Invest Appalachia Reduces Document Creation from Minutes to Seconds with PDF Butler

Invest Appalachia is a collaborative impact investment platform created by and for the people of Central Appalachia. Operating across Appalachian counties in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the organization works to ensure the region’s collective potential becomes greater than the sum of its parts. 

As a regionally representative fund, Invest Appalachia leverages deep relationships with partners in philanthropy, community finance, and community economic development. Its mission is rooted in addressing Central Appalachia’s long history of chronic underinvestment by building on existing capacity, filling critical capital gaps, and increasing coordination across the region’s investment ecosystem. 

The Challenge 

Invest Appalachia is anything but a traditional lender in how it works with communities and structures capital. But one place where it closely resembles conventional finance is documentation. Applying for and closing on funding involves multiple signatures and careful review, which can become an administrative bottleneck. 

Before implementing PDF Butler, Invest Appalachia relied on a patchwork of tools and manual processes to manage its documents. Agreements were created using Google Docs and spreadsheets, with data copied and pasted by hand.  

“There was no real document automation,” explains Mae Humiston, Director of Grants and Operations at Invest Appalachia. “It was a Google Doc template, pulling information from a spreadsheet and copying and pasting it in. That obviously left a lot of opportunity for errors.” 

In an industry where lending processes can already be complex, even small mistakes like an incorrect dollar amount or address can create confusion for clients and add unnecessary delays. Each document also took valuable staff time, time that could have been better spent supporting community-driven projects. 

The Goal: One Source of Truth and Fewer Errors 

When Mae joined Invest Appalachia, one of her priorities was streamlining internal operations. She implemented Salesforce as the organization’s central data management system and wanted to ensure that Salesforce became the single source of truth not only for data but also for all outgoing documents. 

“Our main frustration was that mistakes in documents just add to a client’s confusion,” Mae says.   “It’s also embarrassing, and each document we generated was costing time.” 

Why PDF Butler 

Mae initially went looking for a PDF generation tool and discovered PDF Butler through both Salesforce AppExchange and independent research. What ultimately stood out was not just the functionality but the human support behind the product. 

“I found a Reddit thread where several people had positive reviews of PDF Butler,”she recalls. “The specific thing that sold me was that people said they really liked the support team and that they worked with real humans. That was huge for me.” 

Beyond support, PDF Butler’s all-in-one approach also became a key advantage.

“I wasn’t necessarily looking for something with digital signing at first,” Mae explains. “But when I realized PDF Butler had both PDF generation and signing, it meant I didn’t have to switch between systems.” 

Implementation Process 

Invest Appalachia adopted PDF Butler when the team consisted of just three people. Today, eight team members use Salesforce, with six regularly using PDF Butler. 

For Mae, setting up the first basic PDF template took about a day using PDF Butler Academy resources and setup guides. “That was just a simple PDF generation pulling data from one object,” she says.

“Since then, I’ve been on a learning journey, getting deeper into the features and more complex use cases.” 

For the rest of the team, onboarding was even faster. “It’s basically a ten-minute onboarding,” Mae explains.

“Most of that time is just showing them optional steps, like downloading as a DOCX to edit and re-upload. The actual usage is as simple as clicking a button.” 

How Invest Appalachia uses PDF Butler today 

Today, all of Invest Appalachia’s documents are generated directly from Salesforce, eliminating manual data transfer and reducing the risk of human error. 

Key use cases include: 

• Funding agreements between Invest Appalachia and its clients 
• Deal summaries reviewed by the board, standardized for consistency 
• Term sheets used during negotiations 
• Modification documents for updated agreements 

“Salesforce is our single source of truth, and PDF Butler pulls directly from it into our documents,” Mae says. “That negates the need for manual data transfer entirely.” 

Measurable time savings 

Before PDF Butler, generating a single document could take 10 to 2minutes. With multiple documents per deal, this added up quickly. 

“We went from 10 to 20 minutes per document down to just seconds,” Mae notes. 

The impact goes far beyond internal efficiency. By removing manual, detail-heavy work, Invest Appalachia has significantly shortened the time between intake and closing. 

“My best guess is that we’ve reduced our intake-to-closing process by anywhere from 10 to 20 days. That’s because people don’t have to wait for a gap in their calendar to do this kind of work. They know that when they hit the button, the data will pull in correctly and be formatted the right way.” 

For Invest Appalachia, this means something very tangible: getting capital to communities faster. 

“Our work is to get money out to community-driven projects, and those projects often have a sense of urgency,” Mae explains. “PDF Butler helps us expedite that timeline. We get to say yes faster. We get to help our communities faster.” 

A partnership built on trust and support 

Beyond the technology itself, Invest Appalachia values the ongoing relationship with the PDF Butler team. 

“I’ve mainly been interacting with Jeremy, and he’s really responsive and helpful,” Mae shares. “Just super positive feedback from me.” 

As Invest Appalachia continues to scale its impact across Central Appalachia, PDF Butler remains a key part of its operational foundation, enabling the team to focus less on documents and more on building a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable economic future for the region.