Proposals are an important part of the sales process and with a tool like Bidsketch, you can generate professional proposals in a matter of minutes. With easy to use templates, you can build great looking proposals that will impress your customers.
So you’ve built the proposal, sent it to the client, and they’ve accepted the proposal. Now what? You’ll probably need to send out a contract or invoice to get the project going. You can use Formstack Documents to automatically generate any of these documents.
In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically send out an invoice to our client when they accept our proposal. To help with the integration between Bidsketch and Formstack Documents, we’ll be using our friends at Zapier.
To get started, we’re going to setup our invoice template in Formstack Documents. We’re going to use the online document builder to build the template. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and give it a name. On the next step, pick the Build Your Own document type and then continue.
On the next step, you’ll be taken to the Document Builder. Here’s where you’re going to setup your template. We’re going to add normal invoice information like our logo, address, etc. Then we’re going to add merge fields in the spots where we want our project/client data to be inserted.
Merge fields are just like any other text in our document, and look like {$FirstName}, {$ProjectName}, {$Amount}, etc. You can name these merge fields anything you’d like – we’ll match them up with Bidsketch fields later.
Here’s what our invoice template looks like:
Once you have your template finished, go ahead and save. Then next step is going to be the Settings tab. Here you can change options like the type of file that you want to generate and even the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and we’re going to include the name of the project in the file name.
Next, we’re going to setup the delivery of our invoice via email. From the Deliver tab, we’re going just to edit the default email delivery that’s already setup. We’re going to send the document To a merge field for our customer’s email address. Feel free to edit any of the other settings as well.
After we save our email delivery, we’re done with the setup process inside Formstack Documents and we’re ready to setup the integration with Bidsketch.
Inside Zapier, we’re going to create a new Zap. For the Trigger, we’re going to choose Bidsketch as the service and then Proposal Accepted or Declined trigger.
Zapier will have you authenticate your Bidsketch account. Follow those steps and then continue on to the next step.
Next, we’re going to setup the Action of our Zap. For the service, we’re going to pick Formstack Documents as the service and then Create Document Merge as the action.
Once you authenticate your Formstack Documents account, Zapier is going to load a list of all the documents that you have setup in your Formstack Documents account. Go ahead and pick the invoice document that you just created. Zapier will then load a list of all the merge fields that you have in your document.
For each of the merge fields in your document, you need to pick the corresponding fields from Bidsketch. This tells Zapier how to send data over to Formstack Documents so that it is inserted in the correct spot on the invoice.
After you have matched up all of your merge fields, go ahead and save your Zap and then turn it on. We’re ready for a test! Login to your Bidsketch account and create a test proposal then mark it as accepted. Zapier will then detect the accepted proposal, send your data to Formstack Documents, and your invoice will be emailed.
Here’s what our example invoice looked like:
Congrats, you’re all finished! You can now easily generate all kinds of documents from your Bidsketch account. Can you think of any other ways that you can use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?