5 tips to make documents for your business

1. Delegate the design of documents to the business part

Normally programmers are the ones who program the documents, usually in HTML, and business analysts indicate the layout of the document. In the case of an invoice it would be quite clear, the programmer is given a model and implements it, and as time goes by, analysts ask for changes to this template.

This process is quite inefficient, since interactions are triggered, and maybe the change is very small, for example, changing the font of a text. So it is essential to separate the design from the data that appears in the template. Programmers should only make the data available to the template, and that this is independent of the design.

2. Use a well-known tool for design

If business analysts are going to modify templates, it is crucial that they use a tool that they already know how to use. The ideal would be Microsoft Word, since anyone knows how to use it. This can dramatically affect productivity and agility on the business side.

3. Save document change history

How many times have you made any changes and wanted to go back? Performing this action should not take time, likewise, you have to be able to test future templates, for example, for a new version of the application you want to keep the existing templates but you want to start making new templates. This creates a problem for us because we have to maintain many versions.

We have solved this problem in Docxmerge, each modification that is made is saved, and in addition the document can be annotated with a version, such as 1.0.2, this means that we can continue updating version 1.0.0, but we could open the template versions 2.0.0.

4. Minimize deployment time

If you have templates in files that are deployed with the server, it is very expensive to deploy the server again to make a change to a template. Ideally we should have our application decoupled from these files.

5. Have the documents in the cloud

If we have the documents in the cloud or a service like Docxmerge, we can speed up this process of updating and creating templates, apart from the history of changes.