Policy and procedure writing services

Cherryleaf helps organisations create, review and improve internal policies, procedures, standards, manuals and employee guidance.

Most of the organisations that come to us have these things in common:

They have documentation that is either out of date, inconsistently followed, or not written down at all.
They often use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspaces.
They want policies that managers can actually apply with confidence, and procedures that hold up under audit.

We work particularly closely with HR, finance, IT security and corporate services teams. This includes organising and preparing your documentation for use in Microsoft 365, including Word, SharePoint and Teams. We can do the same in Google Workspaces.

The result is content that works for the people who use it and for the AI systems that increasingly rely on it.

We can tailor the project to your requirements. For example, one important procedure, a complete policy manual, or help consolidating documents across several department.

Discuss your project

Why internal documentation is more important than many people realise

Good internal documentation helps staff find the right answer without asking someone. It ensures consistent practice across teams and departments. And increasingly, it becomes the source of truth that your AI tools depend on for accurate answers.

None of that works the way it should if your policies and procedures are unclear or out of date, or if your content is scattered across different systems. Many organisations rely on knowledge trapped in people’s heads.

The outcome is often:

Staff waste time finding answers
Mistakes happen because outdated guidance was followed
AI systems give wrong answers with total confidence

We know policies and procedures are hard to write when everyone is busy running the business.

We can help you have clear policies, accurate procedures, and knowledge that stays.

Send us a sample document to review

How we can help

Policy and procedures writing service

Watch this video on YouTube

Create new policies and procedures

We interview your subject-matter experts to capture how your organisation operates and turn that knowledge into structured, practical documentation. We review the available source material and develop documents around your organisation’s approved requirements.

This can include:

Policies that explain principles, responsibilities and organisational requirements
Standards that set mandatory technical or operational rules
Procedures that explain who does what, when and under which circumstances
Work instructions for completing specific tasks
Manager and employee guidance
HR, finance and IT security manuals
Process summaries and decision guidance
Supporting definitions, forms and reference information

Review and rewrite existing documents

Your policies and procedures may contain the right information but still be difficult to use.

We can review and improve their:

Structure
Clarity
Consistency
Terminology
Level of detail
Navigation
Online readability
Cross-references
Roles and responsibilities
Ownership, approval and review information

We can make focused improvements to a small number of documents or apply an agreed standard across a larger collection.

Consolidate scattered or conflicting documentation

Policies frequently accumulate across departments, business units, acquired companies and online locations.

We can help you:

Identify what documentation exists
Find duplicated and outdated content
Identify conflicting requirements
Resolve inconsistencies with your subject-matter experts
Decide what can be retained and reused
Identify missing documentation
Develop a coherent structure
Create a prioritised plan for improvement

Audit your policy and procedures

You might know that your documentation needs attention without knowing where to begin.

A content audit can assess:

What documents exist and where they are stored
Which documents are current
Who owns and approves them
Which documents overlap or contradict one another
Whether important information is missing
Whether the structure and terminology are consistent
Whether employees can find and use the content
Which improvements should be prioritised
Whether your content is AI-ready

The output can be a practical remediation plan, a documentation inventory, or the scope for a larger writing programme.

The result

The result is a coherent source of information for employees, managers, auditors, as well as the digital tools that depend on your content. This gives everyone the confidence to make the right decisions without having to ask.

What you receive

The precise deliverables depend on the project, but they typically include:

An agreed project scope
A documentation inventory
A review of existing source material
A content model or documentation hierarchy
A proposed document structure
Draft and final policies, standards and procedures
Work instructions and supporting guidance
Standard document or SharePoint page templates
A consistent writing style and terminology
Defined roles, responsibilities and approval routes
Ownership, approval and review information
Recommendations for Microsoft 365 organisation and metadata
Links between related policies, procedures, standards and records
A list of missing, duplicate or obsolete documents
A prioritised improvement or migration plan
Guidance for maintaining the content after the project

We agree the deliverables, responsibilities and review process before the writing begins.

Who comes to us

HR directors

They need a policy library that managers will actually use, rather than a folder of documents that staff ignore and managers work around.

Often the trigger is an employment dispute, a merger, or the realisation that the staff handbook hasn’t been properly reviewed in years.

Finance directors

They need procedures that hold up under audit and survive the departure of a key team member. The finance manual exists, but it describes a system the organisation moved away from two years ago.

CFOs and Finance directors preparing for an investment, sale, or IPO

They need to demonstrate that the organisation is well-governed and its operations are properly documented. Often the prompt is an auditor’s recommendation or a request from an investor during due diligence.

IT directors

They need security and other IT policies that reflect how the organisation actually operates, rather than a set of controls written for a certification exercise that nobody has looked at since.

COO/Operations directors

They often work for growing organisations who recognise that the informal, word-of-mouth way of doing things has stopped scaling. The knowledge is in people’s heads. The risk is that it stays there.

How our policy and procedure writing service works

You’re unique, and your policies and procedures will be different from anyone else’s. Our process gives you the policies and procedures you need.

1. Discuss the requirement

We talk about your organisation, the audiences, the current documentation and the problem you need to solve.

2. Scope the project

We identify the likely documents, available source material, subject-matter experts, systems and stakeholders.

For larger or less defined collections, we recommend beginning with a pilot. We’ll produce one or two documents end-to-end so you can validate the approach, test the review process, and build internal confidence before committing to a full rollout.

3. Capture the knowledge

Our writers review your existing information and interview the people who understand the policies, controls and processes. We identify gaps, uncertainties and inconsistencies for your team to resolve.

We work remotely as standard, so there’s no need to arrange site visits or office access.

How much time will your team need to give?

Typically 2 to 4 hours per subject area, spread across the project. This is usually split into one or two structured interviews and a review round. We keep this as light as possible by doing the preparation work upfront.

4. Develop the structure

We organise the information around what employees need to know and do. This can include separating policies from standards, procedures, work instructions and supporting guidance.

5. Write and review the documents

We produce the drafts and manage an agreed review cycle with your subject-matter experts and other stakeholders.

Reviews are structured to avoid open-ended feedback loops. We typically use a two-round cycle. This comprises a content review followed by a final accuracy check, with clear deadlines and a named approver for each document.

When stakeholders have conflicting views on how a process works, we flag this as an explicit decision point rather than making assumptions. We can help facilitate the conversation, but the resolution stays with your team.

6. Finalise and deliver

We incorporate the approved changes and supply the content in the agreed format. You receive professionally written procedures you can immediately implement. This might be a set of Word documents, SharePoint-ready content, online guidance or material prepared for another system.

What you’ll need to provide

To get started, it helps to have:

A named project lead who can make or escalate decisions
Access to the subject-matter experts who own each process
Any existing documentation, however outdated or informal
A view on who will approve the final content

You don’t need polished source material or a fully defined scope; helping you work that out is part of what we do.

Not sure where your documentation is failing you?

Documentation debt accumulates silently: in outdated articles, missing coverage, inconsistent guidance, and content your AI tools can’t reliably use.

Cherryleaf’s Documentation Debt Audit identifies the highest-cost problems and tells you what to fix first.

Find out more

M&A policy and procedure integration

Mergers and acquisitions create an immediate documentation challenge. Two sets of policies, two sets of procedures, and a combined organisation that needs both to work as one.

We help integration teams carry out document inventories, resolve conflicting policies, capture undocumented practices, and build the documentation the new organisation actually needs.

Find out more about our M&A integration service

Optimising policies and procedures for Microsoft 365

Cherryleaf prepares policies and procedures for publication in Microsoft 365 environments (Word, SharePoint, Teams, or another agreed platform). Getting the most from these tools depends on the content being well-structured, consistently written, and logically organised before it goes in.

This matters more than ever if your organisation is using, or plans to use, Microsoft Copilot. Copilot retrieves answers from your internal content, This means the quality of your policies directly affects the quality of the answers your staff receive. Well-structured, unambiguous documentation produces reliable results. Poorly organised content does not.

We focus on the content, structure and user experience. Depending on the project, this can involve:

Document and page templates
Consistent titles and naming conventions
Metadata recommendations
Document ownership and review dates
Logical content groupings
Clear headings and modular sections
Links between related policies, procedures, standards, forms and guidance
Search-friendly terminology
Audience and sensitivity labels for consideration by your Microsoft 365 team
Recommendations for archive, retention and migration

Where specialist Microsoft 365 configuration, permissions, security controls, workflow development or software integration is required, we work alongside your internal technology team or implementation partner.

Apps to help with creating and maintaining policies and procedures

We can show you how you can build apps for creating and managing your policies and procedures, either as part of a policies and procedures project, or as part of a policies and procedures training course for your company.

Policy and procedures audit tool

The policy and procedures audit tool is a specialised web application we’ve designed to help teams systematically assess, prioritise, and improve their internal policy and procedures documents.

Managers responsible for policy governance, compliance or enablement, can add policies or procedures, and then rate them against key quality criteria such as accuracy, usability, and accessibility.

For each document, the tool calculates an overall quality score, visualises the assessment in a radar chart for an at-a-glance profile, and generates a ranked “Priority Update Queue” to highlight which documents require the most immediate attention.

It also provides actionable suggestions for improvement based on the provided scores, streamlining the process of documentation governance and enhancement. The priority list can be exported to a CSV file for easy sharing and reporting. The list can be also used for scheduling improvements to the documents.

Evaluating policies and procedures with AI personas

We have developed a free tool for evaluating policy and procedure documents from the users’ perspective. This is an important issue because some organisations spend considerable time creating policies that might not be working for their intended audiences.

Screenshot from our policy and procedure document persona evaluation tool

The tool helps policy and procedure writers, and UX researchers, evaluate policies and procedures from different user perspectives. By defining user personas with varying levels of expertise, backgrounds and preferences, it enables you to simulate how different staff members (and the public) would interact with your documentation.

See: Evaluating policies and procedures with AI personas

Policy and procedures dependency mapping app

Managing complex documents is a constant challenge for many organisations. A change in one manual can often affect several other policies. To solve this, Cherryleaf has developed an app that helps teams track these vital links.

The tool is designed to be simple and intuitive. Users can upload files directly to the platform. It supports standard formats, such as PDF and DOCX files. The app also handles digital content. You can provide a URL for any online documentation site. The engine will then analyse the text to find connections. The mapper focuses on two main types of relationships: dependencies and conflicts. Each result shows the source, the target, and a short description of the relationship, presented in a clear list.

See: Building a policy and procedures dependency mapping app

Policy audit simulator

The Policy Audit Simulator is an AI-driven app that simulates an audit of policy and procedure documents.

screenshot of an policy audit simulator app

Procedure to training content converter

The Procedure To Training Content Converter creates training content from policies and procedures documents.

screenshot of a procedure to training content converter app

Fix your procedures so your AI chatbot stops hallucinating

We help organisations prepare their internal documentation to be a reliable source for AI systems. This can be creating a clear structure, consistent terminology, accurate content, and appropriate modular length.

Discover if your documentation is ready for AI retrieval

If you’re deploying an AI support tool or internal assistant, your content quality determines your AI’s answer quality. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the technique that powers most AI assistants and support bots: the AI retrieves relevant content from your knowledge base, then generates an answer based on what it finds. If what it finds is outdated, contradictory, or too long to parse reliably, the answer will reflect that.

Cherryleaf’s RAG readiness audit tells you exactly what to fix, and in what order, before you go live.

The types of content we create or update

Finance policies and procedures

Accounting standards
Bank reconciliations
Budgeting and forecasting
Capitalisation
Claims and reinsurance accounting
Cost control
Creditors and accruals
Dividends
Finance manuals
Financial reporting and management accounts
Fixed assets
Foreign exchange transactions
Funding
Hedging
Income, debtors, and prepayments
Inter-company charges
Internal controls and risk management
Investment accounting
Invoice/expense accounting
Long term projects (including DevEx and CapEx)
Mergers and acquisitions
Payroll
Premium accounting and unearned income
Revenue recognition
Tax (Corporation, VAT)
Travel and expenses
Treasury and cash management
Year-end accounts

HR policies and procedures

Anti-bribery
Anti-modern slavery
Betting and personal financial transactions
Conflict of interest
Delegation of Authority
Disciplinary and dismissal
Diversity
Equality
Grievance
Intellectual Property and knowledge assets
Maternity
Onboarding
Performance management
Recruitment and staff induction
Relocation and travel
Serving the community
Staff handbook
Training and development
Whistleblower protection

Board level policies

Crisis management
Corporate risk
Executive compensation
Global operations (Board composition and responsibilities, Group structure)

IT security and data privacy procedures

Anti-virus malware prevention and detection policy
Business continuity
Controlled document procedure
Cybersecurity events and incidents
Disaster recovery plan
email and Social Media
Home and mobile working policy
Information governance
Monitoring and response policy
Network security
Policies that ensure you conform to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Removable media policy
Risk register
Systems updates procedure
User access permissions policy
Using Artificial Intelligence

Other policies and procedures

Operating procedures

Complaints handling
Workplace security

Public Relations

Crisis and emergency communications

Health and Safety policies and procedures

Supply Chain and procurement

Roles, responsibilities & authority
Preparation for procurement
Selecting the right procurement procedure and contract
Supplier selection
Negotiation
Award of contract
Management of the procurement
Close out and learning
Managing large capital projects

Sales and marketing policies and procedures

- Brand marketing
- Customer acquisition
- Sales team training and on-boarding
- Customer credit finance approval

What we don't do

We can’t tell you how to run your own business.

We are not lawyers, so we cannot provide professional legal advice on whether your documents comply with national or state regulations.

We also do not sell generic policy packs or boilerplate handbooks. We do have a number of policies that we have written in the past, which we may be able to adapt and repurpose for your situation. But we don’t sell document where you fill in the blank sections.

Case studies and examples

Our experience with complex documentation projects

Our journey began with a challenge few organisations face: nine government agencies merging into one.

Each member of the new senior leadership team knew their own agency inside out, but knew little about the other eight. We were engaged to capture, consolidate and improve policies and procedures from all nine agencies into a single, coherent set of online documents.

It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. We had to see the big picture while identifying the missing pieces: the undocumented knowledge living inside people’s heads, the inconsistencies between agencies, the inefficiencies, and the opportunities hiding in plain sight. We helped leadership see more than just what existed; they could see what needed to change.

That same challenge drives every project we take on today. We capture scattered information, bring order to complexity, make the unclear crystal clear, and surface the gaps that others overlook. Today it can also involve identifying opportunities to use AI and automation to improve processes.

It’s work we genuinely love, whether it’s for a new organisation forming its policies from scratch or for a large established company grappling with complexity.

Case studies

Creating an easy to use Listener Guide for the Samaritans and the Prison Service

Developing procedures for a rapidly expanding company

Case Study: Samaritans procedures clarified and put online

Examples of policies and procedures

We can provide examples of our work:

An HR policy for employing new staff
A controls-based finance procedure covering VAT reporting and payment
Management processes and staff responsibilities presented in a responsive online format
An online employee information portal
Procedures for a rapidly expanding organisation

Where confidentiality allows, we can also discuss relevant types of project during an initial conversation.

Below are some of the organisations we have helped write or improve their policies and procedures:

Academy chain
Derivatives trading company
Energy company (oil and gas sector)
Fire and Rescue Service
International sport academy/professional club organisation
NHS trust
Pan-European medical equipment and service provider
Retirement homes provider
Software company
Specialist insurance provider

How much does policy and procedure writing cost?

The cost depends on the scale and complexity of the work.

Most projects fall in the £5K–£10K range. More complex projects (larger organisations, multiple countries or departments, or a full policy library) can go up to £80K. We can bill clients outside of the UK in Euro or US dollars.

Important factors include:

The number of documents.
- The more documents you need us to create, the higher the total cost will be.
Their length and complexity
- More complex procedures take longer to document than simpler, shorter write-ups.
Whether usable source content already exists
The number of people or departments involved
The number of systems covered
Whether processes contain many exceptions or decision points
The extent of restructuring and rewriting required
The number of review rounds and approvers
Whether Microsoft 365 organisation or migration preparation is included

A project might involve:

Improving one important procedure
Developing a related set of HR, finance or IT security documents
Auditing an existing policy collection
Creating a departmental manual
Consolidating documents across several teams
Preparing a larger collection for SharePoint

We will discuss the requirement and provide a quotation before you decide whether to proceed.

For a larger or uncertain project, a paid audit or small pilot can provide a clearer estimate for the remaining work.

Our collaborative approach

You want your subject-matter experts to remain responsible for the accuracy of the underlying policies, controls and processes.

Our role is to make it easier for them to transfer their knowledge.

We prepare for interviews, ask focused questions and use existing material wherever possible. We then organise and write the content so your experts can review a structured draft rather than start with a blank page.

This means HR, finance, IT security and operational specialists can stay focused on their principal responsibilities while retaining control over the final documentation.

To provide you with an accurate quotation, we’ll work closely with your team to scope out the full project. Together, we’ll:

Develop a comprehensive list of the policies and procedures that need to be documented
Assess if any existing content can be repurposed
Determine the appropriate level of detail required for each procedure

There’s no obligation to move forward after receiving your quotation. We’re happy to provide this upfront consultation at no cost, so you can make an informed decision about how to best document your processes.

Ready to get started? Contact us today to discuss your policy and procedure requirements.

Find out whether your documentation is working for you

Your policies and procedures should provide dependable answers, support consistent decisions and preserve important organisational knowledge.

When they do not, employees lose time, managers repeat explanations and the organisation becomes too dependent on individual experience.

Book a free initial conversation to discuss:

HR policies and procedures
Finance policies and procedures
IT security policies and procedures
Microsoft 365 and SharePoint content
Creating AI-ready content
A documentation audit
A policy consolidation project
A pilot project
The likely scope and cost

If you already have internal documentation, send us a representative sample. We will review it and explain what appears to be working, what could be improved and what the next step might involve.

You can book a free discovery call. You can talk to us via Microsoft Teams, Zoom, GoToMeeting, or another video conferencing platform of your choice. We can discuss how we can provide your company with clear and actionable policies and procedures.

If you have existing internal documentation, we’ll review a sample of your and tell you plainly what’s working, what isn’t, and what the priority fixes are.

Our clients are based mostly around the UK, Europe and the USA (although if you are based elsewhere, we still may be able to help).

Email: info@cherryleaf.com

Book a discovery call

In this page