The quality of documents a consultancy firm produces can determine how happy a client will be after the consultant has done their work. Right from the first meeting with a client, there’s a need for documents that capture whatever has been agreed upon. However, dealing with these documents presents a few issues that can be addressed by automating the document automation process.
Here’s how:
Before a consulting firm takes on a new client, there’s a lot of back and forth communication that needs to be captured and incorporated into the service contract. Sometimes it is a challenge to design such a contract without the involvement of a lawyer, but lawyers are expensive and not everyone at the firm knows how to draft contracts.
Automation is the answer to this. Well designed contracts drafted by professionals can be used to generate professional contracts for different situations. By simply answering a few questions, document automation software will do the rest and assemble a contract that both parties would be satisfied with.
Not every client has an organized data storage system, but they will still expect the consultant to find a way to access the right data and get the job done. This is common when a consultant has to do taxes or carry out an audit. It can be a mixture of paper documents, excel sheets, emails, and so on. Such data can take ages to sort out.
Document automation software like Windward can amazingly capture every bit of information and quickly structure it in a way that is easy to understand. In a few hours, a consulting firm can complete tax returns of a huge corporation and move on to the next. Audit reports can be generated in a flash with no errors.
A consulting firm may need to store large amounts of data for different clients as well as for compliance reasons. This could require large storage space which will cost money and may not be safe if they are keeping paper documents or even utilizing an in-house server.
Utilizing automation software deals with the issue of excess paper documents but that is not all. Most modern software comes with added features like cloud storage. This means documents do not need physical space to be stored in and the consultancy firm doesn’t have to worry about the safety of confidential documents that they have in their possession since it is taken care of by the software developer.
Billing clients is not as straightforward as other services. Sometimes billing may need extra calculations and this takes time and may be subject to error. Consultancy firms need efficient billing processes to be able to bill clients on time and at the right rate.
Automating software can be programmed to take stock of the scope of work done as well as the amount of time taken to complete the work. Discounts and taxes can also be computed automatically and the final bill sent to the client on the date stipulated in the contract.
Some contracts include training of client’s employees to manage the tasks after the contract expires. This may require a training manual because the employees will not be able to call every time they forget a step. Some training manuals are complex to create and take up a lot of time. It is also difficult to provide one for everyone at the organization.
Automation is the answer to this. Training notes can be generated based on the needs of the client and they will be available to everyone without having to print hard copies.
Since most of the work consulting firms do involve documents, it makes sense to use document automation software like Windward Hub to make the work move faster. The faster they work, the more clients they can serve and eventually reap profits.
If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Try Windward with our 14-day free trial and start creating documents in quick time with our low/no code solutions.
Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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SQL Select Debugger
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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Displays of all the tags in the template, structured as they are placed in the template. This provides a simple & intuitive way to see the structure of your template. Also provides the capability to go to any tag and/or see the properties of any tag.
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The ability to integrate the Windward Engine into Google’s cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications dubbed Google Applications Engine (GAE).
If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
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If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
Try Windward with our 30-day free trial and start creating documents in quick time with our low/no code solutions.
This new integration will allow for processing of complex scripts and bi-directional text such as Arabic. Your PDF output will be much tighter and more closely match your template, and we’ll be able to respond rapidly to PDF requests and fixes.
If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
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Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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Version 13’s core code has been reworked and optimized to offer a reduced memory footprint, faster PDF generation and full documentation of supported features and limitations in the specifications for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
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Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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The Generate Code tool in the designer allows you to open an existing template and, with a click of a button, automatically create a window with the code needed to run your current template with all data sources and variables. Simply copy this code and paste into your application's code in the appropriate place. You now have Windward integrated into your application.
You only need to do this once. You do not do this for each template. Instead, where it has explicit files for the template and output, change that to parameters you pass to this code. Same for the parameters passed to Windward. This example uses explicit values to show you what to substitute in where.
Any pivot tables in an XLSX template are carried over to the XLSX output. The ranges in the pivot ranges are adjusted to match the generated output. So your final XLSX will have pivot tables set as expected in the generated file.
This makes creating an XLSX workbook with pivot tables trivial.
In an imported sub-template, if its properties for a style (ex. Normal) differ from the parent template's properties for the style, the use in the sub-template can be set to either use the properties in the sub-template, or the properties in the parent.
You set to retain when you don't want the child template's styling to change when imported. You set to use the parent when you want the styling of the imported template to match the styling in the parent.
Any explicit styling is always retained. This only impacts styling set by styles.
Tags can be placed in text boxes. Including linked text boxes. This gives you the ability to set the text in a textbox from your data.
Tags can be placed in shapes & smart art. This gives you the ability to set the text in a shape from your data.
When generating HTML output, the engine can either write bitmaps as distinct files the generate HTML references, or it can embed the images in the HTML providing a single file for the output.
You can place tags in pretty much any part of a template, including in footnotes & endnotes.
Any parts of a DOCX or XLSX (PowerPoint does not support this) file that are locked in the template, will be locked the same in the output.
If a font used in the template does not exist on the server generating a report, the font to substitute can be specified.
In addition, if a glyph to be rendered does not exist in the font specified, you can specify the replacement font. This can be set distinctly for European, Bi-Directional, and Far East fonts.
If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.
Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)
This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.
