The processing of a Trade Finance application requires a bank to review a multitude of documents from various sources such as importers, exporters, steamship lines, and freight forwarders. The majority of the documents submitted for review by banks contain discrepancies. These discrepancies are both time consuming and difficult to catch. The document preparation and generation system, DocFlo, integrates the flow of documents into a common system that automates the generation of these documents by combining the template documents and form data from the bank's databases. By using Adobe PDF and FDF, documents and forms can be generated by end-users through a simple to use program provided by Adobe or by the accompanying web based form creation engine. The initiation of Letter of Credit through the bank backend systems are processed into our system through a SWIFT message parsing engine thereby directly importing many fields of information automatically for users to directly initiate and draw transactions through to begin their document preparation process. Interfaces for reporting and generation of documents also are provided to the bank users through hooks into legacy system software. Users can input both the data and document templates with complete mapping to their data. The documents can be customized to fit the original look of documents. The completed documents can be digitally signed or preliminarily signed awaiting receipt of the paper original. The usage of electronic documents allow for users to receive and deliver documents from anywhere in the world at any time. This lowers costs and risks associated with Letter of Credit transactions for the bank. The clients of the bank experience shorter time to completion for a letter of transactions resulting in increased cash flow. The integration of the entire document workflow with existing backend systems including SWIFT processing and parsing, document data field mapping with user customizable fields, Adobe PDF technology for document delivery, and connectors to backend systems for both transactions and reporting extends DocFlo beyond a simply a document engine solution or web based letter of credit application by combining the process for all users of the system.