When a document is the proof that someone earned a qualification, you cannot cut corners to produce it faster. Pädiko Akademie teaches people through online courses and issues the accredited certificates that carry their new qualification, in a closely regulated field where the layout, the fixed structure and the required seals have to stay exactly as approved. That responsibility is exactly what made the paperwork so heavy.
Building each certificate by hand used to take around twenty minutes, which is nowhere near feasible at the scale of tens of thousands of graduates a year. By designing one approved template in PDF Generator API and driving it from its own ERP, the academy turned that document into a click, and freed up roughly one and a half full time positions, without loosening a single compliance requirement. Daniel Hentschel, ERP Product Manager and Process Owner at the academy, walked us through how it works.
Building certificate generation for regulated education
Because the qualifications carry real weight, the accreditation behind them is strict, and the academy has to be careful with every document it issues. Each certificate also has to carry individual detail about the course and its curriculum, so no two documents are quite the same, and none of them can be sloppy. The fixed parts have to stay exactly as approved, while the course specifics change from one graduate to the next.
The challenge: a slow document, at a scale that could not hold
Before automation, the team built these certificates by hand in Word and other office documents. It worked, but it did not scale to the numbers the academy graduates.
“In the past we used docs and Word and whatever, and it took about twenty minutes per certificate. At our volume this is nowhere near feasible in time.”
The academy needed to automate, but with a hard constraint. The custom parts of each certificate still had to be editable to satisfy the accreditation rules, and the rest of the layout, the seals and the fixed structure, had to stay exactly as approved. Rebuilding a document from a blank page every time was not an option.
“We do not want to lose the rest of the template, because we would have to start from scratch to make a certificate on our own.”
The solution: one approved template, driven by the ERP
The academy built a single certificate template on PDF Generator API and wired it into its own ERP. When a graduate qualifies, the ERP collects the course history, the training hours and the project work, and a button sends those fields straight to the template. The approved layout stays fixed, and only the individual data changes.
The result is a live, automated flow rather than a manual chore. The vast majority of documents are generated automatically through the API for the academy’s own users, and the rest are produced by administrators for the individual edge cases.
“Does it work as expected? It works as expected. Thank you.”
Designing the template once in the visual editor
The certificate lives as a single template in the PDF Generator API editor, where the team designed the approved layout themselves. Producing a new certificate is then a matter of adjusting the course specific text rather than rebuilding a document, so the people who run the process day to day can work in the template directly without waiting on developers.
The impact: significant time back, and faster even by hand
The time saved is substantial. What used to take around one and a half dedicated positions now runs on its own.
“We had about one and a half positions only for making the certificates manually, and that is the time we saved by using PDF Generator API. And even with the individual ones it is still way faster, because we do not have to start from the ground. We can just adjust the certain texts.”
The academy now runs a steady volume of documents through PDF Generator API each month, and expects that to keep growing as more of its document types move onto the platform.
E-invoicing under German law
Certificates are only part of the story. The same document engine also carries the academy’s speaker paperwork, and that is where the European move to electronic invoicing gets interesting. Course speakers sign a contract that doubles as the groundwork for the invoices the academy receives from them, and German law makes those documents unusually demanding.
“German law wants that every single course the speaker gave since the founding of our company has to be listed. So if this would be an invoice, it would be an invoice with thirty pages.”
Today the academy generates the document itself rather than the structured electronic invoice format. That is the natural next step. PDF Generator API can produce the compliant XML alongside the PDF through its e-invoicing endpoint, the same capability clients in Germany, Poland and France already use to meet government requirements, which would let the academy turn its speaker documents into fully compliant e-invoices without new tooling.
Feedback answered in days
Regulation hands the academy a steady supply of edge cases, and instead of quietly working around them, the team tells us about them. For the rare document they produce outside the API, they wanted a free watermarked preview alongside a paid export without the watermark, exactly like an API generation. We came back within days rather than weeks, because that capability was already on the way. Separately, an earlier watermark export issue they had reported was fixed in a platform upgrade and confirmed working on their account.
Support that fades into the background
The academy first heard about PDF Generator API the best possible way, through a recommendation from the CEO of another company that already used it. Early on, support was hands on while the team worked through their custom corporate font, but once the rollout settled, the product got out of the way.
“In the early days I was talking nearly daily with customer support. But after the rollout we barely spoke to support. Most of the information was already there, and the devs could work really well with the API documentation.”
Conclusion
Pädiko Akademie had the hardest kind of paperwork to automate, the kind that has to satisfy strict regulation. Instead of trading compliance for speed, the academy designed its approved template once and let PDF Generator API and its own ERP carry the volume. The document that once took many minutes now takes a click, significant time went back to the team, and the same engine is ready to carry the academy into e-invoicing next.
Automating documents in a regulated field?
If your compliance requirements make document automation feel out of reach, PDF Generator API lets you design an approved template once and drive it from the system you already run. Keep the fixed layout and seals exactly as signed off, change only the data per record, and add compliant e-invoicing from the same platform when you need it.
