This is my initial template for my master's thesis. I made it easily customisable (at least for students at University of St.Gallen, others have to adjust the front page as well as the academic honesty) and with sample code to get beginners used to both, LaTeX and R (and of course the fusion of both: knitr).

Feel free to fork, customise, share, help to improve... My goal is to help make research reproducible without wasting time in doing so. Writing this way indeed might save you much time, especially because you don't need to re-write everything once you spot a mistake in your code if you keep it dynamic. And in the end, LaTeX produces nice and perfectly formatted output.