Institutions are frequently required to create and share official documents, receipts, and letters with students. Rather than enduring the clunky experience of exporting information between systems, Gecko provides a streamlined solution to the problem of document creation, allowing you to create highly customized PDF documents.
In supporting template tags and Liquid, documents can be fully personalized to the student they're created for.
Once generated, documents are visible in Contacts > Attachments. They can be configured to be visible to the user in their Portal.
Creating your document template
Document templates can be created, edited or deleted by navigating to Settings > Email & SMS Templates and clicking [+ New template] in the top-right corner.
Select Document as the template type and give your template a name.
‼️ Important note: The name of your template will be public-facing and visible to students if shared via their Portal. For example, if you named your template Fee Receipt, the document download name would be fee-receipt.pdf
The basic editor offers a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface, similar to what you see when composing an email with your personal or work email client. It supports images, hyperlinking, tables, template tags, and Liquid.
Set about creating your document and, when you're happy with your work, click Save changes.
Generating documents
You can use your finished document template to generate a corresponding document in one of two ways:
Manually - To generate a document for a student, navigate to Contacts and click on the contact record you'd like to use. Navigate to the Attachments tab and click the "Generate Document" button. Select the document template you'd like to use, and choose whether you'd like the document to be visible to the student on their Portal. Documents can also be downloaded, renamed, and removed.
Workflows - This allows document generation to be automated, conditional, and as a direct result of any interaction in Gecko, including forms, events, broadcasts, calls, and conversations. Documents can be generated programmatically whenever a workflow runs using the Generate document workflow. Choose your template and choose whether you'd like the document to be visible to the student on their Portal. Once generated, documents will be visible in the Contact > Attachments tab.
Sharing documents
There are two ways to share your generated documents with students:
Manually - Navigate to Contacts, click into the record of the student you wish to share a generated document with and head to Attachments. Find your document and click [
...] Actions > Download attachment. This will download a copy of the document as a PDF which can be shared directly with the student via email or cloud storage.Student Portal - Students visiting their Portal will be able to view and download any documents which have been made visible to them. To enable this functionality, head to Settings > Portal Settings and be sure to add the System Page > Documents menu item to your portal.
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