Creating and Sending Document Packages

This article describes the use of Document Packages to improve document building and management within the FORTH platform. It is broken up into the following sections:

• Overview
• Access this Feature
• What are Templates?
• What are Packages?
• Creating a Document Package

Overview

Document Packages lets you leverage the capabilities of our document builders (HTML + PDF) while allowing you to combine them, saving you time and money.

Document Packages are fully integrated into our Clixsign e-signature platform and will seamlessly mesh into your existing e-signature processes. Clixsign can handle “packaged” e-signed documents. We now allow splitting of these documents within a document package, encoding them, and compiling into a single payload.

Document Packages make building and maintaining a “folder” of documents you can send to the end consumer and share with your users easier. Through an intuitive, new drag-and-drop UI, you no longer have to struggle with including one document inside another or have to rebuild PDFs as HTML documents.  The system now lets you separate and handle each document individually, allowing you to mix all types of documents while preserving each document's unique layout, branding, and other visual characteristics.

Access this Feature

To access this feature, log in to the Forth CRM and click the Docs tab. At the top of the first screen, you will see two tabs as options: "Templates” and “Packages.” If you click on the "New Template" dropdown menu, you can create a new HTML Template or a new PDF template.

What are Templates?

A Template is a document you create, commonly used in your business, that requires automatic feeding of information from your CRM. You produce a new HTML-based template or PDF by choosing from the “New Template” drop-down menu.

Features of templates also include allowing the user to add or remove columns from their view, and allowing real-time searching, sorting, and filtering.

In the past, when generating a Clixsign request that required more than one template, a user would need to combine documents within a single template via tags, creating a “template within a template”.

This caused issues with formatting, styling, and layout, resulting in a final product that could use improvement. Users were also unable to combine an HTML template and a PDF template in the same request. We created “Document Packages” to solve these and many other problems.

What are Packages?

A Package is a collection of one or more document templates, and is used in the same way as existing document templates are in an agent’s workflow.  A user can pick a package to generate a Clixsign request as they would a standard document template. However, the system handles Packages differently and will render each template of the package separately before combining them for the Clixsign Request.

No more “Template within a Template”' and no more struggle deciding between using an HTML or PDF template, or having to rebuild document templates from one format into the other. A Package can include templates of either type.

Creating a Document Package

To create a Document Package, click the “New Package” button shown in the image below:

Next, enter a package title and description in the Package Name and Package Description fields, respectively.

NOTE: You can use dynamic tags (like {FIRSTNAME} or {SYNDICATOR}) directly inside both Document and Package titles. This allows generated files to be automatically named with specific client details, making them easier to identify and organize.

Select your preferred document templates by clicking Add a Template at the bottom of the page.

Perform a single click on the row of the templates you wish to "package", and click "Add Templates".

On the right side of the page, you will see the ACCESS CONTROL panel (see image below on the left).

The sidebar on this page also contains the standard access and sharing controls you use in document templates (See the image above).   You can make templates available to all or specific file types, states, or users.   Once you have confirmed all settings on this page, click Save Package at the top right of the page (see above).

Once you have saved the document package, return to the Contacts tab, and select the client to whom you are sending the document package request. You may select a recently viewed client from the area highlighted below in red.

Once you select that client, go to the Docs nested tab, and on the right side of the screen, click the “Generate Documents” button.

Ensure that the "Generate and Save Document" Action is chosen (see image below), and you will see that you ave the option of selecting either Package or Template, via a radio button.

After selecting the “Package” radio button (see above), choose your package using the "Select Package to Use" dropdown menu (see red arrow above.) 

Under the "Select Package" dropdown menu, a Document Expiration Date field appears, providing you the opportunity to enter an expiration date. NOTE: the default expiration is 30 days.

Scroll down the page to the Signers & Delivery Method section of the page. Click the "Scan Package for Signers" button.

Complete the signer assignments and then create or edit your email message as described in the Help Center article entitled: "Generating and Sending Documents for Signature".

To preview your selection, click the "Preview" link at the bottom right of the page. Otherwise, once you have selected a package, click "Generate & Save" found at the far bottom right of the page.

You will then see a confirmation notice appear on the bottom of your page, confirming that your selection was accepted.