Managing your projects can be a tough task. From coordinating with team members to organizing tasks, quotes, invoices, and payments, you need to make sure that you have a solid plan in place. With ProWorkflow, you can manage all of your projects from start to finish.
Part of the project process most likely includes some type of document generation. Whether it is generating contracts to quotes and invoices, these documents are put together by hand with data from ProWorkflow. There’s a better way!
With Formstack Documents, you can automatically populate almost any document you need in your workflow. From PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations, you can create professional-looking documents that you can send to your clients.
In this example, we’re going to show you how you can automatically generate a Project Proposal when we add a new Project to ProWorkflow. With the help of our friends over a Zapier, this will all happen automatically!
To get started, we’re going to set up our proposal template using a Word document. In the Word document, you’ll add all of your normal proposal content (logo, company info, default text, etc) and then you’re going to add the merge fields. These merge fields indicate where you want data from ProWorkflow to be placed.
Merge fields look something like {$CompanyName}, {$ProjectTitle}, etc (no spaces or special characters). You can type the merge fields just like any other text in your document.
Here’s what our proposal template looks like:
Once you have your template ready, we’re going to upload it to Formstack Documents. From the Documents tab, click the New Document button. Enter in a name for the document and then pick I have a document I would like to use on the next step, then select your template file from your computer.
After you upload your file, you’re going to be taken to the Settings tab. Here, you can update a number of settings like the type of document that is generated, the name of the file, and more. For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and include the name of the project in the file name.
We’re also going to turn on the Field Map (under Advanced Settings) as we’re going to need to format some of the incoming data from ProWorkflow. We’ll set up the Field Map on the next step.
After you save the settings, you’re going to see a Field Map tab. Go ahead and click that tab. When Zapier sends over data from ProWorkflow, they combine some fields into single fields (for example, the client field is a combination of ID, Name, and Type).
In order to get the data we’re looking for, we’re going to need to “parse” it out. We have an easy way to do this using the following merge tag:
{$Client|parse_lines:”:”:”name”}
To get the data into the correct fields, we’re going to add this code to our Field Map which will set the value for those specific fields.
Our next step is going to be setting up the delivery of our proposal. From the Deliver tab, you can add any of our delivery methods. We’re just going to email this proposal to ourselves so that we can make sure everything is correct before sending it to the client. By default, there is an email delivery setup, so we’ll just modify those settings.
Go ahead and click the Edit button for the email delivery and feel free to change any other settings (From, Subject, Message, etc).
Perfect, we’re done with the Documents setup! Now it’s time to jump over to Zapier and set up the integration between ProWorkflow and Documents. From inside Zapier, create a New Zap.
For the Trigger, you’re going to want to choose ProWorkflow as the service and then New Project as the trigger.
Once you pick the trigger, Zapier will have you authenticate your ProWorkflow account and test the integration. Follow those steps and click the Finish button.
Next, we’re going to add the Action. Pick Formstack Documents as the service and then Create Document Merge as the action.
After you pick the action, Zapier will have you authenticate your Documents account. Then, you’ll be taken to a page where you can pick the document template you would like to merge. Go ahead and pick your Proposal document that you just setup.
Once you pick the document, Zapier will load a list of the merge fields that are in your document. For each of the merge fields, you need to insert the corresponding fields from ProWorkflow (Note: for any fields that you set up in the Field Map, you don’t need to map them in Zapier).
Once you finish mapping the fields in Zapier, you’ll be asked to test the integration. This will send example data over to your document. If you need to make any changes, go ahead and make them now, then click the Finish button when you’re done.
The last step is to turn on the Zap! From the Overview page, click the Turn on Zap button and this will activate your Zap. Now, every time you add a new project in ProWorkflow, Zapier will take that project information and automatically send it over to Documents and your proposal will be generated!
Here’s what our example proposal looked like:
Congrats, you’re all done! You can now automatically generate all types of documents right from your ProWorkflow account. Can you think of any other ways that you could use Formstack Documents to automate your document generation?