What do you use to assemble documents?

[Jake Chambers]

I know this is a shot in the dark and my Stepdad thinks I am wasting my time but I am hoping there is at least someone else out there in the place we are in and have an idea or two to explore.

I work for my Stepdad. He and his partner have over 2300 rental units mostly in the western part of the country. We have used a custom solution to assemble our documents for many years. The problem is the technology this is built on has reached its limits. We have to either try to get and keep old technology running or migrate to something else.

There is a replacement for the technology we are using but it is not from the original vendor, they went out of business. A new company started by some of the people in the original company has relaunched and we are considering this path.

But, before we go too far down this road I wanted to see if there were any other options out there that could do the basics we need.

Here are the basic use cases I need to meet going forward. They are all met by our current but very dated software.

1) Central control of content. We have to know the documents our lawyers approve are the documents generated in the field by our property managers and buyers.

2) Automatic updates between lease renewals. For example, if we decide there will be a 3% rent increase this year we need to apply that consistently across all renewals based on the information in the last lease generated.

3) Data securely protected. If the content or the data needed to complete a document is stored anywhere but on our servers we have to know the proper security protections are in place.

4) Draft review and approval and remote printing when approved. For example, the property manager enters the data but the review happens in our head office. Once approved, the manager can pull and print the completed document. The same is true for buying.

5) Documents must be accepted by the government. For example, when we sell we sometimes also finance. We have to generate HUD and other government forms in acceptable formats.

6) Has a well documented and supported API for integration.

There are other nice to haves but nothing we couldn't work around if these were met.

As I said, I know this is a bit out there because most of the investors here are not institutional types like we are. But, I figured I'd give it a shot.

Thank you for the time you spent reading this.