Automating your paperwork processes has never been easier. With a form tool like PerfectForms, you can easily collect information from your internal teams, prospects, and customers through online forms. Streamlined and efficient!
Then, add Formstack Documents to the mix and you can automatically populate various documents like contracts, invoices, quotes and more. You’ll never have to copy & paste again!
In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically generate a contract from a PerfectForms submission and then send the contract over to HelloSign for e-signature.
To get started, we’re going to set up the template for our contract using a Word document. In Word, we’re going to add our boilerplate contract information, then for the spots that we want to insert our form data, we’re going to use merge fields like {$Name} and {$Company}.
Here’s what our contract template looks like:
Since we’ll be collecting a signature for this contract using HelloSign, we need to add a signature tag to the template so that HelloSign knows where to place the signature. This tag is just like any other text in our template and looks like: [sig|req|signer1]
Once you have your template finished, we need to upload it to Formstack Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and enter a name. On the next step, pick Office Document as the document type and then pick the file from your computer.
Next, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can change various options 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 then include the name of our customer in the file name.
After we’ve updated the settings, we’re going to set up the delivery of our document to HelloSign so that it is automatically sent out for signature. From the Deliver tab, click the New Delivery button and select HelloSign from the list.
Once you enter your HelloSign API Key, go ahead and pick the merge fields for the signer's name and email address. This tells HelloSign who needs to sign your document.
After we have set up the HelloSign delivery, we’re done with the setup process in Formstack Documents and ready to integrate with PerfectForms. But before we leave, we need to grab our document’s Merge URL. From the Publish tab, copy the Merge URL.
Inside PerfectForms, we need to set up a new connection to Formstack Documents. Go to the Connections page and create a New Web Service Connection. Enter a name for the service and then enter your Merge URL in the Service URL box.
Next, click the Add Action button to add an action for this connection. We’re going to choose the String result type and then POST for the Service method. For each of our merge fields, we need to add a Send Parameter.
After we have our action setup, we need to add it to our form. Open up your form designer then go to the Behavior section and pick Form submits data. Then add a new Connect option (under the Integrate commands). We’re going to choose our Create Contract action that we just setup.
For each of the merge fields, we need to pick the corresponding fields from our form. This tells PerfectForms how to send the form data over to Formstack Documents so that it gets populated in the correct spot on your template.
Once you have all of your merge fields matched up, go ahead and save your form. We’re ready for a test! Open up your form and submit a test submission. This will trigger the contract to be generated in Formstack Documents and then sent over to HelloSign.
Here’s what our contract looked like ready to sign:
Congrats, you’re all done! You can now automatically generate all types of documents from your PerfectForms submissions. Can you think of any other ways that you can use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?