6 Key Business Documents You Should Be Automating [Part 2]

A good document automation strategy is crucial for scalable business operations. But you can't automate everything - so what documents should you really be focusing on? Great candidates for automation meet four key criteria. These documents:

• Are created frequently on a regular schedule
• Take lots of time to put together manually
• Require little to medium amounts of customization
• Use data housed in a single source of truth (like Salesforce)

Now it’s time to look at three key documents that you can start automating today to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and make your business processes more secure:

1. Invoices
2. Customer Correspondence
3. Account & Opportunity Summaries

Click here if you missed part one - and learn about 3 more key business documents to automate in Salesforce today.

Invoices

Once proposals are sent, quotes approved, and contracts signed, invoices ensure that you get rewarded for your efforts. All you have to do is put together a list of prices and payment terms, then send out the document and wait for the money to roll in...right?

If you’ve already read part 1 of this series, you’re probably picking up a pattern here -- creating these common documents is never as simple as it sounds, and invoices are no exception. Manually created invoices are prone to errors and tedious to get right (who would’ve guessed?), especially if there are multiple different ones to keep track of. It’s also difficult to maintain the same branding and style across multiple invoices, which can make you look unprofessional. Furthermore, invoices themselves aren’t the only problem -- when you leave payment reminders up to memory, you open the door to missed payments and much more work for your team.

Luckily, automation can save the day when it comes to invoices, too. Automating your invoice process is a step towards faster revenue attainment and a much smoother prospect-customer transition. When you generate your invoices with the click of a button or a field change, you ensure that the data is correct and the customer receives it as soon as it’s necessary, upping the chances of fast payment.

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If your new customers aren’t exactly jumping at the opportunity to respond to your invoices, document automation solutions have you covered there, too. You can configure payment reminders to be automatically sent at regular intervals or when deadlines approach, freeing up valuable time for sales and accounting. If you need to set up recurring invoices, that’s no problem, either.

With automated invoices, you’ll get paid faster, make your customers happier, and be confident that you are always sending polished, error-free documents. No matter where your team is, invoice automation ensures you’re running “business as usual” no matter how unusual things may get. Check out the S-Docs template library for pre-built invoices and other finance templates to start using today.

Customer Correspondence

Regular communication with your customers lets them know that they are valued by your organization, which increases their chances of renewing their account or recommending your products or services to others. Customer correspondence is key to maintaining positive customer relationships and a good reputation in your industry.

Creating personalized assets to send to customers is incredibly important, but it’s also extremely time consuming -- and when you have thousands of customers to communicate with, it quickly becomes impossible to handle manually.

Automating your customer correspondence documents -- whether it’s account welcome letters, Thank-Yous, invitations, vouchers, or anything else -- can be a lifesaver for small and large teams alike. The word “automation” might not immediately make you think “personalized,” but don’t let it fool you -- using templates that pull data from Salesforce and leverage the power of conditional logic, document automation solutions can create complex, highly personalized documents that make your customers feel valued.

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We’re not the only ones who think you should be automating customer correspondence. Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, sends and receives millions of types of customer correspondence on a daily basis -- think coupons, vouchers, giveaways, discounts, and more. When their initial automation system relied too much on manual efforts, they turned to S-Docs to fully automate the creation and execution of all customer communication. With the help of S-Docs, they’re now able to generate, print, and fulfill customer letters using a vastly improved workflow. Along with saved time and energy, S-Docs enables Nestle to maintain their brand promise and keep millions of customers happy.

Download these customer correspondence templates from our library to get started and spark your own automation ideas.

Account & Opportunity Summaries

Account and opportunity summary documents provide valuable information about the state of new business, current customers, and opportunities for expansion. Sales managers and executives often need the insights that these documents provide to make operational decisions and ensure goals are being met.

The problem with account and opportunity summaries is that getting them right requires digging up lots of data and then making it easy to understand. In an ideal world, all of the necessary information would reside on individual account or opportunity records, but this isn’t usually the case. Data is often scattered across objects, meaning that tracking it down can waste valuable time. And once you have it, it needs to be cleanly formatted, which can eat up just as much time.

Here’s the solution: build your account and opportunity summary documents with a document automation app, and never worry about getting them right again. Let’s say a sales manager requests an opportunity summary once opportunities reach a certain stage -- this is no problem with a document automation solution. Once a few pre-built templates are set up and automated, everything is done in the background.

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What’s more, document automation solutions that are built specifically for Salesforce don’t limit you to gathering data from one record, or even related records. Using a native solution like S-Docs, you can build powerful documents that query information across your entire Salesforce org and merge in things like Dashboards charts to provide clean, actionable insights in seconds.

You can also easily aggregate data to create sophisticated pipeline reports that go far beyond out-of-box Salesforce functionality. As long as the information is in Salesforce, it can be pulled together and customized to fit your business needs. Experience the power of document automation for reporting with these free templates.

Optimize Efficiency with Document Automation

The business landscape has been changing for quite some time, and if you’re aiming to gain an edge over the competition, slow and manual workflows just don’t cut it anymore.

The benefits of automating your documents are clear: productivity spikes, errors take a nosedive, and both employees and customers are happier as a result. Your team will be afforded the time to focus on higher-value work, which will translate to innumerable advantages down the road.

Document automation may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think “digital transformation,” but it’s key to modernizing traditional business processes. The sooner it’s implemented, the sooner you’ll be set up for long-term business success, no matter what the world throws at you.

Get Started Today

S-Docs is the only 100% native document automation and e-signature solution available for the Salesforce platform. For over ten years, S-Docs has been helping businesses around the world automate their mission-critical documents and save thousands of hours of productivity.

It’s built entirely on the Salesforce platform -- that means no API calls, no network traffic between clouds, and no transporting your data anywhere. When you automate your documents with S-Docs, everything is 100% generated, delivered, and stored on Salesforce servers. Because of this, S-Docs is faster, much more secure, and easier to use than non-native alternatives.

Being native also means that S-Docs is powerful -- generate complex documents with data merged in from anywhere in Salesforce, multiple SOQL queries, conditional logic, nested templates, and much, much more.

Thousands of businesses rely on S-Docs every day to accomplish the tedious work in the background while they focus on what matters most. If you’re ready to join leading businesses around the world in automating and e-signing documents with S-Docs, request a demo today, or email us at sales@sdocs.com.