HR Letter & Certificate Maker

Six of the letters a small employer has to write are almost the same letter. This page treats them that way: one set of fields, a dropdown for the type, and wording that is built from what you filled in rather than pasted from a form with gaps in it. Here is what each letter is for, what belongs in it, and where people go wrong.

Six letters, one set of facts

A firm with thirty staff still has to produce proper paperwork. Somebody is hired, so there is an offer. They accept, so there is an appointment letter. Two years later they leave and ask for something to show the next employer, so there is an experience letter. A student spends a summer with you and wants a certificate. Somebody is promoted. Somebody, now and then, has to be given a written warning.

Look at what each of those letters needs and you find the same short list every time: who the employer is, who the person is, what the job is called, which dates matter, what the pay is, how much notice applies, and who signs. The letters differ in what they say about those facts, not in the facts themselves.

That is why this is one page with a dropdown rather than six pages. You fill the facts in once. The type you choose decides which of them are used and how they are worded. Switch from an offer to an appointment letter and nothing you typed is lost; the sentences around it change.

It also means the fields on screen change with the type. A notice period matters in an offer and in a resignation letter, and means nothing on an internship certificate, so it disappears. A stage of warning only appears when you are writing a warning. There is less to scroll past and less to get wrong.

Why the wording is written rather than filled in

Most letter templates are a finished document with blanks in it. You download one, delete the parts you do not need, and type over the rest. It works until it does not. The classic failure is a clause that refers to something you deleted: a sentence about the probation review in a letter with no probation period, or a mention of the annexed schedule when there is no annexe.

Here the paragraphs are assembled instead. Each one exists only if the facts behind it do. Set the probation to zero and there is no probation paragraph at all, rather than a sentence saying nought months. Leave the employee number blank and the sentence simply does not mention one. Turn the pay figure off and the salary paragraph goes with it.

A missing fact that the letter cannot do without is handled differently. If you have not typed a name, the letter reads dear [employee name], in square brackets, so that it is impossible to print by accident and hard to miss on screen. The same goes for the job title and the company. Those are the three things that ought to stop you.

The other benefit of assembling rather than filling in is that changing a field updates the sentence that uses it. Rename the job halfway through and the subject line, the opening paragraph and the acceptance block all follow. In a downloaded template you would have to find each one.

The handshake between you and the generator

Generated wording is a starting point, not the last word. Your handbook has its own phrasing. Your industry has its own expectations. Your predecessor wrote the last forty letters a particular way and the staff are used to it. So the body is an ordinary text box that you can rewrite completely.

The awkward part is deciding who wins when both of you are editing. The rule used here is simple. As long as the text in the box is exactly what the tool last wrote, it keeps the box up to date as you change the fields. The moment you alter one character, it stops touching that box and leaves your version alone, however many fields you change afterwards.

You can see which state you are in. Above the preview it says either that the wording is automatic or that it has been edited by you, along with a word count. If you have edited the body and then want to start over, Rebuild wording throws your version away and writes it again from the current fields. That is deliberate and it is the only thing that will overwrite your text.

Four boxes work this way: the subject line, the greeting, the body and the sign-off. Each is tracked on its own. You can rewrite the body entirely and still let the subject line follow the job title.

An offer is not an appointment

These two get muddled more than any other pair, and the difference matters. An offer proposes terms and asks for an answer by a date. Nothing is settled. An appointment letter is issued after the offer has been accepted, and states the terms as facts.

The wording reflects that. The offer letter says your employment would begin, your annual salary would be, the notice period would be. The appointment letter says is, in the present tense, throughout. It reads as a very small thing and it is not: a letter written in the present tense before anyone has accepted anything is a letter that looks like it has decided for the reader.

The offer also carries the things that only belong at the offer stage. It asks for a signed copy back by a date. It says the offer depends on references, on proof of the right to work, and on whatever else your recruitment policy requires. It points forward to the handbook rather than claiming to contain the terms.

The appointment letter carries what the offer left out. It confirms the start date that was actually agreed, gives the employee number, points at the handbook as part of the terms, and sets out how either side ends the employment. It is the document people dig out years later, so it is worth getting the detail right.

Experience letters and relieving letters

An experience letter states what somebody did and for how long. A relieving letter states that they have been released from their duties and that nothing is left outstanding between them and the employer. In some countries they are two separate documents; in many workplaces people ask for both and mean one.

The version here covers both, because it is easier to delete a paragraph than to write one. It certifies the role, the department and the span of employment, then describes conduct and performance, then says the person left of their own accord, served their notice, and was relieved on their last working day. A final paragraph confirms that dues have been settled on both sides. If you only need the first half, delete the rest.

The span of employment is worked out from the two dates and written the way a certificate writes it. A short spell comes out as a number of weeks. Anything longer is given in years and months, so a stretch from April 2019 to March 2026 reads as six years and eleven months rather than a pair of dates the reader has to subtract.

Because a certificate talks about the person rather than to them, there is a pronoun setting. They and them is the default and is safe. She or he can be chosen where you know it and the recipient expects it. It changes every pronoun in the letter at once, which is better than editing eight of them by hand and missing the ninth.

One more difference: a certificate is not addressed to anyone. There is no recipient block and no dear so-and-so. Instead it is headed to whom it may concern, which you can switch off if your organisation prefers a plain heading.

The internship certificate

An internship certificate is a short, generous document and its job is to be useful to a student. It should say what the internship was, how long it lasted, who supervised it, and what the intern actually worked on. The last one is the part students care about, because a certificate that says nothing about the work is a certificate that proves only attendance.

So there is a field for the main project or area. It goes into a sentence of its own: their main work was on the customer onboarding redesign, or whatever you type. A future employer reading that learns something. Without it the letter is a date range with a signature.

Short spans are handled sensibly. Twelve weeks comes out as twelve weeks, not as nought years and three months. The certificate also mentions a stipend if you had one and want it stated, and leaves the whole subject alone if you turn the pay figure off.

The wording avoids extravagant claims. It says the work and conduct were whatever level you picked, that the intern took direction, kept to deadlines and contributed. That is the sort of thing an employer can honestly say about somebody they worked with for a season, and it does not read as a form letter.

Promotion letters

A promotion letter has one job beyond the good news: it must be clear about what has changed and what has not. The letter here names the old title and the new one, gives the date the change takes effect, and states the revised pay if you want it in writing.

It then says plainly that all other terms and conditions remain unchanged and that continuous service is unaffected. Both sentences matter. People worry that a promotion resets something, and an employee whose service length feeds into notice, redundancy pay or leave entitlement has a real reason to want that in writing.

The previous job title has a field of its own, used only for this type. Fill it in and the letter reads promoted from Product Designer to Senior Product Designer. Leave it blank and it simply says promoted to the new title, which is right if the role is new rather than a step up from an existing one.

If the reporting line or the place of work changes with the promotion, update those fields and the second paragraph will say so. If they do not change, the letter says they remain as they are, which is worth stating because a change of title often makes people assume a change of manager.

Warning letters need more care than the rest

Everything else on this page records something everybody agrees about. A warning does not. It may be read months later by somebody deciding whether a dismissal was handled properly, so the way it is written matters more than its layout.

Write the incident as facts. What happened, when, and what the effect was. Not what you think of the person, not a characterisation of their attitude, and not a summary of every previous irritation. The field asks for what happened and the letter puts it into a sentence beginning the matter is as follows, which nudges you towards a plain account.

The stage of the warning is a separate setting: first, second or final. Say which one it is, because a warning that does not say where it sits in the sequence is difficult to rely on afterwards. The review period is another field, and the letter states how long the warning stays active on the file. An indefinite warning is unfair and, in many places, unenforceable.

Two paragraphs are there because they are so often left out. One invites a written response and mentions the right to be accompanied at any meeting that follows. The other says that signing the acknowledgement means the letter was received, not that the employee agrees with it. People refuse to sign warnings precisely because they fear it counts as acceptance, and putting that sentence in the letter usually settles the argument on the spot.

Warning letters sit inside a disciplinary procedure with its own rules about meetings, notes, representation and appeals, and those rules differ from country to country. The letter is the visible part of a longer process. If you are writing one without knowing what the rest of that process looks like where you are, stop and find out first.

Dates, money and the words under the figure

Dates are entered once, in the picker, and printed in whichever style you choose. Five are offered: 31 July 2026, July 31 2026, and the three numeric forms. The numeric ones are a real trap across borders, because 07/08/2026 is August in one country and July in another. If the letter is crossing a border, the month written out in words removes the ambiguity for nothing.

The date boxes are shared between all six letters, which creates a small problem: an offer starts in the future and an experience letter covers a stretch that already ended. Switching type would otherwise leave you certifying employment from September to August. So the dates are re-seeded when you change type, but only when the pair no longer makes sense for the new letter. Dates you have set deliberately are left alone.

Pay has an amount, a currency, and a period. The currency list covers the ones people are actually paid in, and the tool guesses a sensible one from your browser to start with. The period changes the noun as well as the number, so an hourly figure is described as an hourly rate rather than an annual salary.

The figure can be repeated in words underneath, which is standard practice in South Asia and the Gulf and rare elsewhere. Two groupings are offered, because they are genuinely different. One counts in thousands and millions. The other counts in thousands, lakh and crore, so 1,250,000 becomes twelve lakh fifty thousand rather than one million two hundred and fifty thousand. Words are written for whole units only and the figure is rounded to the nearest one, because a spelled-out fraction defeats the point of the check.

Making it look like your organisation

The sheet is a real letterhead, not a plain page. Load your logo, choose one of three header styles, set an accent colour and pick a serif or sans typeface. The footer along the bottom carries your address, contact details and registration line, and can be switched off if you print on pre-printed stock.

The logo is read straight from your disk into the preview. It is the one thing not kept between visits, so if you come back tomorrow you will need to load it again. Everything else you typed is still there.

Two switches earn their place. One adds a signature block at the foot of the letter, with ruled lines for a signature, a name in capitals and a date, worded for acceptance on an offer and for receipt on a warning. The other stamps a pale diagonal DRAFT behind the text, which is what you want on a copy circulated for checking. Nothing is more embarrassing than a review copy that gets filed as the real thing.

For a certificate the signature block is hidden, because a certificate is signed by the employer alone. That is one of several places where a control disappears rather than sitting there doing nothing.

Getting the letter out of the browser

Print opens your browser's own print box and sends only the sheet. The form, the panels, the adverts and the help are all left behind. From that box you can print on paper or choose a PDF destination, which is how most of these letters actually travel now. Going through the browser's own PDF writer keeps the text selectable and searchable rather than turning it into a picture.

Download PNG saves an image of the page straight to your downloads with no dialogue at all. That is convenient for pasting into a message, and it is a good way to keep an exact record of what was issued. Save as text pulls out the wording without any of the design, which is what you want if the letter has to go into a case management system or an email body.

There is a fourth export that is easy to overlook and probably the most useful if you write these regularly. Save details as JSON writes every field to a small file: the employer block, the letterhead settings, the signatory, the lot. Load it back before the next letter and only the person's name and the dates need typing. It also travels, so a colleague who issues letters from a different machine can start from the same house settings without retyping them.

Loading a saved file rebuilds the wording from what is in it. That is on purpose. Nothing from the previous person is left sitting in the body waiting to be printed with somebody else's name at the top.

What this page cannot do for you

It is a template, and templates do not know where you are. Employment law is national, often regional on top of that, and it moves. Statutory minimum notice, probation rules, what a fixed-term contract may say, what has to be given in writing and by when, how a disciplinary process must run: all of it varies, and none of it is built into this page.

Notice periods are the clearest example. The tool prints whatever number and unit you type. It has no idea what the legal minimum is where you are, and in many places that minimum rises with length of service, so the figure that was right for a new starter is wrong for somebody with eight years behind them.

The same applies to anything with money in it. A pay figure in a letter is a promise. If your payroll works on a different basis from the one the letter describes, the letter is the document somebody will point at later.

So use the output as a draft. If a letter creates a legal obligation, and an offer, an appointment letter, a warning and anything ending an employment all do, have somebody qualified in your jurisdiction read it before it is signed and sent. That advice is on the page itself, in the help, and here, because it is the one thing about this tool that is worth repeating.

Why none of this is uploaded

Staff letters are among the most sensitive things an employer keeps. A single page can carry a person's home address, their salary, their employee number and an account of something they did wrong. That is exactly the kind of material that should not be sitting in a queue on somebody else's computer.

There is no server behind this page. The letter is put together by code running in your browser, from text you typed into your own machine, and there is nowhere for any of it to go. The logo you load is read locally and never transmitted. That is not a policy that could be changed quietly; the page simply has no way of sending anything.

Your draft is kept in this browser's own storage so that closing the tab does not lose an afternoon's work. It stays on that device and in that browser, and Start again removes it. If you are working on a shared or public machine, that button is worth pressing before you walk away.