You’ve done your research, you’ve spoken with the client, you’ve gathered all the requirements, now it’s time to present your best proposal to the client. With a tool like Proposify, the proposal process couldn’t be easier. You can create professional proposals in a matter of minutes and send them directly to your client.
Once your client signs off on the proposal, it is time to get to work! But first, you’ll probably need to send out an invoice to the client (at least for a down payment) and that’s a manual process. Don’t worry, Formstack Documents can help!
With Formstack Documents, you can automatically generate all kinds of documents like letters, invoices, contracts and more. Simply setup a template and in Documents and integrate with your favorite online service to streamline your paperwork.
In this example, we’re going to show you how to generate an invoice from Proposify when our client has signed and accepted our proposal. To help with the integration between Proposify and Documents, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.
To get started, we’re going to setup the template for our invoice in Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button, then enter a name. On the next step, you’re going to choose the Build Your Own document type and continue.
Next, you’ll be taken to the Document Builder. Here, you’re going to build your invoice template. We’re going to add our logo, contact information, and then merge fields for where we want the information from the proposal to be inserted.
These merge fields are just like any other text in the document and look like {$first_name}, {$phone}, etc.
Here’s what our invoice template looks like:
Once you’ve finished building your template, let’s move on to the Settings tab. Here you’re going to be able to update different options like the type of file that we want to generate and the name of the file. For this example we’re going to generate a PDF and we’re going to include the Proposal Name in the name of the file.
Next, we’re going to setup the delivery of our document. We’ll want to automatically email the invoice directly to our client, so we need to change the email delivery for the document. Under the Deliver tab, you’ll see an email delivery. Go ahead and edit that delivery and change the To address to the merge field for the client’s email address.
Once we’ve finished up the email delivery changes, it’s time to setup the integration with Proposify!
Inside Zapier, click the New Zap button and then for the Trigger service, pick Proposify, then select Proposal Won as the trigger.
Next, Zapier will have you enter your API Key for Proposify and then grab a sample proposal. Follow those steps and click Finish when you’re done.
For the Action, we’re going to pick Formstack Documents as the service and then Create Document Merge as the action.
Once you’ve authenticated your Documents account, Zapier will load a list of the documents that are in your account. Go ahead and pick the invoice that you just created then Zapier will load a list of all the merge fields in your document.
For each of the merge fields in your document, you need to pick the corresponding fields from Proposify that you want inserted in your document. You can see the Proposify fields by clicking the icon on the right of the box.
Once you’ve finished mapping all of your fields, go ahead and save the Zap then turn it on. We’re ready to run a test! Log into your Proposify account and create a test proposal, then sign and accept it as if you were a client.
Once you accept the proposal, Zapier is going to detect that action and it will grab the data for the proposal and send it over to Documents. Documents will then populate the invoice then email it out to the client.
Here’s what our invoice looked like:
Congratulations, you’re all done! You can now automatically populate all sorts of documents right from your Proposify account. Can you think of any other ways that you could use Formstack Documents to streamline your paperwork process?