph options that depend on the customer’s unique characteristics and products purchased:
- Mortgages, containing documents such as a promissory note, deed, mortgage, and disclosures, and
- Insurance policies, which can contain documents such as a cover letter, declarations page, policy details, ID cards, etc.
With so much complexity and variability in high document-volume businesses like these, document automation software is simply a must-have for efficiency and competitiveness.
Business document automation
According to one Gartner analyst, a typical organization’s sales team spends one-third of their time selling and two-thirds on everything else. Unfortunately, the “everything else” does not add to the top line, making it ripe for automation. Much of a salesperson’s time is spent writing content, building custom quotes and proposals, and creating contracts and addenda—all areas where document automation can assist.
With document automation, sellers can rapidly generate compliant, data-driven contracts right within familiar CRM systems like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics to instantly transform the contract lifecycle and close deals faster.
Other departments can benefit from document automation as well. Human resource departments can more easily onboard employees by auto-generating an employee contract in seconds; accounts receivable departments can batch-send branded invoices with data pulled from their ERP system; and customer success can run retention, upsell and cross-sell programs through branded customer communications with data unique to what the customer owns and what path they should expand to.
Learn more about the Nintex DocGen and Nintex Automation Cloud for document automation workflow.
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