Letter Templates - Letter Builder Docs

What templates are in this system

A letter template is the reusable definition of a document type. It belongs to a company, has a visibility mode, supports one or more languages, and contains per-language subject and content. Templates are not generated documents. They are the blueprint used later by requests and letters.

Important distinction: the template defines what a letter can say. The generated letter records what was actually said for one specific employee at one specific moment.

Core template features

Company binding
Internal or external visibility
Active or inactive status
Multi-language support through related language content
TinyMCE-based rich-text editing
Placeholder detection and display
Validation status feedback
Revision history and audit support

Internal

Use for admin-only or inside-the-organization document flows.

External

Use when employees should request the document from the employee portal.

Multilingual

Use when the same document type must print in more than one language without losing placeholder consistency.

How authoring actually works

Create the template and choose the company.
Choose external if employees should be able to request it; choose internal if it is intended for admin-only flows.
Select all languages you want the template to support.
For each language, write a subject and a content body.
Insert placeholders using the current delimiters, usually [[placeholder_name]].
Review the detected placeholder list and the validation status panel.
Save only when every language version uses the same placeholder keys.

Why placeholder consistency matters

The text of a translated letter can and should change to sound natural in each language. The placeholder keys should not. The system needs a stable set of keys so it can merge values into every language version reliably.

Good:

English: [[employee_name]], [[purpose]]
Amharic: [[employee_name]], [[purpose]]

Bad:

English: [[employee_name]], [[purpose]]
Amharic: [[employee_name]], [[ዓላማ]]

What the editor validates

Content is not empty
Content meets a minimum useful length
Placeholders can be parsed successfully
Placeholder sets stay aligned across every language

Why validation exists: placeholder drift across languages is one of the easiest ways to quietly break a multilingual letter system. The editor is intentionally opinionated here because it protects future generation and print behavior.

Why revisions are important

Template mistakes are expensive because they affect every future letter that uses that template. The revision history page exists so teams can inspect version history, preview older versions, compare a version with the current state, and restore a prior version if a bad change ships.

Revision workflow highlights

Versions are sorted newest-first.
The current version is visually marked.
Users can preview a historical version.
Users can compare a historical version to the current version.
Users can restore a historical version, which creates a new current state based on the old data.

Template design edge cases

Changing delimiters later: existing template text may no longer parse the way you expect.
Removing a language: think about whether employees still need to print historic letters in that language.
Switching visibility: changing internal to external exposes the template to employees immediately if other conditions are met.
Placeholder removal: deleting a placeholder from one language but not another usually creates validation trouble.

Sample body

<p>To whom it may concern,</p>
<p>This letter certifies that [[employee_name]] has been employed with [[company_name]]
as [[position]] in the [[department]] department since [[start_date]].</p>
<p>This certificate is issued upon the employee's request for [[purpose]].</p>
<p>Date: [[current_date]]<br>Reference: [[reference]]</p>