5 reasons to ditch the paper and start document automation

I have one simple mission today. I want you guys to write less, export and send less, and hopefully kill off any PDFs you are still using in your company.

The time for paper, old boomer formats, and manual work is over. It is time to automate. While sales, marketing, project management and pretty much every department of every company out there are already automating, there is one aspect of most organizations I visit that is not.

And that’s documents. And when I say documents I mean contracts, policies, insurance files, HR personnel files, meeting notes.

That’s a large swathe of text that is currently being manually produced, often at a great frequency and always at extreme pain and displeasure.

So here are 5 quick reasons why you should get started on document automation today. They all represent pretty significant value adds no matter what your organization does. 

If you’re not really very sure about what document automation is, read this guide. 

It doesn’t take more than five minutes of unfocused work to make one stupid mistake. That mistake will be in the document. A document you’re probably sending out to clients. And that one mistake looks awful.

We’ve all sent out something that ended up looking wrong due to a single formatting error. Moving a picture one inch in Docs or Word, anyone? 

No longer with automatically generated documents. The templates you use will make sure all necessary data is automatically populated.

As your company grows, a lot of things happen. Of course, you probably start making a lot more money. But you also start having a lot of administrative burdens. Unfortunately, the curse of startup growth is having the tools to handle it. And the consequences can be very big if you don’t.

With a proper document automation setup, you don’t have to fear it. The machine handles it all. You can grow at a pace you can keep up with. And even any significant changes will always be instantly reflected throughout documents in your entire organization.

Sure, not all documents can be automatically generated. You probably want a lawyer to take a look at that large IP contract or acquisition deal.

But, really. Most documents produced are of the type of little variance, little complexity, and large frequency.

Take a sales contract. Often, very little is changed between them. Maybe prices and materials, maybe durations.

Or an employment contract. How substantially do most employment contracts actually differ? 

My bet is very little. With proper setup document templates, you'll always have finished documents with all the right information. And you’ll have them the second you need them.

Speaking of time. Have you ever lost a sale because you took too long in sending a contract? Or that a client backed out after a couple of weeks of back-and-forth with written, printed contracts?

I know I have! 

What about a system where you can send a filled-out contract the second the client says yes on the phone? Where changes and collaboration are a natural part of the editing of the document?

I’ll guarantee you that automatically generated documents and contracts are gonna provide a ton of value to your clients - no matter your size or theirs.

The last one, of course, applies to almost all automation tasks.

You are going to save time and money. You don’t need an employee only making sales contracts. You can save on review (because you know it’s consistent!) and employment onboarding is going to take much less time. 

You save money on prints, sending back and forth and you save those precious man-hours that are now freed for less… demeaning work than data entry.

Just get started.