Since the mid nineties Pathways has automatically generated various state agreements automatically as a fixed report. The complex formatting, colouring and layouts of most state agreements have historically not been particular "auto create" friendly so we had to build highly complex custom reports. Simple things like your attendance details field for a placement being too long would spill over and break the layout - and this is increasingly common as the forms are rarely designed with their actual practical use in mind (they are legal docs first and foremost).

From Pathways Classic (9.9) and later including Pathways Cloud in 2013, all agreements have been painstakingly recreated from their PDF source into editable word files - to the pixel. What this allows us to do is set these agreements up using our integrated mail merge and briefcase function so they work like any other letter or proforma you produce.

The benefits of this are obvious:

1. You can adjust the agreement if needed (for example independent schools etc.)
2. For fields that may be sized poorly for the data you can tweak the layout easily in Word
3. Distributing the agreements is easy - just use the PDF and email function built into Word
4. Packaging the agreement up with other documents is easy - it's just another set of pages

This new flexibility is a further step away from "locked in" reports needed in the past, and towards a more flexible and open document generation system from all our Pathways products.