With a tool like POWr, you can easily build powerful plugins for your website to collect information from your customers via online forms, collect payments, or provide a chat popup. All these plugins are easy to add to your website and can save you a lot of time.
Add Formstack Documents to the mix and you can also automatically populate all kinds of documents with information from your POWr plugins like contracts, quotes, reports, and more. You’ll never have to copy & paste data into a template again!
In this example we’re going to show you how to automatically populate an order form with data from our POWr form that we’ll embed on our website. We’ll then email this order form PDF directly to our customer for their review.
To get started, we’re going to setup the template for our order form in Formstack Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and enter a name. On the next step, choose the Build Your Own document type then continue.
In the Document Builder, we’re going to add our logo, contact info and then for the spots that we want to insert our customer/form data, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$CustomerName}, {$Amount}, etc. You can name these merge fields anything you’d like, but only use letters, numbers, and underscores (no spaces).
Next, we’re going to modify the Settings of our document. We can customize many different options like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to produce a PDF document and include the name of our customer in the merged file name.
Once you have updated your settings, we’re going to setup the email delivery so that the document is automatically emailed directly to our customer. Under the Deliver tab, click Edit under the default email delivery and then for the “To” address, we’re going to choose the merge field for our customer’s email address.
If you don’t have a merge field for the email address in your document, choose <
Feel free to edit any of the other email settings.
Once you have updated your email delivery, we are done with the setup process inside Formstack Documents and we’re ready to integrate with POWr. To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.
Inside Zapier we’re going to create a New Zap. For the Trigger, we’re going to choose POWr as the app, then New Form Response as the trigger.
Once you authenticate your POWr account, Zapier is going to to load a list of the forms in your POWr account. Go ahead and pick the form that you setup and Zapier will load a test response to make sure everything is working correctly.
Next, we’re going to choose the Action of our Zap. For the app, choose Formstack Documents, then Create Document Merge as the action.
Once you authenticate your Formstack Documents account, Zapier is going to load a list of the documents in your Formstack Documents account. Go ahead and pick the Order Form that you just setup and Zapier is going to load a list of the merge fields in your document.
For each merge field, you’ll need to pick the corresponding fields from your POWr form by clicking the button on the right side of each box. This tells Zapier how to send your data over to Formstack Documents so that it’s populated in the correct spot on your document.
Once you have matched up all of your merge fields, you’re ready to turn on your zap and run a test! Open up your POWr form and submit a new response. Zapier will detect this new response and send the data over to Formstack Documents.
Here’s what our order form looked like ready for our customer!
Congrats, you’re all done! You can now instantly populate all kinds of documents from POWr form responses. Can you think of any other ways you can use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?