Conga › Document automation
Conga Composer, Sign
and document automation
Template design, conditional assembly, generation at volume and eSignature. On Salesforce, and against back ends that are not Salesforce at all.
How document automation usually goes wrong
The pattern is remarkably consistent, and none of it looks like a crisis until a customer notices.
- Templates live on individual desktops, so there is no single current version of anything.
- People copy and paste from the CRM into Word, which is where the errors enter.
- PDFs are bundled by hand and moved around by email or SFTP.
- Nothing validates the data before the document is generated, so mistakes are found by the recipient.
- Peak season means more people rather than more throughput.
At one international education group this was running at roughly 2,200 transcripts a month across 50 to 60 users, with accuracy problems serious enough that a university partner raised concerns. That is the point at which document automation stops being an efficiency project.
What we do
Template design and rationalisation
Turning a folder of near-identical documents into a small set of templates with conditional logic. Fewer templates is the goal, not more.
Conditional assembly
Clause and clause-bundle selection by rule rather than by hand. At a Dutch property group, 50 to 60 clauses are selected per lease from a 700-clause library, without a person choosing them.
Generation at volume
Starting with button-click generation, then moving to Conga Trigger and Batch as volume grows. The phasing matters, because automating a broken template just produces errors faster.
Composer API and Merge API
Generation invoked from outside the CRM entirely, including from middleware and custom applications.
Conga Sign and web forms
Signature flows including multi-signer routing, preloaded internal signatories, and status and executed documents coming back to the source record.
X-Author, Orchestrate and Grid
Word and Excel authoring, orchestration of multi-step generation, and the Salesforce productivity tooling that usually comes up in the same conversation.
Generating against back ends that are not Salesforce
Most Conga document automation content assumes Salesforce underneath. A growing amount of the work we do does not.
A current engagement at a German forging group generates quote documents from Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Dataverse: an Azure Function assembles the data, calls the Composer Merge API, produces the document, and passes it into a two-signature Conga Sign flow. Before quoting it, we built and tested the full generation path end to end in our own environment, which is how we were able to cut the estimate from eight weeks to six and fix the price.
Do it yourself, use a partner, or buy expert hours?
Not every document automation problem needs an implementation partner, and we would rather tell you that early than bill you for finding out.
| When it fits | What it costs you | |
|---|---|---|
| Self implement | One or two straightforward templates, a capable admin in house, no integration | Time, and the risk that template design decisions made now become expensive later |
| Expert hours | You have the hands but need architecture review, complex template design, data mapping or performance tuning | A small block of senior time, advisory rather than hands-on |
| Full implementation | Volume, conditional assembly, integration, multi-country or multi-language, or a compliance requirement | A project, with the estimate coming after discovery |
Questions
Can Conga Composer generate documents from a system other than Salesforce?
Yes. The Merge API can be called from middleware or a custom application, and we currently run this against Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Dataverse through an Azure Function into a Conga Sign flow.
What is the difference between Composer, Trigger and Batch?
Composer generates the document. Trigger fires generation automatically from a record event. Batch runs generation across many records at once. Most implementations start with Composer alone and add the other two when volume makes manual generation the bottleneck.
How many templates should we end up with?
Fewer than you have now, almost always. Conditional logic inside a well-built template replaces a large number of near-duplicates. At a global insurer, two core templates assemble four distinct agreement documents.
Can you handle multiple countries and languages?
Yes, and the governance around it matters as much as the generation. Karan was invited by Conga to co-present a webinar on exactly this, covering generating documents across multiple countries and languages with proper governance.
Do we need Conga Sign, or can we keep DocuSign?
Either works and we implement both. Conga Sign is simpler when everything else is Conga. If DocuSign is already embedded in your legal process, we integrate to it bidirectionally rather than forcing a change.
Explore the rest of the Conga practice
How many documents are still being made by hand?
A document automation review looks at what you generate, how, and where the errors come from, then tells you what is worth automating and in what order.