Automate Bonus Letter Generation and Delivery

Introduction

Once a year, the employer reviews an employee's work and performance and decides the bonus. This is formally communicated to the employee through a bonus letter. The same process is carried out for pay review letters as well.

Typically, HR teams mass-mail these letters to all employees. Most of the HR teams use Excel data to do a mail merge for sending letters.

Creating bonus letters through mail merge can be a tedious process that significantly hampers productivity. Juggling various bonus letter templates for different regions and languages can feel overwhelming. Timely delivery of these letters to employees is crucial, and ensuring they are free of errors is a must. Unfortunately, with mail merge, achieving both of these goals can be uncertain.

1. Customizing the letter's content based on employee type or location is complex.
2. Populating templates with table data is a limitation of mail merge if you’re attempting directory mail merge.

Moreover, HR teams send password-protected documents to keep the information in the bonus letter confidential. Only the employee with a valid password can open the document. Creating password-protected letters is a hassle with the mail merge.

Even if the HR teams are using other formats such as XML and JSON, these issues would persist. Most of the HRMS systems don't support these features either.

Bonus Letter Automation

EDocGen provides an elegant solution for automating the bonus letters creation and delivery.

You can use your existing templates for letter generation. Compared to traditional approaches.

1. The system provides a centralized repository for templates, with fine-grained access control. These templates are version-controlled, ensuring that teams always utilize the most up-to-date versions.
2. You can generate thousands of letters in minutes, including password-protected PDF files.
3. Retains the format of data, which is otherwise hard in the mail merge.
4. The system provides you the flexibility to create different bonus letter formats from a single master. Utilizing conditional statements, you can dynamically populate sub-templates/paragraphs/text to generate region-specific letters.
5. With a single master template and the use of conditions, you can generate tailored bonus letters for each location. This system supports multiple languages, including German, French, Japanese, and more, for bonus letter creation.
6. Allows you to populate multiple letter templates with a single data file. If your organization has offices across the globe, you use multiple bonus letter templates. Populating each of them with a single data file makes the job easier.

How to generate Bonus letters

In the following sections, we’ll see how to generate bonus letters with an example.

Step1- Add tags to your template:

HR teams don't need IT support for the generation of the letters. Simply incorporate dynamic tags into your current templates, as shown in the example below, which includes dynamic text, tables, and conditional statements.

Text tags: The dynamic text fields are tagged with { } Ex: {Customer}, {Date}.

Conditional statements: As you can see in the template, the salutation depends on the gender value in Excel. {#Gender == "F"}Ms.{/}.

Formatting: You can format numbers using “format_number” in the tag. Through the tag {Bonus|format_number:","}, we are instructing the system to use the “,” separator after thousands. Similarly, you can format dates as well.

Image Population: Populate digital signature image through image tag {%Imageid}. In the below template see the tag {%SignImg} that populates the signature.

Step 2- Data Population for Bulk Generation: Upload the template into the system and populate the dynamic fields with Excel data. The system generates the bonus letters in bulk.

The following Excel generates two pay review letters for employees, Maria & Rob.

Step 3 - Email the Letter: If your Excel has the Email column, the system will automatically send the corresponding bonus letter to the designated employee.

Should the document be password-protected, you can mention the password in the email body. With the correct password, the employee will be able to access the letter.

If you want to auto-send these emails from your business email (Custom sender email), you can set up your mail account. The system also allows you to download all the generated bonus letters or sync them to cloud storage.