After a rebrand
Your brand changed on Monday. Your Word documents did not.
A rebrand is announced, the website and the signage are handled, and then somebody opens the shared drive. Hundreds of procedures, forms, reports and proposals are still carrying the old logo, the old colours and the old document numbering. The new template exists. Nothing is in it yet.
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.
Only the documents people notice get fixed
The client-facing ones are reformatted first, the internal ones wait, and a year later both versions are still in circulation.
The old template keeps coming back
People start from the last document they wrote, not from the new template, so old branding quietly reappears in new work.
Attaching the new template does not do it
Pointing an old Word file at a new template changes very little: hand-applied fonts, manual numbering and direct formatting all survive and keep overriding it.
Reformatting by hand edits the words
Somebody retyping a heading or a clause to make it fit is the most common way a controlled document quietly changes meaning.
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
- Policies and procedures
- Report and letter templates
- Proposal and tender packs
- Forms and registers
- Method statements
- Training material
Who usually owns it
- Brand or marketing director
- Head of document control
- Quality or IMS manager
- Operations director
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 your rebrand backlog
Twenty minutes, no obligation, and an honest answer about whether this is a fit for your library.
Book a migration assessment