Report templates built for older readers and busy advisers

Sized for the people reading it

LLRP's clients are 67 on average, and they read these documents while deciding what to do with their home. That's a lot to take in at any age, and small, crowded text makes it harder work than it needs to be.

I put the body text up a size and brought the columns in, because your eye loses its place on a long line when it swings back to find the start of the next one. I widened the margins, spaced out the lines and added clear headings, so a client can find the part they need without reading the whole thing.

More space means more pages, though, and a client who opens a long report full of text will feel they've been set homework. To break it up, the proposal walks through LLRP's process in six steps with a marker showing where the client is, key points sit in callout boxes, and the sections that stay the same for every client carry imagery, including the team's photo from their awards night.

Still a ten-minute proposal

Before I was involved, LLRP's web designer made a version of the proposal in PowerPoint. It looked lovely, but adding and removing pages, saving to PDF and wrestling with text boxes slowed the team down, and they went back to Word.

An adviser at LLRP puts a proposal together in about ten minutes from a bank of set paragraphs, and a paraplanner turns round a suitability report in about half an hour. I built both templates in Word so those times stay the same.

Anything specific to the client shows in bright red, so the adviser changes the words, turns them black and moves on. The formatting lives in the styles, which puts a callout or a new table one click away. The team also got a how-to-use guide and an example client document for each adviser, so everyone could see a finished one before writing their first.

Safe in fifteen pairs of hands

Up to fifteen people at LLRP use these documents, each on their own copy and their own machine. With that many hands on the files, it doesn't take long before no two copies match.

I saved the templates as .dotx files, so opening one starts a fresh document and the template itself can't be saved over. Every adviser has their own, with their name, qualifications, contact details and bio already in place, which means nobody can send a client a colleague's details by mistake.

The look is hard to knock out of shape too. All of it sits in twenty-seven paragraph styles, so if someone pastes in text that arrives in the wrong font, one click puts it right.

Made for the printer they've got

LLRP send clients a printed copy as well as a PDF. The proposal goes out single-sided on thick paper, stapled and tucked into a wallet with a business card, and the suitability report goes out double-sided.

Office printers can't print to the edge of the page. Colour that runs off the edge needs a professional printer and a guillotine, and big blocks of ink can come out patchy on an off day, so I kept the colour inside the margins. On the suitability report I mirrored the margins like a book's, leaving room on the inside edge for the binding.

For clients who'd rather read on screen, advisers save the same file to PDF from Word with nothing to reformat. Before sign-off, Sam printed both documents in the office to check they came out as they should.

One change, a fresh set for everyone

Advisers pass exams, change phone numbers and join the firm, and each time that would mean someone opening every template and editing it by hand, with good odds of missing one.

I keep the master, with the date in its file name so the latest is obvious. All the adviser details live in one spreadsheet, and a script I built reads it and rebuilds every adviser's templates in one go. It refuses to write anything if a detail is missing, so no adviser ends up with a half-finished template.

When LLRP need a change, I make it once in the master and send back a fresh set, along with a how-to-update guide for anyone who'd rather make small edits themselves.

Report templates built for older readers and busy advisers

Looking smart is just one part

Sized for the people reading it

Still a ten-minute proposal

Safe in fifteen pairs of hands

Made for the printer they've got

One change, a fresh set for everyone

James Wilkinson DipPFS

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