Setting up FormLizard - Businesses
Businesses, in fact most all organizations, move at the speed by which they can complete transactions. Whether it’s sales, purchases, hiring, or the dozens of other functions that business owners and managers must deal with. At the heart of nearly all of these functions are forms, contracts and other documents.
Common problems most organizations run into in getting these documents completed include:
- Using the wrong version of a form or contract
- Modifying an old contract and not finding all of the places that needed changing
- Employees making (non-authorized) changes
- Having to rewrite the same sections because there is no single place to keep track of it all
We created FormLizard to speed up your business’s ability to quickly get forms, proposals, contracts and more produced.
Please, note, we know documents, forms, business processes and software, but WE ARE NOT ATTORNEYS. The forms, text, and other elements of this tutorial are NOT SUITABLE for any use other than this training.
Getting started with FormLizard
The most common way we see our customers get started with FormLizard is by choosing the part of their business that is most mired in paperwork issues. For example, if no two sales contracts are the same and they should be, this might be a good place to start. Or, if customer registration forms are hand-written, incomplete, and backlogged in getting entered, this would be a good place to begin. Regardless, pick a place and get started. We recommend starting with one area and expanding your use of FormLizard over time.
Although most of our clients manage quite well on their own, for businesses that don’t want to take the time to setup FormLizard themselves, we offer FormLizard on a managed services basis. This includes setup and all ongoing document and form management. If you are interested in learning more, just email us at support@formlizard.com.
Build the process first.
FormLizard is designed to fit into your business processes, not force you to change your processes, so start by deciding how you want the effected part of your business to operate. Begin with the list of problems that exist and come up with solutions to the problems taking into account the unique capabilities of FormLizard.
Below are two examples of how FormLizard can fit into various business processes. The first describes a new customer registration process and the second addresses sales proposals and contracts. We chose these two examples because many other processes are similar. For example, whether a new customer or a new employee, there is data to get and forms to sign. The second example covering sales proposals and contract processes, could also be applied for most processes involving contracts such as purchase contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and the like.
New Customer Registration Process
For businesses that require initial information from customers, such as healthcare providers and financial service companies, getting the initial information is often problematic: manually entering the information, decipher handwriting, and dealing with incomplete forms are just some of the issues. Trying to automate the process with MS Word or PDF forms usually makes things worse. Further, no one would argue that handing a new customer a stack of forms to fill out is not the best way to begin a business relationship.
Consider the following process: With FormLizard, you put a link on your site with a note telling new customers to click the link to “Get Started” or some other phrase. When they click the link, they are brought to your branded FormLizard site where they can create their own account, and complete an online interview. With the online interview, they are asked for information only once, even if the same information appears on several forms. When they are done, they can print the documents themselves, or you can have them E-Submit the documents to you, so that you can directly access the documents and the data they entered.
As mentioned above, FormLizard does not force you into any specific process. For example, if you already have the customer’s email address, you can send them an email with a link to your FormLizard site rather than putting a link on your site.
We have many business users of FormLizard where the customer fills out some information, and the rest of the information is completed by their staff in-house. In these cases, the new customer would E-Submit the documents, and an administrator forwards them on to whoever in the company needs to deal with them. The administrator can also share them with multiple people, so the new customer documents are available to people in multiple departments. You can also grant users certain administrative privileges, so for example, all of the sales support personnel can access the E-Submit queue.
Sales Proposal and Contract Process
Issues that businesses often have with the process of creating proposals and resulting customer contracts include:
- Sales persons editing “standard” language in proposals and contracts creating one-off, non-standard contracts
- Use of the wrong version of the proposal or contract form
- Contracts missing information such as correct notice address, proper legal name of customer, and key dates
- Non-standard language from a prior contracts being inadvertently included in new contracts because the old one was used as a starting point
- Math errors
FormLizard eliminates all of these problems and gives you control over how “locked down” you want the documents. For example, you can limit the completed documents from being produced in anything other than a PDF format, preventing any changes to the standard language.
By making FormLizard the “go to place” for standard contract formats and other documents, you ensure that the latest versions will be used.
Use Conditional Fields (a type of field in FormLizard) to handle variations in the contracts. For example, you may have two alternate Warranty sections of a contract; one is your standard warranty and the other is an extended warranty. When the salesperson completes the online interview in FormLizard they would be asked if the customer gets the extended warranty. If they answer no, then the normal warranty clause is inserted, if they answer yes, the extended warranty clause is inserted.
Using conditional fields often eliminates the need for salespersons to make changes to proposals and contract documents, since FormLizard can be setup to handle all the flexibility they might need.
The diagram below shows an example of how this process would work.
Although we use proposals and sales contracts in this example, the approach can be used for all of your business’s legal documents such as:
- Purchasing solicitations and contracts
- Partnering agreements
- Subcontracting agreements
- Non-disclosure agreements
- Employment agreements
Imagine having one place to go to where all of the documents your business relies upon are setup for easy, error-free completion. That’s the power of FormLizard.
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