The How to series · Post 24
How much of Monday is reformatting documents to fit someone else's template
For any small-business owner whose team rebuilds documents into other people's templates: about 76 hours a year on this sketch, and one narrow way to start.
Monday, 9:40am. A client replies: good work, now send it in our template, and the afternoon has a hole in it. Across town, an electrician's office copies a job sheet into the supplier's portal layout while a director's report gets retyped for the board pack. Same information, new wrapping, every week.
The loop this post is about: reformatting documents to fit someone else's template. It runs everywhere. The CV rebuilt into a client's format. The job sheet copied into the office layout. The report retyped for the head office pack. The inventory reshaped for a supplier's portal. Every business has a version of it, and nobody budgets for it because it never looks like work. It looks like Tuesday.
But it's a defined, repeating job with a right answer, which makes it exactly the kind of loop worth measuring before you spend anything on fixing it.
Before someone says it: yes, software exists. Generic tools still choke on bespoke templates, and fixing their output takes as long as doing it by hand. That's why most small teams still reformat manually, and why any fix has to end at a person approving the draft.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
- 5 documents a week reformatted by hand across the whole team
- × 20 minutes each = 100 minutes a week
- × 46 working weeks = 76 hours a year, about two working weeks
- × £30 an hour = £2,280 a year
One measured example exists, and it's recruitment: Totaljobs surveyed UK recruiters in 2025 and put admin at 17.7 hours per vacancy, roughly £17,000 per recruiter per year. A solid slice of that is one document copied into another template. The CV is the loudest version of the loop, not the only one.
Score it: the three checks
- Hours. Two hours a week on the sketch, more where it's daily: 3.
- Repeat. The target template's rules fit on one page. That's what a template is: 4.
- Risk-if-wrong. The draft is checked against the template before it goes anywhere, so a slip is visible at the approval step: 4.
Verdict: two at 4 or more, start narrow. Pick the one document that repeats most and hand over its reformatting, with a person on the approval. Don't start with the scanned PDF nobody can read. Start with the clean, boring, weekly one.
Try one thing this week (free)
Pick your most-reformatted document. Count last week's copies and the minutes each took, then write the target template's rules on one page: the fields in the order the client wants, and the bits they always change. Judge it by Friday. If the rules fit on one page, the loop is handover-shaped. If they don't fit, you've learned something cheaper: which document to leave alone.
Where a person stays
AI drafts the reformatted document. A person approves it against the template, in about two minutes, before it goes anywhere. Nothing leaves unchecked. The drafter doesn't get the send button, and where a document carries money or a commitment, the approval belongs to a named person, not to a rule inside the software.
FAQ
Some of it is good, and we'll say when a tool beats a build. The problem is the bespoke templates: generic tools produce output that needs fixing, and the fixing takes as long as doing it by hand. That's why most small teams still reformat manually.
No. Each template's rules get written down once, per client. The machine drafts to those rules and a person approves. When the client changes the template, the rules page changes rather than the whole system.
It gets caught at the approval step, before it reaches the client. That's approval-first: software prepares, a person decides. A wrong draft costs two minutes. A wrong document that went out costs the relationship.
No. Recruitment just measured it first: Totaljobs put recruiter admin at 17.7 hours per vacancy in 2025, and a solid slice of that is copying one document into another template. The same loop runs in any trade where a document changes wrapping for a new reader: the job sheet in a builder's office, the statement pack in a letting agency.
Into the work that earns: the next placement or the next job, or into the follow-up that never got sent. We don't pretend it always goes somewhere noble. Sometimes it goes back into the evening, and that's a fine return too.