To ensure your dynamic document templates (employment contracts, offer letters, NDAs etc.) are easy to use for you and your team we recommend the following.

Must haves

The following are must haves in order for your dynamic document templates to function correctly in Worknice.

Avoid Inline Text

Dynamic templates do not reliably support inline text very well and often leads to poor formatting. Below is example of how to avoid inline text in your templates.

Sample one

Sample two

Embed the Company Representative’s Name & Signature

For contracts and agreements we recommend embedding the name, position and signature of the authorised representative within the template. If there are sometimes more than one authorised representative for a contract, please create a template for each. Authorised rep’s will still be able to review documents with their signatures embedded via an approval workflow.

Remove witness signatures

Electronic witnessing is not possible therefore we recommend you will need to remove any witness signature sections from your contracts.

Consider dynamic field spacing

Consider the space required for data to fit. The dynamic areas in a template are fixed ie they don’t change depending on the data input, like in a word processor like MS Word. See some examples below where data won’t fit.

Not enough horizontal width

In the sample below (figure 1), adding data such as “70,000” would not fit between the $ and per annum text. You need more space (figure 2)

figure 1

figure 2

In the sample below (figure 3) you can see name and address has been put into the template using mail merge tags. We see this quite regularly, so please be aware those mail merge tags must be removed.

Figure 3

With the tags removed, the template looks like figure 4. The persons name and address will not fit into this space. Instead, consider placing data onto it’s own line, as suggested above

Figure 4

Remove highlighting and <<mailmerge>> formatting that represents dynamic information

During your managed implementation our team will assist getting your first document templates setup. Highlighting and brackets <<like this>> can’t be removed. But be sure to also provide the original document with those dynamic fields marked so we don’t miss any.

Recommended best practices

The following is what we consider best practices to ensure managing contract templates is efficient for you and your people have the best experience completing them.

Keep employment terms in one table

Rather than scattered through the template, we see templates with all the employment terms at the top of the document in a table much easier for admins to create and for employees to read.

Seperate positions descriptions from your contract

Rather than create a contract template for every type of position you offer, separating PDs out as their own templates and then bundling them together in Worknice is far less work to maintain.

Consider a master offer letter

If you employ people under many different contracts we recommend creating a master ‘offer letter’ (with all of the dynamic terms - start date, pay rate etc) which then refers to the relevant contract and then bundling these two documents together in Worknice.