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Solution · Other solutionsEvery field comes from the HR record, and the signature comes from a phone
Employment letters generated and signed in minutes
Employees request a certificate in Microsoft Teams, a robot fills the approved template from the HR record, the signatory signs from anywhere, and the letter is delivered, filed and logged.
Executive summary
A letter whose every field already sits in the HR system should not need three days and a signature hunt.
We build a document service, not a faster way to edit a Word file.
Turnaround drops from days to the time it takes a signatory to tap, because assembly and routing happen the moment the request is made.
the SharePoint template library; the signed-document library under Purview retention; Outlook delivery
Business problem
HR documents
HR document requests are small, urgent and constant. A landlord wants proof of employment, a bank wants income, an embassy wants a letter in English, a court wants dates of service. Each request arrives by e‑mail or at the office door, queues behind case work, and is produced by copying an old document and editing it.
Signatures set the pace, not the work. The letter has to wait for a specific manager to be in a specific building, and in a company whose HR managers travel between sites that is a day, sometimes three. Nothing is recorded, so a second request for the same letter starts from the beginning, and the question "what have we confirmed about this person, and to whom" has no answer at all.
The problem survives because it looks clerical. The HR system holds every field the letter needs, but the letter function it offers is either unused or does not match what the local bank wants, so the Word file remains the process. Meanwhile the cost lands almost entirely outside HR: on the employee who waits, and on the institution that draws a conclusion about a company that takes a week to confirm somebody works there.
How it works today
This routine is recognisable wherever HR administration is split across regional offices.
- PersonAn employee e‑mails HR or walks into a regional office and asks for a certificate
- PersonAn administrator adds it to a list, opens the HR system and reads the employment data
- SystemLast month's letter is opened in Word and the name, dates, position and salary are overwritten
- WaitingThe printed letter waits for the authorised signatory, who is travelling between sites
- PersonThe signed letter is scanned, e‑mailed or handed over, and a copy goes into a personal folder
- Risk of errorA stale field survives the overwrite, because find and replace does not read paragraphs
- Risk of errorNothing is logged, so a repeat request or a dispute years later starts from an empty desk
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Behind every exception is an hour nobody logged.
- Twenty minutes of an administrator's time is the visible part, and the smaller one. The employee's part is a visit, two follow-up e‑mails and, for frontline staff, time off the floor to collect a piece of paper.
- Delays are paid for outside the company: a mortgage rate that moves, a visa appointment missed, a flat let to somebody else. None of it appears in the HR budget and all of it appears in what the employee tells colleagues.
- A wrong salary or a wrong date in a letter to a bank or a court is a personal-data error with legal weight, not a typo, and it is discovered by the recipient rather than by the sender.
- Without a log, HR cannot prove what it confirmed when a dispute surfaces three years later, and the person who wrote the letter has usually left by then.
Cost of inaction
Six regional teams keep producing several thousand letters a year from copies of copies, and the chance of another wrong salary reaching a bank rises with the count rather than with anybody's carelessness. Requests grow with headcount, with turnover and with the number of institutions that each want their own wording, so the queue expands without anyone deciding that it should, and every signatory absence adds a day to every letter in that region.
Employee hours are the row nobody defends in a budget, because they are not spent in a department that has one. Neither is the reputational part: an employee who waits a week for proof that they work here draws a conclusion, and so does the bank on the other end. Both are paid for in full and neither appears in a management report.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A facility-services company with 6,200 employees in cleaning, security and maintenance across two countries, with HR administration run from six regional offices; Workday holds the employment data.
Around 540 document requests a month: employment certificates for banks and landlords, income confirmations, work-period statements for social insurance and reference letters, in two languages.
Letters are produced in Word from old copies and signed by regional HR managers who travel between sites. Turnaround is three to five working days, and employees regularly visit an office to chase.
Twenty minutes of HR administration per document plus 25 minutes of the employee's own time per request; signature availability, not the work itself, sets the turnaround.
The request is made in Microsoft Teams with type, purpose, language and recipient, a robot fills the approved template from the HR record, the signatory signs through SharePoint eSignature from wherever they are, and Outlook delivers the letter while SharePoint files it with an audit trail.
In the modelled case turnaround falls to the time it takes a signatory to tap, stale fields disappear because every value is read at the moment of issue, and HR can finally answer what was confirmed to whom. Modelled, not measured.
Proposed solution
We build a document service, not a faster way to edit a Word file. The employee opens it in Microsoft Teams, on a laptop or on a phone at a site, and chooses four things: which document, what it is for, which language, and who receives it. Where the recipient is a third party, the consent is part of the request rather than an assumption made later by whoever assembles the letter.
A UiPath Robot then reads the current employment data from the HR record through the UiPath Integration Service and fills the approved template held in the SharePoint library. Templates live there with an owner, a version history and the language variants beside each other, which is the end of the desktop copy. The output is a PDF carrying a request reference, and the fields in it were read seconds earlier rather than inherited from last month's letter.
Signing is where the days used to go. Standard documents are routed through SharePoint eSignature, so the authorised signatory signs from a phone between sites and the signed copy lands back in SharePoint with its signature audit trail and a Purview retention label. Outlook delivers the letter to the employee, or to the consented recipient. Anything that is not standard, an unusual wording, a request from a court or an authority, a disclosure beyond the agreed fields, becomes a task in UiPath Action Center for an HR specialist with the draft already assembled and the record attached. Nobody starts from a blank page, and nobody starts from the wrong page either.
Microsoft Teams as the request surface, including mobile; SharePoint template library with versioning, metadata and permissions; SharePoint eSignature with its audit trail; Microsoft Purview retention labels; Outlook delivery; UiPath Action Center tasks in Microsoft Teams; UiPath Orchestrator queues and audit log
The document catalogue and request form, the template mapping from HR fields to each letter and language, the assembly robot, the consent and disclosure rules, the signature routing, the exception path to an HR specialist and the turnaround reporting
Employment-data reads from Workday through the UiPath Integration Service connector, or from SAP SuccessFactors through SAP OData; delivery to third-party portals where an institution insists on its own channel
How the automated process works
- PersonThe employee requests a document in Microsoft Teams, choosing type, purpose, language and recipient
- AutomationA robot reads current employment data from the HR record and checks which facts may be disclosed to that recipient
- AutomationThe approved template is filled from the record and rendered as a PDF carrying a request reference
- PersonThe signatory signs through SharePoint eSignature, or an HR specialist drafts the non-standard wording in Action Center
- AutomationThe signed document is filed in SharePoint with its signature audit trail and a retention label
- AutomationOutlook delivers the letter to the employee, or to the third party the employee consented to
- SystemThe request is closed and logged, and reporting shows turnaround by document type, region and language
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Intake with document type, purpose, language, recipient and recorded consent
- Reading the current employment data at the moment of issue, never from a previous letter
- Filling the approved template, producing the PDF and routing it for signature
- Filing the signed copy with retention, delivering it and logging every document issued
People decide
- Every signature; the letter goes out under a named person, not under a robot
- Non-standard wording and answers to courts, authorities and social insurance
- What may be confirmed about salary or conduct to a third party
- Template ownership and the legal review of wording in each language
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Every entry can be checked in vendor documentation. The evidence class is stated next to each one.
Inputs
- the request in Microsoft Teams
- the mobile form for staff without a desk
- the document catalogue with purpose, language and consent
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- the SharePoint template library
- the signed-document library under Purview retention
- Outlook delivery
- the request log and its reporting
Human touchpoints: the signatory in SharePoint eSignature; the HR specialist in Action Center; the employee's consent captured on the request
Technologies used
the request surface, including on a phone at a site, with type, purpose, language and consent
Aread the employment data, assemble the document, route, file, deliver and log every letter issued
Acurrent employment data and access to the template and evidence libraries
Athe versioned template library with owners and language variants, and the library of signed documents
Asignature from anywhere, with the signing audit trail recorded and tracked in Approvals
Adelivery to the employee or to the consented recipient
Anon-standard letters and requests from authorities routed to an HR specialist with the draft attached
Aretention labels on issued documents and the audit record behind the signature
AIllustrative economic model
The arithmetic is open, so it can be argued with.
Eighty-five per cent of this work can be assembled by a machine, and that share sits inside the 459 in the first row rather than being applied to the total; the other 81 requests a month stay with a specialist. Twenty minutes covers opening the HR record, copying last month's letter, overwriting the fields, printing and filing, at €30 an hour fully loaded. The employee's own 25 minutes per request is not in this table and is priced under it. Every figure here is an assumption of ours.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Turnaround drops from days to the time it takes a signatory to tap, because assembly and routing happen the moment the request is made
- Errors from copied letters disappear: every field is read from the employment record at the moment of issue
- Administration effort moves to the exceptions, which is where a regional HR team's judgement is actually worth something
- HR can show exactly what was confirmed, about whom, to whom and when, because every letter is filed with its signature trail
- Frontline employees stop spending working time travelling to an office for a piece of paper, and stop hearing that it will be ready on Thursday
The management view
- Turnaround is measurable per step, so the signature wait stops being invisible and starts being a number somebody owns
- Request volumes by type, region and language show where a template is missing and where a policy question keeps arriving as a document request
- Signatories work from a queue rather than a pile, and an absence no longer adds a day to every letter in that region
- Templates have an owner and a version history in SharePoint, which ends the copy on somebody's desktop and the wording nobody approved
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Control is not an add-on.
- The robot reads the HR record with a service account limited to the fields the templates use, and its password sits in a credential store that the workflow can call but no developer can read
- Salary and other sensitive values appear in the generated document only; they are not written into Teams messages, notifications or process logs
- Delivery to a third party requires the employee's recorded consent, and any disclosure beyond the agreed fields stops for a human decision rather than proceeding on a default
- Signed documents are filed with a Purview retention label and their eSignature audit trail, and robots run in the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud while the documents stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant
Why now
E‑signature is now native in SharePoint with its audit trail in Microsoft Purview, which removes the last reason a letter had to wait for a manager to be in a particular building
Workforces without desks now carry Microsoft Teams on a phone, so the request can be made from a site instead of from a queue at an office door
Meanwhile the arithmetic runs: €4,590 a month of administration, plus 225 hours a month of employee time that this company pays for twice, once in wages and once in what people say about working here
Relevant executive roles
Administration time moves to cases, and a wrong letter to a bank stops being a monthly probability
A logged, consented record of everything the company has confirmed about every employee, available years later
A request type with clear rules, a measurable turnaround and a queue instead of a door
Common questions and objections
Most institutions accept an electronic signature with an audit trail behind it. Where one genuinely does not, the signatory signs the generated letter on paper, and the assembly, the filing and the log still happen.
That is why the catalogue comes first. The variants that actually recur become templates, and the rest reach a specialist with the draft and the record already assembled instead of a blank page.
It does not. Disclosure to a third party needs the employee's recorded consent, and anything beyond the agreed fields stops for a person to decide before a document exists.
When this is not the right solution
- The HR system already generates and signs these letters in the format your institutions accept, and employees use it
- Volumes are a handful a month, handled the same day by somebody who is always in the building
- The employment data is unreliable, in which case automation would issue errors faster and with a signature on them
A question for the next management meeting
In how many of our six HR offices could somebody produce today the last certificate issued from that office, with proof of who signed it and when?
Implementation approach
Delivery runs in stages, so it can be stopped at any point.
We deliver
- A document catalogue built from a quarter of real requests, grouped into templates and reviewed with legal
- The request form in Microsoft Teams, including the mobile path for staff without a desk
- Template mapping per document and language, with owners and versioning in SharePoint
- The assembly robot, the consent and disclosure rules and the exception route to an HR specialist
- Signature routing through SharePoint eSignature, filing with retention, delivery and turnaround reporting
We need from you
- Every letter type issued in the last quarter, with the counts and the languages
- Read access to the employment data and named template owners on the HR and legal side
- The authorised signatories, and pay-as-you-go billing enabled in your tenant for SharePoint eSignature
Stages
Discovery
Letter types from a real quarter, grouped into templates, with wording agreed with legal
Design
Request form, field mapping per template and language, consent rules, signature routing, security model
Build and pilot
The three commonest documents in one region with two signatories, measured on turnaround and errors
Rollout
Remaining templates, the second language, the other regions and third-party delivery, with hypercare
Quick win. Effort is driven by how many genuinely different templates survive the catalogue exercise, how many languages they need, and whether legal wants to reopen the wording while it is being mapped.
A mortgage offer expires on Friday, and the certificate is behind a signature.
Send us the three certificates you issue most often and one month of request counts by type. You get back a working mock-up of the Teams request and the finished, signed letter.
Send your three commonest templatesThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
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