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Document assembly programs cost too much

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At a few hundred dollars a seat (exact pricing differs on product and licensing option chosen), document assembly software is relatively cheap when considering the benefits it provides. Lets say you spend $400.00 per seat. Each seat entitles a user to access whatever libraries and templates that have been built with your document assembly product. Well designed and programmed document assembly systems (conservatively) reduce document production times by around 300%. This is a huge increase in workload capabilities for each staff member that has this product. Multiply that across an entire firm, and document assembly software is not only "cheap", it is a solid investment that permits you to leverage more output from your current staffing levels, without reducing morale or requiring unreasonable work standards.

Of course, your upfront purchase cost will never form the larger part of your investment, unless you do nothing with your purchased product. The real cost can be broken down into four distinct areas:

  • Purchase price of the software. Invariably, this is the cheapest part of the entire cost. Low cost per seat isn't as relevant to you as the ongoing costs - the real costs.
  • Initial internal overheads and costs - installation time and related consulting costs. Learn & train users in the product. Time spent customising and/or developing. Your in-house developer's time. It IS a full time job - it is not something you just saddle a bright staff member with - this will yield little to no return on investment.
  • Professional/executive staff time spent embedding their knowledge into the system or, at the very very least, vetting and testing the documents produced by the system.
  • Flat rate vendor/consultant hours providing support, assistance and programming guidance (or programming works).

These are the real costs of document assembly (or any software acquisition) that will probably be larger than your purchase costs within a rather short period of time. Be warned - software companies make money on supporting you, not selling you a product.

Even with all this added on, it is STILL cheap as chips, so long as you do it properly.