Financial Review Template
for Pole Arnold
An example of a Word automated report with text library
Pole Arnold Financial Management provide independent financial advice to businesses and private clients.
Pole Arnold found they were spending too much time fixing formatting issues in their Financial Review reports. They needed a template that was easy to use and enabled them to produce professional-looking documents without formatting problems. They also wanted to be able to insert standard paragraphs, tables and charts. We developed an automated Financial Review template for them.
Report wizard
When a new financial review report is created an input box is displayed where the financial adviser selects all the advice options to be included in the report.
They then select the appendices they want to include in the review.
Text library
The relevant information for each advice option and appendix selected is then automatically added to the report. The relevant information can be text, tables, images, graphs or diagrams. This information is gathered from Pole Arnold’s text library. We set up the text library as a series of Word documents that staff at Pole Arnold can easily update as required. They can add and remove documents from the library and edit the content of documents.
When people are editing the report they can also access the text library and add standard paragraphs of text, tables, graphs or diagrams relevant to the section they are working on. They choose the standard text to insert from a drop-down list on the custom ribbon tab (see below).
Custom ribbon tab
The template includes a custom ribbon tab with buttons to run the custom functions we developed to help Pole Arnold’s staff use the template.
Formatting
Staff can easily apply formatting to headings and paragraphs by selecting the paragraph and applying a style.
Table formats
They can format a table in a choice of three styles.
Highlight and graph boxes
Add a highlight box or a graph box.
“Our reports are often complex and time-consuming and can cover a single planning subject or as many as six or seven. We normally use wording, tables and pictures from different sources which created a number of formatting problems for us and a report could take more than two days to complete. This was affecting our ability to keep up with the work coming in.
“We therefore needed a template that offered a facility to tick boxes for the appropriate subject and enables us to insert charts, tables and wordings which, at the press of a button, would automatically format to the correct font, spacing and style.
“The templates which Expert Office Documents created did all of these things and are very easy for us to use. Creating our reports will always be relatively time-consuming but they are now completed in a quarter of the time.
“We cannot recommend Expert Office Documents enough.”
Robert Bunting, Director, Pole Arnold Financial Management