Generated Documents: One Design, Every Letter
If you have ever opened last month’s letter, changed the name and the date, and saved it as a new file, this post is for you.
The most common document workflow in the world is: open the last one, change the details, save as. It is fast, it is familiar, and roughly one time in twenty it leaves the previous client's name in paragraph four.
Design once
A document design in Herarx is a page layout — or a plain text template — with tokens where the case data goes: the tenant's name from the Tenant role, the address from the address field, the balance from the table's total, today's date. Add the logo, set the fonts, choose which repeating rows print as a table. Save it on the template.
From then on, every case built from that template can generate that document. The values come from the case as it is at that moment, and the generated PDF is filed back into the case's Files tab, linked to the row that produced it if it came from a table.
The documents most teams design first
- The acknowledgement or engagement letter.
- The invoice, receipt and statement of account.
- The notice letter — served, dated, with the calculation shown.
- The report cover and summary page.
- The consent form, sent for e-signature straight after generation.
Many contacts, one document
A contact role can hold several people. A design can address all of them, pick one by position, or ask you which at generation time. A letter to joint tenants names both; the same design for a single tenant names one. You do not maintain two versions.
Numbers and references
Invoice numbers come from a sequence and are minted at generation, not reused, not editable after. When a posted invoice is regenerated, the PDF carries the number the accounting system assigned — so the document in the case matches the document in the books.
What a generated document is not
It is not editable afterwards. That is on purpose. If the letter needs to say something different, the case needs to say something different; change the field and regenerate. The document is a view of the record, and a view that can be quietly edited is not a record of anything.
Getting started
Free workspaces get one document design; Premium several; Max as many as you need. Start with the letter you send most often. Design it, generate it on three real cases, compare. Then delete the "save as" copies from the shared drive before someone opens one.
