Document automation

Context

A Salesforce integrator generated its European clients' contractual documents by hand from Salesforce: quotes, confirmations, contracts. Each document required manual rework, and each rework introduced a risk of error on paperwork that carries legal weight for the end client.

Constraints

• Documents had to stay compliant with each end client's brand guidelines.
• No manual intervention between the Salesforce data and the signed PDF.
• Templates had to remain editable by non-developers.

Stack

Salesforce (administration, profiles), PDF Butler, FORM Butler, SIGN Butler.

Decisions & trade-offs

Data mapping was centralised rather than duplicated per template. It took longer to set up, but a structural change on the Salesforce side no longer breaks ten templates at once.

Templates stayed owned by the business teams. It would have been faster to hard-code everything; that would have made the team dependent on a developer for every comma.

What didn't work

The first workflows failed silently when an expected field was empty on the Salesforce side — the document was generated, incomplete, with no alert. The fix was to validate the data upstream of generation rather than inspect the PDFs afterwards.

Outcome

End-to-end document generation, with no manual rework, for European clients. Templates remain maintained by the business teams.