The Benefits of Document Creation Automation
Every day, you and your employees create and reference a seemingly endless supply of business documents. Whether for legal, human resources, customer communication, or another reason, these documents serve as the glue holding your business together.
Accuracy, efficiency, compliance, and speed are vital regardless of the volume and type of document you create. This is where document creation automation saves the day. Leveraging jSign’s document automation software helps you create complex documents seamlessly — without the massive investment in time and resources typical of manual document creation.
What Is Document Creation Automation?
Document creation automation uses automation tools to create interactive document templates for specific business purposes, then creates electronic documents from these templates.
Document automation creates intelligent templates, incorporating foundational business logic and updated industry data. This way, the resulting business documents are accurate, compliant, and up-to-date.
These automation tools empower you to create accurate documents every time without first tweaking or manually inputting variables into the document template. Generally speaking, there are three tiers of automation:
- 100% automation: You create documents solely from templates without human input. The templates utilize data and already-defined business logic.
- User-driven automation: Human input is required to make certain strategic decisions regarding the automation process. The software then integrates these decisions into the business logic data and completes the automation process.
- Hybrid automation: Your document creation process is fully automated unless there are missing data or data outliers you must review or input manually.
6 Benefits of Using Document Automation Tools
Automation streamlines your document production process, giving you the following perks:
1. Saves Time on Repetitive Tasks
Regardless of your line of business, you’ll have a set of tasks that repeat daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Often, most of these tasks involve writing and disseminating reports. For instance, you may have quarterly cash flow statement reports, daily progress reports, weekly sales reports, and monthly internal audit reports.
Reports for these repetitive tasks are entirely informational and don’t necessarily require a creative or personal touch. As such, you can create reusable document templates for your repetitive tasks, empowering your staff to complete such reports more promptly.
This saves your company substantial time which you can redirect toward more high-value tasks that yield a higher return on investment (ROI). For instance, instead of employees spending 20 to 30 minutes writing sales process reports, jSign’s automation tools will take care of it in seconds. Your team can then spend that time more productively, such as by calling churned customers and try to win them back.
2. Establishes a Document Workflow for Your Employees
Starting document assembly from scratch every time is tedious and time-consuming, especially if you’re producing documents at scale. However, the document creation process is much smoother when following a streamlined document workflow.
Using document automation features such as intelligent workflows, your IT admin can define the step-by-step document production process for other employees. For instance, IT can define workflows for sales proposals to help your sales teams write and send proposals swiftly when pitching new prospects.
With defined workflow processes, non-technical employees in other departments can easily follow any document workflow and create the required documents without help from IT. As employees get comfortable using document automation software, they can customize document workflows to their liking and further boost efficiency.
3. Reduces the Element of Human Error
While human error in the workplace isn’t new, it’s become more costly for businesses given the advanced enterprise data integration systems in place today. With these systems, a single error in an isolated business process can cause huge losses to your entire company.
Citigroup’s clerical error that led to the infamous $900 million loan error is an ideal example of how costly human errors can be. They can be rule-based, knowledge-based, simple slips, or memory lapses. Regardless of the type of error, it can yield dire legal and commercial consequences for your company.
Thankfully, jSign’s document automation can help eliminate human errors in crucial documents by using data-specific templates and fields that populate data digitally, not manually.
4. Increases the Security of Your Documents
Each profession has several industrial, internal, state, and federal compliance regulations that protect the security and integrity of critical documents. The healthcare, insurance, and financial sectors traditionally experience more stringent regulatory compliance requirements.
Here’s a list of some of the most common compliance regulations that control document automation and management in different industries:
- The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — affects healthcare providers.
- The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — affects food and drug manufacturers.
- The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) — affects all companies that handle, transmit, or store credit card information.
- The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) — affects financial institutions.
- The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) — affects accounting firms, auditors, securities analysts, and publicly traded companies.
- International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 — affects all companies providing services and products to customers.
Inaccurate and non-compliant documents will cost you revenue in fines, litigation costs, and, in the worst case, even jail time. Fortunately, document automation software helps enforce accuracy and compliance, saving you from the undesirable consequences of non-compliance.
More importantly, jSign’s automation software contains security features such as blockchain stamping and HIPAA-compliant electronic signatures, further boosting the security and integrity of your documents.
5. Integrates Documents With Other Tools
Document automation software lets you integrate your electronic documents with third-party tools such as Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox. The ease of integration helps you and your employees organize, store, and access documents seamlessly in real-time. This streamlines communication and makes your company’s workflows more efficient.
6. Compiles Data and Information More Rapidly
Because document automation tools integrate with your enterprise systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), they help centralize data and information. This enables you to auto-merge records and pre-populate data, making document assembly much more swift.
All this means your employees won’t have to manually retrieve and input data into documents during production through copy and paste or physical transcription. As a result, your business document production process, whether in PDF forms or Word format, is faster and more accurate.
How To Use Document Automation Software
The use of document automation software varies depending on a company’s individual needs. Before selecting document automation tools, you must know what document workflows you want to automate. Most companies actualize document creation automation as part of business process automation.
As a rule of thumb, document automation should enhance compliance, accuracy, and efficiency. It should also integrate with your existing enterprise systems, content repositories, and business data.
After creating your electronic documents, signing them online is easy with jSign’s electronic signature service. On jSign’s platform, you can sign, send, track, and collect electronic signatures in minutes.
Integrating jSign with your document automation software is extremely handy when you need to sign and dispatch the business documents you’ve automated. Check out our plans and select the one that suits your business document needs the most. You’ll enjoy the convenience and security of our intelligent signature page templates specific to your industry.
