Quickbooks Online is a great accounting tool for your small business. You can easily keep track of all your customers, invoices, and other billing activities from a single interface.
With Formstack Documents, you can automatically take information that you have saved in Quickbooks Online and populate various documents like customized invoices, letters, contracts, and more. You’ll never copy & paste again!
In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically generate a contract for new customers added to Quickbooks Online and we’ll send the contract over to Formstack Sign for signature using a combination of Formstack Documents, Formstack Sign & Zapier.
To get started, you need to set up the template for a contract using an in-house template that we can create with our AI assistant feature.
Note - Check out this article for all the different methods you can use to create a template(Examples: Word, Fillable PDF). We recommend starting out using our document builder for the easiest path to document creation and understanding how to structure your template.
Inside your document, you can add boilerplate contract information for the spots that we want to add our customer’s information. This can either be achieved dragging and dropping merge fields from the right to the left or you can manually write the merge fields. The merge fields would look like {$FirstName}, {$LastName}, {$Email}, etc.
Since we’ll be sending our contract over to Formstack Sign for signature, we need to add a signature tag to our document so that Formstack Sign knows where to put the signature in our document. This signature tag is just like any other text in our document and looks like:
After you're finished with your template, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify different 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 we’re going to include the name of our customer in the file name.
Next, we’re going to set up the integration with Formstack Sign so that our document is automatically sent out for signature. From the Deliver tab, click the New Delivery button and select Formstack Sign from the list.
After you authenticate your account, you’ll need to define the name and email address of your signer using merge fields.
After you have saved the Formstack Sign delivery, you've completed the setup process in Formstack Documents and we’re ready to integrate with Quickbooks Online. To help with the integration, you'd need to use our friends over at Zapier.
Here are the steps you'd need to follow:
Step 1 - Inside Zapier, you'd need to set up a new Zap. For the Trigger, pick Quickbooks Online as the service and then New Customer as the trigger.
Step 2 - After you authenticate your Quickbooks Online account, Zapier will load a test customer to make sure everything works correctly. Follow those steps and move on.
Step 3- For the Action of our Zap, you want to choose Formstack Documents(Webmerge) as the service and then Create Document Merge as the action.
Step 4 - Once you have authenticated your Formstack Documents account, Zapier is going to load a list of all the documents in your Formstack Documents account. Go ahead and pick the contract document that you just set up and Zapier is going to load a list of all the merge fields in your document.
Note - For each of the merge fields in your document, you need to pick the corresponding field from Quickbooks Online. This tells Zapier how to send the data from Quickbooks over to Formstack Documents so that it is populated in the correct spot on your template.
Step 5 - After you have matched up all of your merge fields, go ahead and save your Zap. You're ready for a test! Login to Quickbooks Online and add a new customer, then Zapier will detect this new customer and send the data over to Formstack Documents. Your contract will be generated and then sent over to Formstack Sign for signature.