Airtable is a great way to build online databases to keep track of customers, orders, projects, and more. You can build sophisticated spreadsheets that allow your entire team to collaborate and manage the data with ease.
A great way to make use all of this data your keeping in Airtable is to use Formstack Documents to automatically populate documents like invoices, contracts, and more. By simply adding a new item to Airtable or changing the value of one of the fields, you can trigger a document to be merged in Documents.
In this example, we’re going to show you how you can generate a contract and send it over to SignNow when we update a deal in Airtable to have a status of “Closed Won”. To help with this integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier which will automatically detect our deal being changed to Closed Won.
To get started, we’re going to setup our contract template using a Word document. Inside the Word document we’re going to take our normal contract terms and add merge fields for where we want the data from Airtable to be placed. These merge tags look like {$DealName}, {$CustomerName}, etc.
Since this is a contract and we’re going to collect a signature via SignNow, we need to setup some signature tags in our document so that SignNow knows where to place the signature. These tags are just like any other text in our document and look like: {literal} {{t:s;r:y;o:"Signer";}} {/literal} (more info).
Once we finish up our template, it’s time to upload it to Documents. From the Documents page, click the New Document button and then enter a name. On the next step, pick I have a document I would like to use and then select the file from your computer.
After you upload your document, you’re going to be taken to the Settings tab where you can update settings like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and include the name of the client in the contract.
Next, we’re going to setup the delivery with SignNow so that our merged contracts are automatically sent over to SignNow for signature. Jump over to the Deliver tab and then click the New Delivery button. Select SignNow from the list and then you’ll be asked to login to your SignNow account.
After you login to SignNow, you’ll be redirected back to Documents and you’ll see a popup for the SignNow settings. You’ll need to pick the merge field for the signer’s email address and then enter “Signer” in the role box (this is based on the signature tag you put in your document).
Once you save the SignNow delivery, we’re all done with the setup in Documents and we’re ready to setup the integration with Airtable using Zapier.
Inside Zapier, click on the New Zap button and then pick Airtable are your trigger app and then the “New Record in View” trigger. (*Note: we have setup a view in Airtable that only shows deals which have the status of Closed Won).
On the next step, Zapier is going to have you authenticate your Airtable account – follow those steps. Then, you’ll be taken to a page where you’re going to choose your Base, Table, and then the View that you want to monitor.
Next, Zapier is going to load a test record to make sure everything is working. Follow those steps and then click the Finish button.
For the Action app, we’re going to choose Formstack Documents and then we’re going to pick the Create Document Merge as the action.
After Zapier authenticates your Documents account, you’ll be taken to a page where you need to select the document that you want to merge. Once you select your contract document, Zapier will load a list of all the merge fields in your contract.
For each of the merge fields, you need to pick the corresponding field from Airtable. You can insert the field by clicking the little icon on the right of each box.
After you have mapped all of the fields, go ahead and finish out the Zap and turn it on.
Now, we’re ready to run a test! Go ahead and login to Airtable and then update one of your deals to Closed Won. Zapier checks Airtable every 15 minutes, so it could take a few minutes, but when Zapier detects the update to your deal, it will send that data over to Documents and your contract will be generated and send to SignNow.
Here’s what our contract looked like ready for signature:
That’s it! You can now automatically generate contracts, invoices, and more from your Airtable data. Can you think of other ways that you could use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?