11 Top Benefits of Document Automation in 2022

Document automation allows all employees across the company, who have a need to create a document, to be spared the burden of tedious, manual work in assembling and collating from existing files and records. 

Automating the creation of documents helps businesses grow and digitize their work, in a controlled manner, by reducing the time required to execute essential processes of the business. Whether it’s signing a deal with a vendor, bringing on new hires, or scaling internal processes, documents underlie all these business-critical workflows. 

And so through document automation, companies make a synchronized, directed effort to empower all those workflows which in turn helps businesses do more high-impact work.  

From reducing errors to ensuring consistency to saving time and enabling more security for important business records, today we look at the top benefits of automating document management across your business. 

1. Create documents faster 

Document automation removes the need for building contracts from scratch. Instead of copying and pasting from previous files, automating document creation allows subject matter experts — from legal to compliance to HR — to create single, customizable templates, that can be replicated and modified on the go, depending on the specific need.  

2. Ensure document consistency 

The manual work behind document creation involves searching through various records, and results in creating a sort of “collage” from various sources, such as email, obsolete versions of documents, and different platforms. This is bound to result in non-standardized documents. Automation leaves all this behind, as you’re able to have the most up-to-date, on-brand documents across the company. 

3. Reduce errors and mistakes 

Errors and typos are inevitable when manual copy-pasting is involved. Despite the efforts to eliminate them, they are bound to show up when combining various spreadsheets and legacy documents – often to detrimental effect. And trying to revert these errors often leads to new ones.  

In fact, IBM reports that 88% of all spreadsheets contain at least one error, which can be extremely costly. A case in point is TransAlta, a power company from Canada, which lost $24 million over an Excel spreadsheet error. The copy-and-paste error led to the company overpaying some of the contracts, effectively wiping out 10% of its annual profit.  

Through document automation, you fully eliminate typos and factual errors that are likely to happen when documents are built from scratch or built based on earlier versions.

4. Have a better version control 

Document versioning helps businesses make their documentation more accessible. Previously, amendments to documents were done through color-coding, highlighting and copy-pasting comments and suggestions in the body of the emails, followed by a loop of back-and-forth emails.  

This made document creation slow and prone to error, as it was difficult to keep track of all changes. And this process then had to be repeated for each new piece of document. 

With document automation, you can make a single update for all future documents, ensuring that the most accurate version of a document is consistently applied across the board.  

5. Collaborate more easily 

Traditionally, building contracts meant a long loop of comments and feedback that had to be incorporated in the final document, exchanged via email or in a paper form. With document automation, your team can create online contracts and other documents that can be reviewed, amended, agreed upon, and signed by stakeholders at all times. 

6. Speed up all workflows 

While the automation of documents is often used as a synonym of contract automation, it’s in fact only one portion of its power.  

With automated document creation, you can speed up multiple workflows, across departments, for instance, by automating the creation of next steps to be used as guidance by employees in case of handling sensitive data or complying with a particular law or in-house policy.  

Plus, you can automate the creation of invoices, reference letters, assessments of vendors or their services, run anti-money laundering checks, generate privacy notices, or identify tax measures that apply to your company.

7. Improve your records security and privacy 

When done manually, document management is prone to various privacy and security risks. Whether stored in a paper form or on individual computers, documents can get lost in inboxes, folders, and various platforms used in day-to-day work. Or worse, unauthorized persons can get access to your business-critical data.  

With data automation tools, you create a centralized place that securely stores your files and minimizes the risk of data being exposed or stolen. 

8. Empower all teams across the company 

Automating document creation allows employees to be more independent, while having a robust, compliant system behind their back at all times.  

For example, if contract signing with a new client is standardized and automated, then sales reps don’t have to wait on legal or compliance for each such contract. Instead, they can be proactive and have more ownership over the deal, ensuring it’s not caught up in red tape, but executed faster, with legal being involved only when truly needed.

Learn how to integrate Document Automation in a Law Firm.

9. Enable knowledge management for proactive operations  

Document automation tools also enable companies to remove the guesswork and act based on real-life data. By enabling a full audit trail, it lets key functions and senior roles within the company know about specific needs in their departments, based on previous experiences and processes. 

10. Keep evidence of all contract-related actions 

By storing records on generated documents such as the frequency of documents being generated, type of contracts, who made changes to a document, or what kinds of amendments are most often made to a document, teams have all the evidence on how the documents have been drafted, from the initial version until the final document.

11. Allow experts to return to high-impact work 

Document automation isn’t simply a matter of automating contracts and documents and saving time. While that is of course what doc automation primarily achieves, it has far many more high-impact consequences.  

Today, all teams and functions are interconnected. Whether it’s signing on a new customer or hiring employees, legal, compliance, finance, and HR will be involved.  

Through the automation of documents, all these teams can work on their own – and together – more efficiently, with fewer (manual) obstacles along the way.  

If a deal signing can be automated so that all the legal, compliance and finance teams have to do is sign the document electronically, while the company’s good standing and profitability and compliance are preserved, that creates a lot of space where all these highly-paid and highly skilled teams can focus on strategic, high-impact work.

Better, faster, stronger documents

Document automation is not just about making fewer errors (which as we’ve seen can be quite costly) or speeding up entire workflows. While it does make significant improvements at the day-to-day operational level, it brings about a much bigger opportunity for organizations. It allows everyone, from individual business experts, to units, departments, and entire verticals to have more time for strategic work which actually requires them to be present. As a result, they can use their expertise in a highly impactful manner and drive the entire organization forward. 

Ready to start automating the creation of documents in your team? Read our No-Code and Workflow Automation guides to learn how the BRYTER no-code platform can support your business in digital transformation. Or if you need more intel on how document automation works in practice, sign up for a demo.