Whether you need thousands of customers to accept updated terms or hundreds of employees to sign off on a new employee handbook, bulk creation provides a seamless solution for companies of any size.
To better understand how you can bulk create documents from the template, let's go through an example where many employment contracts are generated to be sent for signing to prospective employees.
The process consists of three steps:
- Preparation of the document template and the Excel spreadsheet with the data.
- Creating a document template in Agrello
- Bulk creating the documents from the template
Preparation
First, the template document must be prepared in Microsoft Word and the fields that are employee-specific can be marked as dynamic fields using {{curly_brackets}}.
Dynamically filled fields must be entered in Word with curly brackets, for example {{employee_name}}. To avoid errors, you mustn't use punctuation or spaces in the text enclosed in parentheses.
Next, we prepare an Excel file with a list of all employees and the data to be included in the document. A separate row must be created for each employee and a column for each dynamic field.
The table must contain the e-mail address of the employee to whom the invitation to sign should be sent.
Please note that the name of your Excel file should not contain any spaces.
Creating a document template in Agrello
1. Upload document template
In Agrello you can easily create a document template. If you go into one of your workspace folders, you can see the documents/templates/permissions bar at the top. To create a template, go to the templates section and click the green "create template" button.
You will then be prompted to upload a file from your computer. Select your desired word or PDF file with the curly brackets marked, and upload it.
2. Placing signature fields
Once you have uploaded the document template, place the signature fields. In the document template preview scroll to the page where the signature should be and click on the “Signature field” button on the left pane. Place the field in to correct position. It will autosave the position of the field.
Bulk creating documents from the template
Now you are ready to connect the Excel file and the Word template to create multiple documents for signing at once.
When you are still in the document template view click on the “Use template” button and choose “Bulk create documents”.
This will open a bulk creation wizard.
Step 1. Upload Excel
Choose the Excel file with your desired records.
Note that our system allows importing 1000 rows from a single file.
Step 2. Map the signature fields
Now you need to define from which Excel column the system will find the signers' email address.
Select the correct column or columns and click Continue.
Step 3. Fill in the data fields
In this step, you need to map available data fields in the template to the columns in Excel. In this example there are multiple fields to map, and it is as easy as clicking on each drop down and selecting the correct corresponding column.
Here we can see what it looks like when we're done with the process
Click Continue to proceed.
Step 4. Document naming and destination
In the final step, we define the dynamic name of each document. The dynamic document name is composed of the template name + one of the data columns. For example Employee Code of Conduct - Jarmo Tuisk. You can add a separate document name column to your bulk creation Excel file to determine the document name.
To add a custom document name field, in your Excel spreadsheet, create a column named something like "document name", as seen in the example below
Then, when configuring the name of your documents in the bulk create wizard, simply click your document name column like so
Once that is done, click Create Documents.
Depending on the number of rows in Excel the document creation process can take from a few seconds up to a couple of minutes. So if you do not see the documents immediately, wait a bit and then refresh the folder screen.
All the documents are created in the preparing for signing state, and you can safely review them before sending them off to counter-parties.
Once sent, you can track the process and completion of your documents in your document folder Progress view.
