If you’re a Partner or Principal in an accounting firm, or the owner or a manager in a business, you might not know—and you probably don’t want to know—the details of how letters are created within your business. And that’s fair enough. You have plenty of more pressing business matters to deal with. Letters? That’s why you have admin and support staff, right?
However, if yours is a business that creates a large volume of outgoing correspondence (such as an accounting firm), it would pay to do an efficiency audit on how many steps are involved in your current process for the creation, approval and sending of letters from your business.
Keep in mind that many admin and support staff won’t question or challenge the way things are done. They might be creating letters ‘the way we’ve always done them’, but you might be shocked at the inefficiency, especially if you calculate the cost of the wasted staff time across a year.
For example, if your business has 500 clients and on average you send each of them 5 standard letters per year (such as covering letters), that’s 2,500 letters. If each letter takes 15 minutes in staff time, that’s 37,500 minutes (625 hours) of time which equates to almost 17 weeks of a staff member’s time.
If you could reduce that from 15 minutes per letter down to 2 minutes—which is very possible—you’d save over 540 hours which is over 14 weeks of staff time.
I’m sure you could find higher value activities for your staff to do (such as running client surveys or producing client newsletters), rather than mess around with inefficient letter production processes.
Here are common inefficiencies we see in letter production:
- Data: Client name and address data not automatically inserted into letters
- Content: Customisation of standard letter content not automated – that is, lots of manual editing and typing
- Electronic Filing: Manual ‘Save As’ filing of letters that involves, “Pick a drive, pick a folder, pick a folder, pick a folder, pick a folder, pick a folder, ah, there’s the folder, click Save” just to save the document. Not only is this slow, misfiling is easy to do.
- Formatting: Formatting of letters not automated causing your staff to have to tidy up letters before they are ready to print or send
- Revision and Approval: Cumbersome process of printing draft letters, putting them forward for review, the reviewers marking up the printed drafts, then making the required changes, and potentially repeating the process with a second draft.
- Signing: Insertion of electronic signatures not automated
- Sending: Printing, folding, stuffing, stamping/franking, mailing of ‘snail mail’ letters (i.e. traditional post); or cumbersome processes for creating PDFs from Word documents, naming and saving the PDFs and sending the PDF documents to clients.
An efficient Document Management System automates or semi-automates all of the above.
Have a look at the following example of the way HowNow creates, files and sends letters. This is from a ‘real live’ HowNow in an accounting firm (not a demo version):
- Data: The contact’s name, address and other data is automatically inserted into the letter. HowNow pulls this data from the main database or databases used by the business (for example, the Practice Management System or CRM system), plus HowNow also allows you to create additional custom fields. In the one step, HowNow pulls this data from multiple databases. That’s pretty cool. And efficient. This means that typing and copy and pasting of this sort of information is eliminated. Not only is this faster, it removes an opportunity for error as it’s easy to make msitakes when typnig.
- Content: HowNow has a super neat feature where you can include in a letter or document template all of the optional paragraphs that could apply. For example, in a proposal or engagement letter, optional content could be headings and paragraphs about services that could potentially be included. When the user double-clicks on the letter template, a wizard appears that allows the user to select from a checklist what is applicable to this recipient. Anything not selected is automatically omitted from the resulting document that then appears in Microsoft Word. This avoids the slow a laborious process of going through the Word document and working out which paragraphs to delete. HowNow automates that completely. That’s faster and more accurate.
- Electronic Filing: HowNow eliminates the need to do the laborious ‘Save As’ process of “pick a folder, pick a folder, pick a folder” because once the user selects the client or contact and then clicks Create, not only does HowNow pull the data into the letter, it knows where and how a latter of that type should be saved. This means by the time the resulting letter appears on the screen in MS Word, it has already been filed by HowNow. Kiss that ‘Save As’ good-bye. (We know you won’t miss it.)
- Formatting: HowNow allows you to set up Master Style Templates that control the layout, look and feel of any letter or document created using that Master Style Template. Within a Master Style Template you can specify fonts, margins, headers, footers, page numbering, reference line protocols, how you want the date and address block laid out at the top of the letter, and how you want the signature block and list of enclosures formatted. You can even include your organisation’s logo and letterhead graphics so that the resulting Word documents already look like they are formatted on your letterhead. (This makes sending letters as PDFs a cinch, but more about that in Sending, below.) You can set up more than one Master Style Template. For example, if you also sometimes print letters and documents to letterhead, you’d have a version of the Master Style Template that didn’t include the logo and stationery graphics. If you have different divisions within your firm that have variations of the letterhead, you simply set up two Master Style Templates for each type of stationery in use (one without logo for printing letters, one with logo for PDF’ing letters). You can also create Master Style Templates for Fax Headers, Report formats, or any other purpose that comes to mind. The point of all this is that your staff never again need to mess around with changing fonts, margins, layouts etc. HowNow automates that 100%. If you subscribe to a HowNow Content Update Service such as HowNow Accountants, this Master Style Template functionality also means you never need to format the (‘Merge 2’ version) letters published by businessfitness. Just the body of such letters are published. Your Master Style Templates look after the rest. Easy.
- Revision Approval: When the person who prepares a letter or document closes the Word document, HowNow prompts them, “Would you like to update its Record Status?” Rather than leave the letter at Draft status, the preparer can select Review and then email a link to the person who is to proof the document. After they proof the document on-screen and then save and close the document, they too are prompted to update the Record Status. They can select Approved or if corrections are required they could choose to push it back to Draft status. When the person responsible for sending the letter out finalises and sends it, they can change the Record Status to Final. These Record Statuses of Draft > Review > Approved > Final are customisable. For example, you can create Record Statuses such as Out for Signature, Sent, etc. In the background HowNow automatically records an Audit Trail of who created the document in the first place; whether they changed the status and when; who they emailed the link to; who else opened or edited the document; who marked the document as Approved; who made it Final; who printed or PDF’ed or emailed the document; and so on. These are benefits you just don’t get when you have an letter and document approval process that happens pen-on-paper. You lose all of the workflow and QA information. Using HowNow for on-screen review and approval of letters and documents, not only is it faster and more accurate, you get bullet-proof QA process and audit trail. Comforting.
- Signing: If you’re still manually signing letters pen-on-paper you’re welcome to join us in the new millennium any time you’re ready. Just kidding. Kind of. Signing letters on paper has the same ‘no audit trail’ disadvantages mentioned about reviewing and approving letters. It’s also slower. Ever seen a pile of letters sitting on a Director’s desk awaiting signature? Ever been one of the people waiting on that perennial bottleneck? If your clients would like to receive correspondence electronically (e.g. as PDF documents via email or via download from a web portal), then you should be signing those letters on-screen. It’s insanely inefficient to be printing out letters which to that point have been created efficiently on-screen. This traditional (now old fashioned) approach involves someone printing the letters, getting them from the printer, putting them in your In Tray, coming in to get them later, seeing that you haven’t signed them yet, coming back later to check again, and so on. That’s business at glacial speed. With a few clicks you can electronically sign your letters, including the inclusion of a scan of your handwritten signature that, if done properly, looks to the recipient like you signed it by hand. It looks very professional, you have the event of signing it automatically recorded in the audit trail for the document, and it’s all so easy, once you know how.
- Sending: More and more firms are sending correspondence electronically as PDF documents, whether by email or the web. If you’re still sending a lot of your correspondence via printed and mailed ‘snail mail’, ask your clients if they’d prefer to receive it electronically. Many people do. That’s because it’s often easier to file and later find documents that are stored on a computer or in a web mail system like Gmail. Keyword search is a beautiful thing. For the firm, it’s also faster, saves paper/trees, saves postage, saves the folding/stuffing/franking process and shows you’re up-to-date with technology. An efficient Document Management System should make it quick and simple to create and send PDF documents. In HowNow, you can right-click on a letter, select Email As PDF and in the one automated process HowNow will open the MS Word document, print it to PDF, close the MS Word document, open an email, insert the recipient’s email address in the To: field, insert the Subject line in the email and attached the PDF to the email, ready for you to type a brief message before clicking Send. If you’re into efficiency, that will excite you. That process leaves the original document in MS Word format, which is often handy. (Any document marked as ‘Final’ in HowNow cannot be edited anyway.) When you click Send on the email, if you’re running HowNow Email Manager, you’ll be prompted whether you wish to save the email under the Contact as well. A few clicks later and you’ve saved the record of act of sending the document to the client. That’s thorough record keeping. It also helps find the correspondence in the future if the client ever asks for a copy of it again. If you prefer to keep the finalised original on your system as a PDF instead of in MS Word format, you just right-click it and select Convert to PDF.
If you’re a HowNow user and you have any questions about how to implement any of the above, just email support[at]businessfitness.net or call us on 1300 333 424.
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