Saratoga Group simplifies document generation with PandaDoc API

The challenge

Saratoga Group is a real estate company that owns and operates mobile home communities across the US. Based in Knoxville, Tennessee, they are expanding, operating in a growing number of states nationwide. They have been looking for a way to eliminate the inefficiencies and ugly formatting errors they experienced while using DocuSign for hundreds of its agents across the United States.

They needed to:

• Upload PDFs and parse signatures and initials from it

• Insert signature and initial boxes into their multiple-document tenant leases

• Insert names, dollar amounts, and other data into their leases

• Find a solution that didn’t involve maintaining multiple templates for each state-specific lease

• Integrate a signature generation tool into their workflows, so agents in the field and staff at their head office could more easily work with their documents

The solution

Saratoga started to explore options for creating more readable, less error-strewn leases.

The free API sandbox from PandaDoc allowed Saratoga’s IT team to experiment and explore how PandaDoc could fit into their workflows.

Being able to use the sandbox meant that API integration was a smooth process. Saratoga describes their integration time as “insanely fast”, thanks to the extensive documentation that PandaDoc provides. It took Sam three weeks end-to-end from getting the API to publishing their finished documents.

They found the field tags feature to be particularly useful in inserting signature and initial boxes into their documents. “That feature of being able to parse field tags was huge. It meant that we could create varying contracts state by state. The API sandbox allowed me to see that this is exactly what we need, so I didn’t go any further with my research with Adobe Sign, HelloSign, and others.” Sam Hales, Software Engineer at Saratoga Group shared. “Since switching to PandaDoc, our leases are better formatted, contain fewer errors, and are far easier for our teams to work with.”

Sam was able to insert field tags into Saratoga’s PDF leases, allowing him to place signature and initial boxes wherever he needed them in the document. PandaDoc’s field tags feature inserts names, dates, dollar amounts, and other data into predefined text boxes. These fields can be customized into signature boxes, initials boxes, etc. Using field tags, Saratoga is now able to reliably generate cleaner documents with fewer errors. In addition to the ability to parse PDFs with field tags, Saratoga found PandaDoc’s competitive pricing options and unmatched user experience to be big factors in their decision.

Results

Integrating PandaDoc’s API into their workflows has drastically simplified Saratoga’s lease generation process. Now, Saratoga’s managers and agents can create a new lease by going into their database, selecting the name of the tenant, and clicking ‘submit’.

This simple process is all it takes to produce a new, fully populated, and correctly formatted lease. It has cut the time employees need to spend on document generation and simplified the process of gathering signatures from all parties. Sam says that since switching to PandaDoc, their leases are better formatted, contain fewer errors, and are far easier for their teams to work with.

PandaDoc’s API is fully documented and publicly available, meaning Saratoga were able to integrate it into their workflows within three weeks.