Document Templates

Document templates let you generate formatted documents for customers — service reports, inspection summaries, proposals, or any other document your team sends to clients. You define the template once and generate a document for any customer with customer-specific data filled in automatically.

Template formats

HTML — you write the template content directly in the editor using HTML markup. Generated documents can be exported as HTML or PDF.

Word (.docx) — you upload a .docx file as the template. Generated documents can be exported as Word or PDF.

Global templates vs customer-specific templates

Global templates are the actual template definitions — the HTML or Word content, the name, the description. They live at the account level and a dispatcher creates and manages them.

Customer-specific templates are assignments of a global template to one particular customer, not separate copies of the content. Assigning a template to a customer is what makes it show up (and become generatable) on that customer’s record. Importantly, the content itself is still shared: if you edit the HTML or Word file from within a customer’s assigned template, you are editing the same global template that every other customer it’s assigned to also uses. The edit screen lists all the other customers currently assigned to that template as a reminder before you change anything.

Deleting a customer-specific template only removes the assignment for that customer — it does not touch the global template or its assignments to other customers.

Variables in templates

Templates can include variables that are replaced with real data when the document is generated. The template editor has a variable browser organized by area, so you don’t need to memorize variable names:

• Customer details — name, short name, status, customer number, email, phone, notes, plus the primary contact and the service/billing addresses
• All contacts, addresses, categories, and tags on the customer — as full lists, or a “specific” lookup to pull in one particular contact/address/category/tag by name
• Job details — the selected job (or the customer’s most recent job if none is chosen), including its customer request, job address, and linked project/contract/contract cost
• Job services and materials — the billable items and parts used on the job, plus lookups for a specific service or material
• Crews, assigned employees, and assets on the job
• Installed equipment linked to the job, and answers to that equipment’s dynamic forms
• Work log entries — time recorded on the job
• Attachments — files on the job, including a helper to embed a specific attachment’s image directly in the document
• Related customer and job data — convenience fields like comma-separated category/tag names, and the customer’s job list

Generating a document

1. Open a customer record and go to the Documents tab.
2. If the template you want isn’t listed yet under Customer Document Templates, assign it from the Available Templates list below (this only lists active global templates not already assigned to this customer).
3. Click Edit on the assigned template. From there you can pick which job’s data to use (defaults to the customer’s most recent job), then Preview, Export, or download a PDF using the customer’s (and job’s) data.

Preview only opens a temporary document and is not saved. Exporting or generating a PDF downloads the file and adds an entry to the customer’s document history.

A log of every generated document is kept on the customer record, showing when it was generated, the template and customer-specific version used, which job (if any) it was generated from, the output format, and who generated it.

Managing global templates

Note

Creating, editing, and deleting global document templates — the actual template content — is restricted to dispatchers.

Go to Customers → Document Templates to see all global templates.

• Creating a template — click Add template, choose a format, give it a name, and either write the HTML content or upload the .docx file.
• Editing a template — open from the list. You can change the name, description, format, or content. Changing the format requires providing the correct content for the new format.
• Deactivating a template — set to Inactive to hide it from the list of templates available to assign to customers. Existing customer assignments and generated document logs are not affected.

Assigning and editing from a customer record

Assigning a global template to a customer, and then editing its content or generating a document from it, does not require being a dispatcher — it follows the normal customer permission rule instead: dispatchers can do this for any customer, employees only for customers they created themselves. Since editing content from a customer’s assigned template actually changes the shared global template, an employee working on their own customer can end up changing a template used by other customers too — worth keeping in mind if several people manage templates.