Keeping track of your company’s sales data can be hard if you don’t have the right tools to keep your team on the same page and working smarter, not harder. With a tool like Zengine you can set up an online database for all your leads, deals, etc and improve your business processes.
Add Formstack Documents to your Zengine workflows and you can automatically populate all kinds of documents with data from your online databases. From letters and proposals to quotes and reports, you can save hundreds of hours and never copy & paste again.
In this example, we’re going to show you how to generate a sales proposal from Zengine when we update one of our Opportunities to a “Send Proposal” stage. We’ll then email that proposal directly to our customer for review.
To get started, we’re going to set up the template for our Proposal using a Word document. Inside Word, we’re going to add our repeating information like our logo, company address, etc, then for the spots that we want to insert our customer/deal info, we’re going to use merge fields like: {$Name}, {$Company_Name}, {$Description}.
These merge tags can be named anything you’d like, but no spaces or special characters are allowed.
Here’s what our proposal template looks like:
Once we have our template ready, we need to upload it to Formstack Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and then enter a name. On the next step, select Office Document as the document type and then pick the file from your computer.
After we upload our template, we’re going to be taken to the Settings tab where we can modify 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 document and include the name of the customer in the file name.
Next, we’re going to set up the delivery of our document so that the merged proposal is emailed directly to our customer. Under the Deliver tab, go ahead and Edit the default email delivery. For the “To” address, we’re going to choose the email address field for our customer. If you don’t have a merge field in your document for the email address, choose <
Feel free to edit any of the other email settings. You can use merge fields in any of those boxes.
Once you have saved your email delivery, we are done with the setup process in Formstack Documents and we’re ready to integrate with Zengine. To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.
Inside Zapier, we’re going to set up a new Zap. For the Trigger, we’re going to choose Zengine as the app and then Updated Record as the trigger.
Once you authenticate your Zengine account, Zapier is going to load a list of the Workspaces in your Zengine account. Go ahead and pick your Sales workspace, then pick the Form (Opportunities) that you want to monitor for updates.
Next, we’re going to add a Filter so that our Zap only runs when your Status of our Opportunity is set to “Send Proposal”.
Next, we’re going to set up the Action of our Zap. For the app, we’re going to choose Formstack Documents and then Create Document merge as the action.
After you authenticate your Formstack Documents account, Zapier is going to load a list of documents in your account. Go ahead and select the proposal document that you just set up and Zapier will load a list of the merge fields in your document.
For each of the merge fields, you’ll need to pick the corresponding fields from your Zengine workspace. This tells Zapier how to send your Zengine data over to Formstack Documents so that it is populated in the correct spot on your template.
Once you have matched up all of your merge fields, go ahead and save your Zap and turn it on. We’re ready for a test! Login to Zengine and update a record in your workspace so that it matches your Zap trigger. This will send the data over to Formstack Documents and populate your proposal.
Here’s what our merged proposal looked like:
Congrats, you’re all done! You can now automatically generate all types of documents from your Zengine workspaces. Can you think of any other ways that you can use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?