A collaborative content management system (CMS) is disclosed herein for generating templates for received documents. The disclosed CMS recognizes that a document selected by a user for processing was previously processed by the CMS and that a user has previously added particular overlaid fillable fields to the document. When the determination is made, the system generates a recommendation to create a template of the document with the previously added overlaid fillable fields. In some embodiments, the CMS makes the recommendation to generate a template when the user creates, in a received document, identical overlaid fillable fields or field types to those created in the previously processed document.