When it comes to creating documents like contracts, work orders, and invoices, businesses struggle the most. This manual document creation slows down business operations.
Now, let’s imagine a world with no manual document creation tasks! What benefits do you see? No more cutting and pasting data from one data source to another, no more errors, creating accurate and compliant documents quickly, etc.
Well, choosing an ideal document automation (DocAuto) tool can help you transform this imagination into reality. Be it your sales professionals or your document developers, document automation software can help increase productivity by automating the creation, routing, and execution of data-driven documents. Right from generating accurate proposals, invoices, contracts, or welcome letters to executing documents with eSignature, a DocAutomation tool can do all readily.
So, if you are willing to bring your imagination to reality, this guide will walk you through a document generation tool that you can choose to deploy.
Getting the Right Document Automation Tool
When you set out to shop for a cousin’s wedding, what is the first thing you do? Prep up yourself with a list of things you want – clothes, jewelry, accessories, and a lot more. Isn’t it?
Well, similar is the case when you want to have a document automation tool (or any other software) for your organization. If you ask me, what I usually do is make a list of my requirements and then compare those will the offerings of a specific tool. If the tool meets my needs, that would be the go-to tool for me.
With this as a ritual for me, how can I afford to break it? So, following the same, I started surfing for the top document automation tools, wherein Nintex drew my attention with its extraordinary document generation and automation potentials.
From passing your already existing data from any sources to familiar document templates so that you can create precise contracts, order forms, service documents, and more in the document format of your choice (Word, PowerPoint, PDF, Excel, etc.), Nintex DocGen does it all in a matter of minutes for you. It even enables you to deliver the documents via email or other sources and store them in the cloud or your content library for future use. Besides, the documents created are compliant, consistent, up-to-date, and fully customizable.
Delving deeper, below is what I explored!
Top-Level Overview of Nintex DocGen
Generating Documents
NintexDocGen empowers different teams across document generation tasks. For instance, the sales team in an organization can leverage the benefits of document generation and automation tools in creating proposals, quotes, account plans, and proposals. In contrast, the legal & procurement department can utilize it for generating T&Cs, packages, etc.
NintexDocGen takes data from Office 365, Salesforce CRM, and any other external company data stored in any system and pushes that data to generate a document (be it a proposal, contract, account plan, forecast, business reviews, etc.). Then, it offers the flexibility to deliver the created document through any channels you want – whether it is Google Docs, Dropbox, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, DocuSign, or any other. Thus, Nintex enables companies to provide high-quality customer communications quickly and easily while ensuring consistency and accuracy in all the business documents and reporting.
When you leverage Nintex DocGen in the Office 365 environment or Salesforce, here is what you can do with it.
Creating a Better User Experience
While you set to create a form for your on-site safety inspectors, you must create it in such a way that the users can access it completely from any device. This is what I liked about Nintex DocGen.
When you create a form, it lets you preview it in different layouts – desktop, mobile phone, text mobile phone, and the text mobile tablet. The latter two handles the Nintex mobile app to provide an even better user experience. It works best for people who do not necessarily use mail while they are on-site or fall prey to poor or no internet connectivity areas. They can easily scroll up and down to fill in the form and submit it easily without any need for better connectivity.
Designing a Template
Nintex DocGen Tagger
While building a template, your main focus is grabbing all the information that you need in your document. So, what you need to do is put them in appropriate workflow variables.
Nintex Document Generation Tagger offers you a list of all the variables and their types that you are using in the current workflow. To insert a particular variable on your document, all you need to do is select the variable. As soon as you choose the variable, a tag gets created in the following format – <<Longitude>>, click on Insert, and the tag will be added to your template. Alternatively, you can also choose to type the tag in the template you are designing.
Nintex tagger, being an integral part of Nintex DocGen, lets you create custom documents in Excel, Word, PDF, or PowerPoint with data dynamically merged from tagged templates stored in your SharePoint or other file storage systems.
Though tagger makes things easier for you, I found it a bit time-consuming as compared to other document generation tools like Windward Studios that allows you to simply drag and drop the tags you want. Moreover, the Nintex tagger also requires an add-in that can read and make changes to the document as well as send data over the internet.
DocGen Package
DocGen Packages are specifically used to define relationships with your Salesforce data. You can utilize them to create templates and determine where and how the outputs will be delivered. It lets you name your DocGen Package and the templates you create. Besides, you can also set the availability of the package as per your requirement.
Document Templates
Nintex requires you to have templates in your DocGen Packages to quickly generate documents. The template is by default included in the DocGen Package so that the users can create documents in a breeze. Additionally, you can use one or more templates within one DocGen Package.
Undoubtedly, you can merge the same file formats into one DocGen Package. Still, the thing that I found interesting is its ability to combine different template files (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) to produce a single output file. But the only issue with this functionality is that it is available only in its Enterprise Plan. Thus, I thought it to be a bit costly to pay for a feature that I might get with other document generation tools at a lower price.
Connecting Data to Templates
The foremost requirement for creating a document is connecting data sources to your templates. Nintex DocGen easily takes data from the reports and adds them to the documents directly with the help of the tags that you set in your template.
Adding Dynamic Images to templates
To add a dynamic image in your output document, you will at first need to hold the image on your records/data source and then reference the field with a tag in your template. So, when you generate a document, the image gets added to it. Again, the availability of this feature only with the Enterprise Plan is a drawback for users like me.
Replication
Nintex DocGen gives you the capability to replicate rows and/or tables for objects linked with each other. With replication, you can retrieve the data quickly to create your document in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. But to achieve this, you need first to have a child relationship and a replication tag. You can create this tag using Field Tagger within your template. This feature of Nintex seemed quite astounding to me.
For example, you want to create multiple tables of data in a document for each item number related to a specific account. What you need to do is simply put a replication tag, and Nintex will automatically fetch the data and insert it on your document.
Field Tagger
Field Tagger is where you can add, view, and maintain tags for your DocGen Packages. It lets you choose the objects you want to work with and insert the field tags into your templates easily. While the document is generated, Field Tagger replaces the tags with relevant information from your data source.
You can even use copy & paste or drag & drop the field tags into your MS Word documents to create templates.
Conditional Text
This functionality is of the utmost importance when you want to generate a dynamic document. But it is limited only to Microsoft Word. What it does is instead of a long text string, it lets you have a checkbox. Let’s say; you want to know the number of employees associated with a particular account. Inserting Conditional Text enables you to have a checked checkbox for a value greater to the set value and unchecked checkbox for a lesser value.
Component Library
When you want to create a contract for customers in one state, and the next time, you need to create it for customers of another state, making changes to the existing template every time might be overwhelming. Then, what else will you do?
Well, Nintex DocGen provides you a Component Library, wherein you can manage all the components that you use in the documents. You can also edit them right from the Component Library. Thus, the documents you create thereafter will get updated accordingly.
Dynamic Charts
Do you need a chart on your output document? Well, Nintex DocGen can help you do that. You can use formulas in Excel to create dynamic ranges and produce reports or documents as desired.
Availability
This window in the Nintex DocGen Package enables you to determine which users will be able to modify or run the DocGen Package. You can add as well as remove options for availability as per your requirement.
Use Your Files stored in Google Drive as Templates
The feature of Nintex that I pretty liked is its ability to save the created files in Google Drive. Nevertheless, Nintex only supports MS Office files – Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. You can configure your Google Drive settings to have your files stored as templates so that you can use them as and when required.
Such functionality is quite beneficial for users like me who love to have everything handy rather than surfing folders and wasting time.
Final Words
While manual document creation takes up a lot of time, implementing DocGen solutions helps invest time in crucial tasks by freeing you from mundane activities.
Nintex DocGen automates document generation without requiring you to enter codes. Thus, teams with no technical knowledge can also leverage it. Moreover, it believes in unleashing the power of data wherever it resides; therefore, eliminating human errors and enhancing your firm’s efficiency.
Associating data from any source with document templates is easy with Nintex DocGen. Right from document creation to automating document delivery and storage, it takes care of the entire process. Though I found Nintex DocGen a compelling tool for document generation, it lacks behind when it comes to comparing its functionalities with other DocGen tools.
Without a doubt, Nintex DocGen for Salesforce is the best tool for users to leverage if they work in the Salesforce environment. But if you are seeking a document generation solution that runs seamlessly with your MS Office Suite, you must check upon the other tools available on the market.
You can explore more about nintex on their SoftwareSuggest Profile Page.
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