After a merger or acquisition
Two document estates, one company, and a date on a slide.
An acquisition closes and two sets of everything arrive at once: two management systems, two sets of procedures, two document numbering conventions and two templates that look nothing alike. Somebody is now accountable for making the combined business look and read like one company, usually by a date that was decided before anyone counted the files.
What usually goes wrong
These are the failure patterns we see described most often. None of them is a statistic; they are the reasons people give for why the backlog is still there.
Nobody knows which version is authoritative
Both sides have a procedure for the same activity. Until that is settled, converting either one just makes a tidier version of the confusion.
The acquired company keeps its own look for years
Without a migration, the smaller estate is the one that never gets done, and its documents keep turning up in front of clients.
Numbering collides
Two document-numbering schemes cannot both be right. The reference in the text has to survive whatever you decide.
Volume arrives all at once
Integration is the one moment where the whole library has to move together, which is exactly when hand reformatting stops being realistic.
How a controlled migration runs
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Step 1
A representative sample
Not your average document: a spread that includes the awkward ones. Scope and price come from what the sample shows, not from an estimate of what the library probably contains.
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Step 2
Template configuration
Your approved Word template is read directly: its styles, numbering, cover page and approval tables. No separate template language to learn and nothing to rebuild by hand.
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Step 3
Batch conversion with automatic checks
Documents are converted in batches. Each one is compared against its source word-for-word and scored for confidence as it completes.
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Step 4
Exceptions, then human acceptance
Anything low-confidence or unusual is flagged with a reason. You accept the output, document by document if you want to, and a report records what happened to every file.
Documents this usually covers
- Integrated management system procedures
- HR and finance policies
- Client-facing deliverables
- Forms, registers and checklists
- Work instructions
- Standard contracts and annexes
Who usually owns it
- Integration lead
- Chief operating officer
- Quality director
- Head of IT or knowledge management
The questions people ask first
How do we know the text did not change? +
Every converted document is compared against its source word-for-word. A conversion that would lose or alter a word is rejected rather than delivered, and the comparison result is recorded in that document's report.
What about the difficult documents? +
Some genuinely are difficult: fixed-layout forms, embedded objects, unusual section breaks. Those come back flagged for review with the reason stated. We would rather hand you a short exception list than a library you cannot trust.
What happens to our files? +
They are stored for a maximum of 30 days and then deleted automatically, and you can delete them sooner. The security page sets out exactly what is stored, where, and who can reach it.
Our template is not finished yet. +
That is normal, and it is worth sorting first. Retempla reads your Word template directly, so the cleaner and more decided it is, the better every converted document looks.
How long does it take, and what does it cost? +
That depends on how many documents there are and how varied they are, which is what the assessment is for. Self-serve pricing is on the pricing page; a scoped library migration is quoted after a representative sample.
Scope a post-merger migration
Twenty minutes, no obligation, and an honest answer about whether this is a fit for your library.
Book a migration assessment