Making Your Word Template the One Pental Fills

Reports come out two ways, and most firms use both. Every document has a built-in PDF made from your branding, with nothing to upload, and there is your own Word template, which the platform fills. This guide is the second. It lives in Settings, on the PDF & DOCX tab, in the Document Templates card, and the button is Open the Document Builder. The builder makes a template for each kind of document the portal writes, the report and the attestation letter among them, which is why it is not called the report builder.

Drop in the document you send today

1. Press Open the Document Builder. If it asks Which document is this?, choose the kind of document.
2. Drop a .docx on the page, or choose one: your current template, or a report you have already sent. A delivered report is usually the better start, because it shows the builder every section and a real finding written out. Your file is never edited, and nothing is kept until you save.
3. With an AI provider connected and Start building as soon as it is uploaded left on, the build starts the moment the file is read. The first time, it says what the AI will do and asks once. Your document goes to the provider connected in Settings, AI, and nowhere else.

With no provider connected the screen says No AI provider connected, and you place every field yourself, as described further down. Connecting an AI provider takes a few fields in Settings, AI. With no template of your own yet, our penetration test report template is a free Word file to start from.

Watch it build

The build shows its stages as it goes: Reading the layout, Placing Pental’s fields, Checking its own work, Finding sections still missing and Taking out the last client’s details, with how far through it is and how many fields it has placed so far. You can keep working anywhere in Pental while it runs, and Stop ends it after the part it is on. Refreshing the page stops it too.

Check what it did, then preview and save

It ends on a review card: Built. Read it through, then save, or, when something needs you, how many things do before you save. Four counts say what it did (fields placed, sections replaced, sample findings removed and details taken out), and Needs your attention lists whatever it could not settle, each with what to do about it. Everything the AI changed is marked in the document, Undo takes back the last change, and How the build went gives its own account.

The AI can put a field in the wrong cell or read a section as something else, so read the document through. Then press Preview the pages to see the real pages filled with example content, and Save as my template when they look right.

This is the part worth being careful about. A template that keeps another client’s wording will carry it into real reports, and nobody notices until one has been delivered.

Point at where things go

Whether the AI went first or not, every placement is yours to change. Click a place in your document, then choose what belongs there from the panel: the fields on every finding, the sections you write once per engagement, the client and the job, your people, the counts. Drag them across instead if you prefer. What you place is marked with a chip, and one click takes it out again.

The panel lists your own setup. A field you have switched off is not offered, one you have renamed appears under your name for it, and anything Pental does not hold yet can be added there and then as a finding field or a report section.

Say what repeats

A report lists findings twice, once as a row in a summary table and once as a section of its own, and both need marking so every finding gets one. Hover a table row and choose to repeat it. On the finding itself, click its heading and choose to repeat that. The finding’s own title is the one heading that changes, so a field goes on it; every other heading names its section and stays.

If you uploaded a finished report

A section written out in full, an executive summary of four paragraphs say, should be replaced as a whole rather than having a field dropped on its first paragraph, or the rest of that wording appears in every report you produce. Every heading offers to replace what is under it. And the report contains every finding somebody wrote: the moment you mark one as the repeating example, the builder counts the others and offers to remove them, because one example is all a template needs. A build by the AI does both of these for you, and the review card counts what it did.

Look at it before you commit

Preview builds the template exactly as saving does and fills it with example content, two example findings among it, so what you are looking at is the template you are about to save rather than an impression of it, and you can see that a repeating section really repeats. The panel also says what is still needed and why: without a title every finding is untitled, without somewhere to repeat the report shows one finding however many there are. Saving with something missing is allowed; it just says so first.

Your work is kept as you go. Drop the same file in again after a refresh or a closed tab and the builder says You were building this before, with Pick up where I left off or Start fresh.

Managing the templates you have

Each kind of document has its own row. Upload (or Add Template once there is one) takes a finished .docx, and a kind can hold several templates with one of them the default. Styles shows the styles chosen for code, headings, captions and lists, and lets you change them. Tick Produce the PDF automatically and the filled document is also made into a PDF, contents page and page numbers included, in your browser, and kept as the final PDF unless you uploaded one yourself.

Several templates on one row are how a firm doing overflow work for another consultancy reports in that consultancy’s style while its own clients keep getting its own: reporting in another consultancy’s Word template covers it.

Then generate a real one

Run a report from an actual engagement rather than an empty one. Rendering is mechanical, so the same engagement produces the same file every time: if two runs differ, the problem is in the document, and fixing a template that renders inconsistently covers why. How to write a penetration test report covers what goes in the sections themselves.

The Document Builder, your Word templates and the Placeholder Key are in our free, open-source reporting tool as well, for a firm that wants only the reporting, on its own server.