The situation
Their onboarding manager branded every document by hand. Open, swap the logo, retype the company name, save, next. Three to four hours per new client, landing on the person with the most useful things to do.
← All work
People Matters HR · Outsourced HR
How People Matters HR turned hours of document branding into a 10 minute job
People Matters HR is an outsourced HR consultancy in the North West. When they take on a new client they produce a branded document pack, 22 policies, three contract types and a set of forms, every one carrying that client's logo, company name and address.
- Sector
- Outsourced HR
- What we built
- Document automation
- Documents per run
- 71
- Time to live
- 25 days
- Built on
- n8n, Google Workspace, Google Docs API
Before
3 to 4 hours per client
After
About 10 minutes
How it works
The system, step by step
A person stays in control here
- 1Automatic
Fill in one short form
Company name, address and logo
- 2Automatic
Templates are read
From a folder they control
- 3Automatic
All 71 documents branded
Logo, name and address dropped in
- 4Automatic
Pack saved to their Drive
Foldered, timestamped
- 5A person
Quick final tidy
The team checks and sends
What we built
One short form. Company name, address, logo. About ten minutes later the full pack of 71 documents comes back branded, in their own Drive. Not one word of their HR content is generated or altered. Fifteen years of policy wording is the thing they are proud of.
What we found that they did not know
A scan of all 230 files found 83 near duplicates in mirror folders. Only 120 documents were actually unique. 69 filenames collided. The branding placeholder was written five different ways, including one misspelling. None of this was in the brief.
The work we turned down
We declined to brand 46 of their letters. Disciplinary and grievance letters are bare by design, because they go out on the client's own letterhead. Automating a logo onto those means redesigning documents that end up in tribunals. We said no twice, to work we could have billed for.
The problem nobody would have predicted
The run kept dying with a 403. After 36 documents, then after 21. The cause was shared API quota: every customer on that hosting tier draws from one pool, so strangers' automations were throttling them. Retries made it worse. We built them their own cloud project.
The result
- ✓Three to four hours per new client, down to about ten minutes, unattended
- ✓71 documents produced per run, from one short form
- ✓Twenty five days from the first call to live in their own environment
- ✓Nine defects found and fixed before they ever saw the system
- ✓Their automation platform, their Google Workspace, their own cloud project and quota
“That's exactly what we need... it just gives us that autonomy really, and then we can quickly run it across the board for clients.”
What they own
Everything.
Their automation platform. Their Google Workspace. Their own cloud project and their own API quota. Their templates, in a folder they control. Their output.
The handover document deliberately teaches them to add their own templates: drop a file in the folder, type three markers, done. That was a design choice, not an afterthought. It is the difference between owning your templates and depending on us every time one changes.
Nothing of ours was left inside their systems, and nothing about this build holds them to us.
“Amazing, because that’s going to stand the test of time then.” Sam, People Matters HR
More work
Event registrationsCommunity and events
How Active Inclusion Network stopped retyping every registration by hand
Before
Export, clean, retype, every event
After
Syncs every 4 hours
Feedback and reportingCommunity wellbeing
How a community drumming CIC turned paper feedback forms into data that wins funding
Before
Paper forms, rarely typed up
After
Feedback on every booking
Free 30 minute call
Tell us what's eating your week.
You leave with two or three ways to save time, whether we work together or not.