The letterhead is the one part of a document everyone stops reading. That's why it's often wrong. The company moved offices two years ago, the phone number at the bottom belongs to someone who left, and the registration number is from before the business became a company.
None of that matters until a customer, a bank or SARS reads it.
What has to be on it
The Companies Act expects a company's documents to show its full registered name and its registration number. That covers letters, quotes, invoices and notices: the documents you send to people outside the business. If you're registered for VAT, every tax invoice must carry your VAT number as well.
Past the legal minimum, add what people need to reach you: a physical address, a phone number, an email address, and a website if you have one. Keep it short. A footer with eleven lines of small print looks like a terms-and-conditions page, and nobody reads those either.
Keep the details as text
Designers like to put the address inside the logo image. Don't let them. Text can be searched, copied into an email and read by a screen reader. When the details change, text is a one-minute fix. An image is a request to the designer, a wait, and a new file to replace everywhere.
Set up stationery once
Treat the letterhead as stationery: the header, footer, page size and margins that sit around every document. Then let each template own only its body, the actual quote or letter.
The split matters. When the letterhead lives inside forty templates, a change of address is forty edits and at least one miss. When it lives in one stationery file, it's one edit.
Make changes reach new documents
When your details change, update the stationery first, then make sure new documents use the new version. Documents you already sent stay as they are. A quote from last March is a record of what you said last March, and it shouldn't quietly gain a new address.
Keep Word in the picture
Most letterheads are designed in Word, and that's fine. Stationery is just a header, a footer and page settings, which Word does well. Keep designing it there if that's where your team works, as long as there's one master file, not a copy on each person's desktop.
How it works in E·BIZI Papers
E·BIZI Papers builds your header and footer from your company details, so a change to the address or registration number happens in one place. Each template carries a stamp of the stationery it uses. Apply stationery to a document and Papers updates the headers, footers, page size and margins of every section in it. A document that's already stamped is offered its own stationery first, updated to the latest version, so a change of address reaches every new document without editing a single template.