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Does Spending Less Time Creating and Approving Documents Sound Good?

Document Services

Many organisations revolve around documents. While we may print less, we still need to create documents to share with customers, employees and suppliers to make sure that our businesses continue to operate efficiently. Whether it is a new customer sales contract, employee offer letter, or supplier agreements, creating documents can be time consuming, error prone and hard to control. Additionally, once that document is created, getting the right approvals before it is sent to the intended audience can be challenging.

Here’s just one example of how this might look in a company not too different from yours: Julie manages a sales team in a large organisation and for every transaction, her team must create a new sales agreement with up to date terms and the most recent products and pricing. Using old or incorrect data can cost the company money and lead to long and unsatisfying customer experience. Even worse, if incorrect terms are included in, or omitted from, the sales agreement, the company could be at risk.

This organisation has several different types of agreement, each with terms that are directly tied to the product being sold. The standard process for new sales at the company was that each sales person would take an old agreement stored on their computer and update the data for the current customer, then send by email for the necessary approvals. This method had a number of challenges and problems:

  • Frequently, the agreement the salesperson selected would not match the product or service that the customer had chosen – including inappropriate terms for that specific deal.
  • Manually entering information such as the company name meant there was a lot of time wasted in re-entering data and the risk of error was very high.
  • An email reliant approval process meant that there was no visibility about where the document was in the approval cycle, leading to long delays and challenges in determining who had an agreement and whether they’d approved it or not.

All of this resulted in agreements taking a long time to create and approve. On top of this, the finished documents frequently contained errors in data or terms, which was, at best, inefficient and frustrating for customers and, at worst, risky for the business.

However, Julie found a better way – an integrated HotDocs and K2 solution.

By implementing these leading workflow and document automation technologies, the sales team is now able to log in to a sales portal. From there, they select the correct document from their library of HotDocs templates and fill in the necessary customer information.

Using HotDocs templates to generate sales contacts, Julie’s organisation knows that the most current and appropriate terms are in that document – reducing risk of non-compliance. In addition, using dynamic HotDocs templates speeds up the document creation process, as HotDocs works within K2 to quickly generate the necessary document, or suite of documents.

As K2 is able to tie into almost any line of business system, the sales team can pull information about their customer from existing systems, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing errors.

Finally, upon completion of the document, K2’s robust workflow engine can route the document for approvals, providing visibility every step of the way. This means no more searching emails for documents or making phone calls to find out where an agreement is in the process.

So, while there will always be a need for documents in the workplace, the way we create and use those documents can be vastly improved with HotDocs and K2. If your organisation could benefit from this type of automation, we have several opportunities for you to learn more:

  • The Automate to Accelerate series are in-person events that showcase the benefits of an integrated HotDocs and K2 solution. There will also be a best practice use case from a joint HotDocs/K2 customer, detailing how they use the integrated solution to make their business more efficient.

Upcoming sessions are:

  • If you’re not near a live event, you can watch a recent webinar here on new client intake for law firms.