Not really a plan question, but...

[stevena]

We are a small TPA firm. When we put together our annual reports, we always have a lengthy cover letter which has on it pertinent info about the plan that year. Basically it says you are/are not top heavy this year and next, the 5500 is/is not enclosed (will be sent later), your plan did/did not pass testing, you do/do not have anyone who is 70 1/2 next year, etc....and there is standard language that goes along with each of those answers.

it is pretty time consuming to type all this out every year. We do save the prior year, but plans change, add stuff on, take stuff out, etc.....it is still time consuming.

I was wondering if anyone knew of a program, that works like this: you would go through a checklist and check off populated questions (like those above) and it would automatically create a letter from the options you chose.

Anyone know of a good option?

Thanks!

[Guest Pensions in Paradise]

We use a document automation program called HotDocs. This program could definitely accomplish want you want, but it is not cheap and there is a learning curve (depending how complex you want to make your documents). If you go to www.hotdocs.com you can download a free trial version.

P.S. - I am not affiliated with LexisNexis or HotDocs.

[david rigby]

Have you considered a merge between spreadsheet and a word processing template?

[stevena]

Yikes, I looked at HotDocs and it looks so complicated! I cant even figure out what it does....I downloaded the trial but I dont exactly know what to do with it...

I get that it could accomplish what we want...

Do you know....could it also create forms that our clients could fill out? Would it create a form that we could email our clients, and they would enter info into fields, tabbing from one to the next, and maybe checking off yes or no buttons? I am thinking if we could use this to create our annual questionnaire that we send out to clients, but also use it to create our year end letters, it would be so cool.

Do you have any idea what it costs initally? Is it available on a network or is installed into each persons computer?

thanks

[Fredman]

You can do all of that with Microsoft Office applications. All of our year end census/quesionaires are done in Excel. We don't even send them a letter anymore, everything they need is in the Excel file.

[Guest ElizabethMae]

I normally prefer Excel but another useful program is Adobe Acrobat (pro version comes w/Designer). I've used it to create a form sent via email or the participants could open from our webpage, all they had to do was type the information in the blanks and click send. Turnaround on responses/census collection was impressive.