Slate Analytics

Every office makes documents. With the introduction of the mail merge, the concept of dynamic content was made accessible to every organization with Microsoft Office. Unfortunately, for many offices, automation in document creation goes no further than a meager ‘Dear [Name],’ mail merge.

Automate Every Recurring Document

Why not more automation? Often, office workers are unaware that greater automation is feasible. Spreadsheets see efficiency gains with formulas and worksheet templates, but that’s not automation. We’re talking about the creation of the document – from non existence to a file on the network – be it an Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint deck, Word document, or PDF.

An invite-only, philanthropic investment advisory has painstakingly organized their business with Salesforce. Everything lives in the cloud. Embracing Salesforce technology met the advisory’s organizational needs, but traditional document creation was left to the back office. They needed custom formatted documents for invoicing, member specific donation forms, and reports. Historically, the advisory labored in Excel to make these documents – even with the help of PivotTables, templates, and lots of copying and pasting. They didn’t know that their tedious and error prone work was a candidate for total automation.

Slate Analytics collaborated with the advisory, understood their business needs and proprietary data sources, and got to work. We designed an Excel based interface, automated with VBA and integrated directly with Salesforce, to churn out Excel and PDF documents. All the source information lives in Salesforce – the single version of the truth.

Now, whenever the advisory needs invoices, member specific donation forms, or reports, they enter their Salesforce login credentials, and with one click can generate or print all necessary documents for all members, guarding against mistakes and saving hundreds of valuable labor hours.

Nearly every office has document authoring tasks that are prime candidates for automation. Get in touch and see how we can streamline your office.