Part 2 — Set Up Your Company · Chapter 12

Document & Email Templates

Paperwork is where service companies quietly bleed hours. BigWave’s answer has three parts. Document Templates generate filled-in Word documents from a work order. Deliverables track which required documents exist yet. HTML templates make the emails BigWave sends look like your company instead of like software. Set these up once and “send the report” stops being a task.

Document templates

A document template is a Word file you author, sprinkled with merge fields: bracketed codes BigWave replaces with live data at generation time. [WOID], [CustomerName], [SiteAddress], [ScheduledDate], your custom fields, the works. On any work order, Documents/Generate… picks a template, merges it and attaches the result.

The full list of available merge fields is downloadable from inside BigWave, and it’s long. The reference in Part 4 covers the syntax, including formatting options for dates and dollar amounts. Build your first template by taking the Word document you already use and replacing the blanks with codes.

Templates live at two levels, same as everything else. Global, under Setup, for company-wide paper like your standard service report. Per project, for paper only one line of work produces.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): the inspection project has a Panel & Emergency Lighting Inspection Report template. Tom finishes an inspection, generates the report, and the site name, panel custom fields and inspection result are already on it. He signs, uploads, done.

Residential (the Okafors): the global Service Summary template covers homeowners. One page, generated at completion, attached to the emailed invoice.

Generated documents can follow naming conventions with merge fields in the filename, so uploads sort themselves. “HG-014 Inspection 2026.docx” instead of “report(3).docx”.

Document folders

Folders organize the Documents panel on each record, and folder structures are definable globally or per project. Decide the folder names once, Photos and Signed Reports and Permits, and every work order’s documents land sorted. This matters most on commercial projects where a close-out package gets assembled per site. Co-mingle photos and reports and assembly becomes manual labor again.

Deliverables

A deliverable is a required document, defined by name, Signed Inspection Report or Before/After Photos, globally or per project. Work orders then show completion at a glance as Deliverables: 2 of 3, the project’s Deliverables report shows the holes across all work orders, and the home page carries a global Deliverables view for the whole company.

The distinction from plain documents is accountability. A document is whatever got uploaded. A deliverable is a checkbox with a name, and it can nag. Alerts fire when one is completed, chapter 13, and rollout close-out in chapter 22 is deliverable-chasing at scale. That’s why defining them on the work order template, chapter 9, pays off.

HTML email templates

Everything BigWave emails, quotes and invoices and alerts, can carry an HTML template so it arrives branded, formatted and readable on a phone. Templates use field codes, the email-side cousins of merge fields, to pull in the work order data, and they support format strings so dates and currency render properly.

Two practical notes. Email HTML is its own dusty corner of web technology, all inline styles and table layouts, so rather than hand-writing it, describe what you want to an AI assistant, paste the result in and iterate. That workflow works well here. Second, a template can embed a status action button: a link that moves the work order to a named status when the recipient clicks it, no login required. That button is the engine of the automated quote approval flow, built end to end in chapters 13 and 18.

Checklist

  1. Convert your two most-sent Word documents into templates first. Momentum matters more than completeness.
  2. Define the folder structure before uploading history, not after.
  3. Make every contractually required document a deliverable on the relevant project.
  4. Build one branded HTML template for invoices and quotes before going live. First impressions are made by the first email.
  5. Keep template source files somewhere versioned. The person who edits them next year won’t be the person who wrote them.