This lesson creates five letters at once from existing projects, edits one of them, and sends the batch. Allow about twenty minutes.
Do Send your first engagement letter first — this lesson assumes you have seen a single letter go out.
If your practice management system does not use projects, take the Without project route instead. The shape of the lesson is the same.
What you need
- Five clients, each with at least one active project in the current fiscal year
- Contacts with email addresses on all five — the batch will stop otherwise
- A letter template
1. Start the batch
Go to Engagements, select Batch create, then choose Existing projects.
2. Set what every letter shares
Choose the letter template and the engagement details. Everything you set here applies to all five letters.
Leave Include all clients in client group unchecked. Checked, it merges each group onto a single letter — useful later, confusing now.
Select Next.
3. Choose the work
You are now looking at every project across your clients. Filter to something manageable — by partner, by service line, by office — and select five projects belonging to five different clients.
Select Next.
4. Meet the error screen
If any client is missing engagement details, they appear under Engagements with errors with the gaps highlighted in red.
This is the most useful screen in the batch flow, and it is worth triggering deliberately at least once. Fix a client with Edit, or drop one with the minus icon.
5. Create, but do not send
Select Batch create engagements. Nothing goes to anyone.
Now navigate away from Engagements and back again. The batch needs the reload before it appears.
6. Find your batch
Your five letters are in the list as drafts, sharing a batch ID.
7. Edit exactly one of them
Open one draft. Change something only that client needs — a price, a contact, a paragraph in an unlocked section.
This is the whole point of a batch: shared setup, individual letters. Nothing you just did touched the other four.
While you have the letter open, turn on Highlight dynamic content and compare it with one of the other four. If your five clients differ in type or in the projects you chose, the paragraphs differ too: the template's blocks carry variants with conditions, and each letter in the batch had those conditions evaluated against its own client. To change wording on this one letter, select the block and choose Flatten rather than Edit; Edit, where you have permission to see it, changes the block in the template and therefore on every letter that uses it.
8. Send
Select the drafts you want to send, then Send to client.
You can send some now and others later. They have been independent from the moment they were created.
What you have learned
- Batch settings are shared; the letters are not
- The batch stops on missing data rather than sending something wrong
- Every letter can be edited individually before it goes out
Next
- Batch create engagement letters from existing projects
- Price a project on an engagement letter