Document Automation: Learning How It Works

Knackly is a document automation system. Among many other uses, document automation allows you to make templates out of the documents that you use over and over again; these templates will serve as the base for all of your future documents. This makes it easy to keep your documents consistent, up to date, and error-free.

The example we will be working with throughout the Knackly learning courses is a form letter. Most offices have form letters that are sent out to clients or vendors; usually, when a new letter is needed, a staff member drafts the new letter from a copy of an old one and makes changes by hand to personalize the letter for the new recipient.

These form letters generally do not have any way to pull in the recipient’s information from a client or vendor database; the staff member must copy and paste or manually type in name, address, and other personal information. If there are any optional paragraphs needed, the staff member has to track down a previous letter that used those paragraphs and copy them into the letter for the new recipient. All of this data re-entry is not only inefficient but opens the door for typos and mistakes to come into the letter; an older or incorrect version of the letter might even be used by mistake.

The letter is just an example – many offices use this process to create most or all of their documents, and when the document in question is far more complex than a form letter – a will, a contract, or a loan agreement, for example – the potential for errors skyrockets. This is where Knackly steps in to help.

Through these courses, you will learn how to use Knackly to automate your documents. Automation means that you have one base template for each document that you choose to automate which is used every time that document is created. With automation, data re-entry is reduced and your documents will be consistent; this considerably speeds up the drafting process and reduces or eliminate errors. In the lessons below, you will learn how to access Knackly and start to become familiar with the terminology.