How can I customise the boilerplate content of my reports?

Nigel Ogram

I’m shamelessly re-using a reference I made in a previous user tip blog from November 2022, when I wrote about what we’d done at Genovo to help with Consumer Duty.

The standard Genovo boilerplate content is perfectly adequate, but we know that some firms will want to edit it, so it more accurately reflects their personality, advice service and preferences.

A Genovo report is built using bite-sized blocks of text called snippets. Genovo’s Report Content Manager allows you to customise the entire boilerplate content of your reports and report templates – from the covering letter and report title page to the various appendices of each Report Type. It does this in two ways:

1. 1. You can create a customised version of a Genovo snippet.
2. 2. You can create your own custom snippet.

The Genovo Knowledge Base

We have an entire Knowledge Base section dedicated to Report Content Manager, which as you’ve probably come to expect, also includes a short but really informative video tutorial. These 14 articles will tell you everything you need to know about how to use the Report Content Manager to make your reports your own!

So how might I use the Report Content Manager?

To be frank, however you want to! There are about 750 snippets in Genovo and you can create custom versions of any of them. Together with the ability to create your own custom snippets, there’s almost nothing that you can’t achieve with some imagination and a bit of effort. For example:

• Customise the ‘Title and Opening’ snippet of the Introduction section so that it says more about you and your firm.
• Add an image into a customised version of the ‘Title’ snippet of the Client Risk Profile section to explain attitude to risk and capacity for loss in a visual way.
• Create your own custom snippet that appears in the Introduction section of Suitability Reports and Review Reports to explain your firm’s value statement.
• Use a combination of custom snippets, customised content and report tags to change where certain Genovo content comes out in your reports.

OK – does the Report Content Manager do anything else?

1. 1. Keeping track of your customised version of Genovo snippets and your own custom snippets is really important, as Genovo updates only apply to the Genovo version of a snippet – updates won’t apply to your custom version. This Knowledge Base article explains how you can use the ‘custom snippets’ filter in Report Content Manager to quickly and easily view and manage your custom content.


2. 2. You can use the Report Content Manager to hide content too. This might be appropriate if you don’t provide advice in a particular area, for example mortgages or long term care planning. This Knowledge Base article explains how to do this. It’s also useful to hide one or more Genovo snippets when you’ve created alternative custom snippets elsewhere in the report.


3. 3. Finally, you can use the Report Content Manager to see what triggers the snippet’s inclusion in a report. Simply hover over the ‘information’ icon in the Trigger column, and you’ll see a pop-up message with a plain-English explanation of when the snippet is included.

Nigel’s knowledge

The Report Content Manager works hand-in-hand with Genovo’s new Report Section Manager which allows you to create additional custom sections to reflect your firm’s individual advice service. Once you’ve added a custom section, you can populate it with your own custom snippets, which can then be viewed and managed within the Report Content Manager.

The actual content of a report is hugely important, but it’s not the only aspect that makes clients want to read it. There are lots of other things you can do to make your reports visually engaging, such as creating an attractive Report Theme, adding your company logo, adding a report title page image, including adviser headshots etc.

Further reading

You’ll find loads more really useful information in:

• Genovo’s series of User Tip blogs;
• the extensive Genovo Knowledge Base;
• the collection of really useful Genovo matrices; of
• the ever popular Genovo video tutorials.

Of course, if you’re still stuck, or just need a helping hand, you can always submit a support ticket and we’ll get straight back to you.

Finally – make sure you don’t miss any of our hints & tips – subscribe and get email alerts when we update our blog.

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