This article provides a deep dive into document management in Personio. It explains how to:

• Configure document categories according to your company's needs.
• Create, manage, and store document templates.
• Create a document for an employee using a template.

Create document categories

You can create as many document categories as you like, by going to Settings > Documents > Categories. The number to the right of a document category indicates how many documents are stored in this category in Personio.

With any category selected, click Edit to change the order of the document categories in the list. The lower the number in the Sort order, the higher the position it will have in the list. 

You can also delete and rename categories you created. Predefined system categories have a lock function, and cannot be deleted or renamed.

Tip
The document categories for candidate documents are predefined by the system. Use Recruiting Roles to define access rights more specifically.

Create document templates

Document templates save you time and effort. By creating templates with placeholders, gender variables, and other elements listed below, you can create documents that pull relevant employee data automatically.

The first step is to create your template using your chosen word processing program. Personio supports templates created in Microsoft Word(.docx/. dotx) or in OpenOffice (.dt/.ott). You can use any of these elements:

• Placeholders: If you use placeholders for all candidate or employee attributes predefined by Personio, they will be used when applying the template and automatically filled with the corresponding candidate or employee data. The placeholders are filled with the information that was previously saved in the candidate or employee profile. You can also create user-defined placeholders which can later be replaced with free text. The user-defined attributes cannot yet be filled automatically during the application process.
• Gender variable If your candidate or employee's gender has been entered into Personio, you can set the software to make gender-specific (grammatical) adjustments in your document automatically.
• Date formatting: If your template contains a date, you can decide the format it is displayed in. For example, the date "20.11.2020" can be changed to "Friday, November 20 2020".
• Text Blocks for Selection: With the help of text blocks for selection you can store several text blocks as selection options in the template. When you create a contract proposal, you can take different contract conditions into account, for example.
• E-signature placeholders: You can create document templates and contracts that can be signed electronically. You need to ensure that the process of requesting and obtaining signatures from multiple people works.

This article provides an overview of document templates best practices.

Upload document templates

Once you have created the document template, upload it to a specific document category, following these steps:

1. Go to Settings > Documents > Templates
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Add Template 
3. Choose the category you want to store the template in, and enter a name
4. Select the template language. The language you select for a template impacts how dates will be formatted. Further information on date formatting is available in this article.
5. Upload a file in the correct format.
6. Click Upload to complete the process.
7. Once you have uploaded a template, display it using the preview function, or get a copy by clicking the Download button. Only Google fonts will be displayed correctly in the document preview.

Tip
If you want work contract templates to be automatically displayed in the Recruiting section when you Create a job offer, upload them to the Work contracts system category.

Create a document for an employee using a template

To create a document that will automatically populate with a specific employee data, follow these steps:

1. Go to the relevant employee profile > Documents > Create new.
2. Search for and select a template from the Select template drawer that appears.
3. If the template contains multiple choice text blocks, choose the relevant one under Options.
4. If the template contains placeholders, fill out any missing variables and review the pre-populated variables.
5. If the template contains multiple choice text blocks, choose the relevant one under Options.
6. Click Preview changes at any point to preview the file on the left side of the screen.
7. Once the document is complete, under Document details, enter a name for the document and choose to save as a PDF or original format.
8. Click Create.

The generated document appears in the employee's Documents tab under the relevant category. Depending on your access rights, you'll be able to access the document and have the following options:

• Click the document name to see a preview.
• Click Edit to edit the document category, title, date , or comments.
• Download the document.
• Delete the document.

Tip
If you want specific stakeholders to have access to multi-upload (such as Finance for payroll documents), grant them access rights in Settings > Employee Roles > Access Rights > Imports > Document import.

Further information on document templates

The video below shows how to create and manage both employee documents and document templates. We also have a Help Center article on best practices with sample document templates for download.