Creating Document Templates

This guide explains how to create document templates tailored to your practice's advice documents and compliance requirements.

Overview

Custom document templates give you full control over how your advice documents are structured, matching your practice's compliance language, section order, and formatting.

While Claras provides a Template Library with ready-to-use templates, creating your own ensures documents match your needs. The template generator uses your instructions to create a structured template with appropriate sections and formatting.

You can start from scratch with natural language instructions or convert existing templates by pasting content from Word or PDF documents. Once generated, templates are ready to preview, edit and use immediately.

Creating Your First Template

Navigate to Templates → Document templates and click Create new. You'll see two fields that tell Claras how to generate your template.

The top field is where you describe the purpose of the template. Write clear sentences explaining what the document should contain and how it should be structured.

Creating a Template from Scratch

When creating a template from scratch, your description should describe the document's purpose and the sections you need. Include details about what information each section should contain, whether they should use tables tables or specific formatting, and any standard wording that must appear.

Examples:

Create a comparison check that reviews the Paraplanner Request to the SOA, identifying gaps, inconsistencies, incorrect strategies and recommendations between the reference documents.

A compliance check that helps our advisers identify gaps, inconsistencies, missing evidence, and remediation actions across the document. It should include:

• Executive summary

• Evidence of best interest duty (BID) and appropriateness

• Consistency checks across documents

• Disclosure and compliance items

• Implementation alignment

• File note and record-keeping quality

• Remediation plan

• Recommendations

Converting Existing Templates

This is the fastest way to bring across your templates to Claras. Copy and paste the content of your existing Word template into the bottom section, and the generator will recreate the structure while adapting it to work within Claras.

When converting an existing template, your description should focus on preserving the original structure and compliance content. For a Statement of Advice template, you could use:

Create an SOA template that exactly follows the structure, layout, and headings of the existing template. Add actual tables where needed rather than text. Keep all standard wording, disclaimers, and explanatory text exactly as written. Do not remove or rephrase any section. The final template should preserve the full compliance and formatting of the original document so it can be reused across clients without losing any required content.

This level of detail gives the generator clear direction about both the document structure and how closely to follow any existing template content you've provided.

Once generated, your template is ready to preview and use.

Testing Your New Template

Once your template is created, test it by generating a document for a client. Navigate to the Documents tab on a client profile, click New Document then select your new template.

Pay attention to whether sections contain the expected information, formatting appears as intended, and all content is preserved. Testing with real client data reveals issues that might not be obvious from viewing the template alone, such as sections that capture too much or too little detail in practice.

For a detailed walkthrough of the document creation process, see Create Advice Documents.

Iterate and Improve

Plan to capture feedback from your team and continually refine your template to optimise the output. Each refinement makes the template more precise and better suited to your practice's specific compliance and formatting requirements.

Last updated 27th May 2026 by Stuart