Does your business use 4 or more tools to manage your document flow? What if just one platform could do all that without ever needing another sign in?

Hyperbole, you say? Then you haven’t experienced Zoho Writer, who is celebrating their 20 year anniversary this year.

Zoho Writer is a powerful online word processor built for seamless document creation, editing, and collaboration. Over the past 20 years, it has evolved from a simple word processor into a full-fledged work processor that automates workflows, streamlines document reviews, and connects with business applications such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Sign, AdobeSign to increase productivity. Available across platforms, Zoho Writer works on the web, as a desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and as a native mobile app for iOS and Android, ensuring you can work from anywhere, even offline.

“Let’s take a marketing analyst on a five person team who needs a signed vendor agreement back by Thursday,” says Balaji V., product expert for Zoho Writer.

This hypothetical marketing analyst must first draft a document in something like Microsoft Word. Then perhaps she might run it through a writing assistance software like Grammarly to improve its structure.

Following this, she emails the document to a few colleagues for review – and/or approval. Finally, she loads her document to a digital signature solution like DocuSign.

Once signed, the agreement gets filed in yet another application, this time a shared drive.

The Problem with a Fragmented Approach

First, notice how a fragmented approach means potential issues when managing your document throughout the process.

With every step in the process potential issues emerge. As your marketing analyst cuts and pastes the document into Grammarly and then uploads it into DocuSign new versions are being created.

Once signed by the vendor yet another version will be loaded into your team’s shared drive.

Oh, and don’t forget the versions emailed out to colleagues for input and approval.

When the responses come back with suggested changes, will the right changes find their way into the final version of the document to be signed by the vendor?

What if these versions begin to “quietly diverge” as the document moves through the process?

“A client signs off on the wrong pricing, legal reviews a clause that got fixed two versions ago,” explains Balaji V. “And by the time someone catches it, it’s not a formatting problem anymore.”

Multiple Applications, Multiple Sign-Ins

Depending on your business’s setup, some of these applications may well exist on the same platform.

However, this particular document’s journey could just as easily require as many as four or more separate tools with the same number of different log-ins.

“It feels like a scavenger hunt with a deadline attached to it,” Balaji V. adds.

But what happens if a single platform manages this entire document life cycle with no need for multiple application handoffs or logins?

One Platform to Rule Them All

Now watch how Zoho Writer unifies all these functions under one roof – and one login!

“Let’s take an offer letter,” Balaji V. suggests.

In this example, your business has completed the hiring process for a new position. A team member must now draft a letter formally offering the successful candidate the job.

But instead of starting from scratch, your team member uses Zoho Writer to speed up the process.

Start with one of Zoho Writer’s “Offer of Employment” templates. Or use Zia, Zoho’s AI writing assistant, to create the letter for you.

You can co-author the letter with other team members by simply sharing it within Zoho.

And you or other team members collaborating on the document may also want to ask questions of other team members.

No problem! Zoho Writer allows you to highlight and tag a section of the document and leave a comment.

All of this means no need to send copies of the document back and forth in emails. Only one version of the document exists within Zoho Writer.

Personalize offer letters with merge fields for details such as the candidate’s name, position, start date, salary, and more.Then connect a Zoho Sheets file containing all the candidate’s information. Generate a merged letter containing all relevant details.

The letter goes to the candidate. You can also include an acceptance letter template.

The new hire simply fills in the applicable fields with their personal information.

Et voila`!

Once they’ve filled in their information, Zoho automatically generates an acceptance letter.

Zoho Writer automatically stores the completed offer letter and acceptance letter in your team’s shared drive.

The workflow requires no additional sign-ins or credentials and generates no additional copies of the documents.

And in this way, Zoho Writer enables you to send out multiple offer letters quickly without anyone on your team having to retype anything.

It allows applicants to rapidly respond by filling in a few fields.

And it files everything on your shared drive – all without much involvement from your team at all.

Compare Zoho Writer to Your Current System

Without Zoho Writer, what would this process look like? It’s not too hard to imagine.

Our team member drafts the original offer letter in Word. From there she needs to copy and paste it into her favorite email platform.

Maybe she sends it to three colleagues who need to weigh in. That’s three additional versions of the document floating around out there.

Each email comes back with a different set of suggestions and notes. She’ll need to somehow synthesize this input into a single revised draft. This makes yet another version of the document.

If she’s lucky, this ends the review phase. However, more likely she’ll need to email the document off to a manager or two for final approval.

And if these managers have additional input she’ll need to create yet another version of her document. (You can see where this is going!)

After this, she needs to format her document, perhaps importing it into a tool like Adobe Acrobat. She’ll use a tool like Jotform to collect any additional data.

She’ll upload that document into a tool like DocuSign for final signature.

And finally she’ll drop the document into a shared cloud drive for storage. (Hopefully she labeled it carefully because several more versions of the document are already in there.)

And if she or her team want to automate any part of this, it requires yet another tool to do so.

Forget 4 or 5 other tools and sign-ins. Now, it looks like we’re talking about 6 or 7.

Think about all the cost, inefficiency, roadblocks to collaboration, slow turnaround, poor compliance, and intensive IT overhead all of this implies. See below!

What Makes Zoho Writer a Better Option?

Benefits of Zoho Writer include lower costs, more efficiency, better collaboration, faster turn around, improved compliance and reduced IT overhead.

Take a look at some specifics.

Lower Cost

Consider the savings of just eliminating all those subscriptions for extra tools alone.

Say you manage a hotel and tiki lounge in Honolulu, Hawaii.

You constantly send out vendor agreements to food and beverage suppliers, waste management services, linen and laundry services and more.

But you also regularly send out offer emails to new management and staff candidates recruited both locally and from the mainland.

Cancel subscriptions to individual word processing, AI assistance, document creation, digital signature, document management and other software.

Use Zoho Writer and Zoho WorkDrive for all your document creation, digital signature, document management and team collaboration needs at one low cost.

More Efficiency

Consider how much easier content creation becomes when writing, layout, final approval and publishing happens in one platform.

Suppose you own a digital marketing agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You maintain blogs, social media channels and email marketing for nearly 100 businesses in the region.

Your team creates content, adds formatting and design elements, gains client approval and publishes or emails that content multiple times a day.

Imagine needing to rely on one tool for composing, another for tightening up prose, and still another for formatting and design.

Then imagine versions cut and pasted into emails and sent off for feedback and eventually approval.

Finally, imagine if suddenly all this could be done in a single software platform.

Better Collaboration

OK, we mentioned this above, but it bears repeating.

Imagine you are a tax expert from Asheville, North Carolina or a political strategist in Kennebunkport, Maine.

You want to create ebooks and blogs promoting your expertise. Zoho Writer offers the tools to create and export ebooks and to publish content directly to WordPress and other blog platforms.

You hire a content writer to beef up your prose and a graphic designer to create design elements for your blogs and covers for your ebooks.

Zoho Writer allows your team to collaborate easily within the platform with “share”, “comment” and “edit” permissions.

So you can highlight, tag and leave comments about changes you want made. Or you can share the content with other colleagues to get their feedback before publishing.

Faster Turnaround

Zoho Writer offers faster turnaround. Just look at the whole process end to end.

You organize an annual thought leadership conference in Tuscon, Arizona.

Every year, this involves recruiting speakers, and contracting with audio visual, catering, event management and other vendors.

Your team must get vendor and speaker agreements out and get them signed early locking in these crucial players.

Using multiple tools to create documents, collect signatures and keep track of which vendors and speakers have committed seems like a recipe for disaster.

A single platform like Zoho Writer helps you follow documents through the process and respond early to problems.

Improved Compliance

A single platform means fewer sign-ins – and less chance your credentials end up in the wrong place.

Imagine you run an IT integration contractor in Alexandria, Virginia with clients including several Fortune 500 companies.

Using multiple platforms to communicate with security conscious clients who may be sharing sensitive information with you creates huge risks.

Creating documents in one tool, formatting them in another, using a third platform for collaboration and a fourth for collecting signatures involves a lot of sign-ins.

With your credentials always out there, clients may wonder how long until someone gains access to your files – and by extension, their information.

Reduced IT Overhead

This makes it ideal for businesses that would rather not spend all their time on their technology.

Imagine you run an architectural firm in Mobile, Alabama. You want to spend your time working on projects for your clients, not trying to automate a workflow.

Still, you will need to create and collect signatures and approvals for owner-architect agreements, scope of work proposals, consulting and non-disclosure agreements and more.

You may also want to share initial sketches, floor plans, material and finish samples and more with a client for feedback as the project progresses.

Zoho Writer allows you to do all these things and more without the need for an IT consultant to configure a bunch of software tools never designed to work together.

“For SMBs, the main challenge is people,” adds Sathish Kumar Giddi, Product Marketer for Zoho Writer.

The company wants to make sure its platform helps small business owners do more with less.

Keep What You Have

This all sounds great, you say. But your business already possesses a whole library of documents.

Maybe you run an employment agency in Provost, Utah and already maintain a huge shared drive of contract templates for clients. You also likely possess templates for job offer letters etc.

Or perhaps you own a series of tourism blogs in Panama City, Florida. Your editorial team keeps a drive filled with past and upcoming articles at various stages of production, photos, logos and more.

Will you need to start all over after moving to Zoho Writer recreating all your documents from scratch or simply creating all new content?

Of course not!

Zoho allows you to easily take the documents you already have and migrate them to Zoho Writer.

Once there, your team reaps the benefit of seamless collaboration while building on the library of documents you’ve already created.

In Conclusion

In today’s economy, the flow of documents keeps your small business running. These documents include price quotes, contracts, offer letters and much much more.

“What’s changed is what that document is now expected to do on its own,” explains Balaji V.

“It collects information, routes its own approvals, triggers workflows, updates other systems, collects a legally valid signature. A document today isn’t really a file anymore. It’s a complete process,” he adds.

Zoho Writer offers a way to keep that flow on a single platform and automate it.

This saves you the cost of subscription fees for other tools you no longer need because Zoho has consolidated document management under one roof.

It saves you work as Zoho’s virtual assistant Zia can do everything from pulling data needed for contracts and offer letters to helping draft a final document.

It aids with compliance and security. Multiple logins aren’t necessary because everything happens on the Zoho platform.

This means no credentials being shared in places they shouldn’t be and no multiple versions of documents floating around causing confusion – or worse.

For more on how Zoho Writer and Zoho WorkDrive help simplify your business operations, visit the website or request a demo today.

This article, “Zoho Writer Brings Small Business Document Workflows Into One App” was first published on Small Business Trends