For those of you with teams in the field collecting data on their mobile devices, you should take a close look at DeviceMagic. They offer a great tool to build mobile forms and make it easy to collect the data your business needs. With DeviceMagic and Formstack Documents, you’ll be able to generate reports, quotes, contracts and more – right from your mobile devices.
In this example, we’re going to show you how a restaurant manager can request more produce and automatically generate an order form using an Excel spreadsheet with calculations. We can then automatically send the order form to HQ for approval.
Our first step in the process is to setup our Excel spreadsheet template with all of our calculations. In the cells that we want our form data to go, we’re going to put in merge tags like {$StoreNumber}, {$StoreAddress}, etc. Here’s what our spreadsheet looks like:
Now that we have our template finished, we’re going to upload it to Formstack Documents. From the Documents page, click the New Document button, give it a name, then choose the Office Document option and upload the file there.
On the next steps you’ll be able to modify settings and where you want to send the work order when it is generated. On the Settings tab, we’re going to turn on Test mode and then check the box to turn on debugging as well. Then under the Advanced Options, we’re going to turn on the Field Map (more on this later).
With Formstack Documents, you can send the document via email, send it for e-signature, or save in the cloud. For this example, we’re going to send the work order to HQ for signature with Docusign.
Under the Deliver tab we’re going to click the New Delivery button then choose Docusign. You’ll need to login to Docusign to give us access to send documents via your account, then indicate who the signers are. This will automatically send the document to Docusign and then HQ will be able to review and sign the order form.
Great, we’re moving along nicely. If you don’t have your form setup in DeviceMagic yet, go ahead and do that now. We’ve setup a simple form that someone can fill out in less than a minute. Here’s what our form looks like:
Next step is to go to the Merge tab and grab the Merge URL for your document. This is a unique URL that is used to send data to your document. Copy that URL and jump over to your form in DeviceMagic and setup a new Destination.
When adding the new Destination, you’ll want to choose “XML” as the data format, then choose “HTTPS” as the destination.
For the server URL, you’ll want to enter the Merge URL for your document. Go ahead and save the new destination.
Now that we’ve got the destination setup, it’s time to map the DeviceMagic fields (that are going to be sent over in the XML from the destination you just setup) to the merge fields you used in your spreadsheet. To start, go ahead and submit a test submission to your form.
Back in Formstack Documents, we’re going to go to the Overview tab for your work order document and you should see a View Data button in the Recent Merges section. Click that and you should see the data from the submission that you just submitted on your form. You can click through the data and you’ll see the merge tags that will need to be used in our Field Map.
Go ahead and open up the Field Map in a new tab so that you can have the data on one screen and the field map on the other. On the Field Map you’ll see a list of all the fields in your template. For each field you’ll need to enter the merge codes that match the data coming from DeviceMagic, like: {$instance.inputs.WO_Date}
Now that you’ve got your field map saved, the data will automatically go to your order form correctly. Run a few test submissions through the form and make sure everything works as expected. Here’s what our spreadsheet looks like:
Congrats, you’re all done! You can now automatically generate produce orders from DeviceMagic and streamline your order process directly with HQ. Can you think of any other ways that you could use Formstack Documents and DeviceMagic to simplify your paperwork process?