In today’s internet-driven world, the possibilities of improving your business processes are endless. From marketing to sales to customer service, you can deliver a much better customer experience by leveraging online tools.
One great tool you can use to collect fast and secure e-signatures is Dropbox Sign. With Dropbox Sign you can handle all of your signatures under one roof using a legally binding platform that allows your customers to sign documents from virtually anywhere.
Add Formstack Documents to your processes and you can automate all of your paperwork with the click of a button. With Formstack Documents, you can set up automation to populate templates with data from your favorite CRM, online form, internal system, etc to generate professional documents (contracts, invoices, letters, and more). Plus, you can instantly send these documents to Dropbox Sign for e-signature without having to upload any documents or send out any links to your customers. Formstack Documents and Dropbox Sign handle everything for you!
In this example, we’re going to show you how to use Formstack Documents to create a document that can be used with Dropbox Sign and all of the settings you'll need to take a look at on the way. At the end we will link out to another article that can take you through how to generate a contract from Salesforce. This is useful if you had a deal that you have closed and wanted to collect the customer’s signature using Dropbox Sign.
To get started, we’re going to set up our contract template in our doc builder, but you could also use some of the same steps and build it in a word doc if you prefer. The main difference would be that you would need to upload your document instead of choosing the build from scratch option that we will be using for this example as pictured below. To get to this screen, you need to select the create new document option.
Inside our template, we’re going to add our boilerplate contract details and then we’re going to add merge fields for the spots in our document that we’d like our deal information to go.
These merge fields are just like any other text in our document and look like {$FirstName}, {$CompanyName}, {$Amount}, etc. It's important to note that if you're writing these merge tags out in our builder, they will be automatically enclosed in a pill shape if you're not on text mode in our builder and that you can alternatively use the insert option on the right to place your merge fields.
Here’s what our contract template looks like for this example:
Since we’ll be collecting a signature for this contract using Dropbox Sign, we need to define where we want the signature to go in the document. Dorpbox Sign has “Text Tags” that you can use to indicate the spot in the document that you want to place the signature (more info). These text tags are just text and they look like: [sig|req|signer1], but you can also use the insert option to place a signature if needed from the right. It's also important to change the colour of the text to match the background if you don't want the text to show up and only the signature image.
Once you have finished your template, you’re going to be taken to the Setting tab. On this page you’re going to be able to customize various settings like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to be generating a PDF and then we’re going to include the name of our deal in the file name.
After we’ve updated our settings, we’re ready to setup the delivery of our document to Dropbox Sign so that the contract is automatically sent out for signature. Head over to the Deliver tab and click the New Delivery button, then select Dropbox Sign from the list.
You’ll be asked to enter your Dropbox Sign API Key (which you can find in your Dropbox Sign Account), then you’ll need to define the name and email address of the signer. We’re going to be using merge fields for the signer’s information.
After you have saved your Dropbox Sign settings, you’re all done with the setup inside Formstack Documents. If you're interested in potentially using Salesforce to generate this contract with the click of a button, check out this article that takes you through all the information you need- from installing the Formstack Documents Managed Package to adding a button to your page layout for generating the contract and properly mapping your fields.
Congrats, you’re all done! You can now automatically populate all types of documents using Formstack Documents and collect signatures with Dropbox Sign. Can you think of any other ways that you could use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?