Managing your business from Quickbase can keep your information organized and can streamline a lot of the day to day operations. But as with almost any business, there’s always paperwork – lots of paperwork. From generating documents, sending them to clients, or filing them away, you probably spend hours a day on paperwork.
We’ve got some great news! Add Formstack Documents to the picture and you can cut the time you spend on paperwork to almost zero. With Formstack Documents, you can set up templates for all your documents and easily (and automatically) populate those templates with data from Quickbase.
Use-Case: Create a Non-Disclosure Agreement based on data from a Quickbase application
In this example, we’re going to show you how to use Formstack Documents to generate an NDA that dynamically inserts the client’s data from a Quickbase application with the click of a button, and then send it out for signature using Formstack Sign.
To get started, we’re going to set up the template for our NDA using a Word document. Inside the Word document, we’re going to add our boilerplate agreement information. For the spots that we want to insert our customer’s information from Quickbase, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$FirstName}, {$LastName}, {$Company}, etc. These are just text that we enter into our document.
Here’s what our NDA template looks like:
Since we’ll be collecting the customer’s signature using Formstack Sign, we need to enter a signature tag so that Formstack Sign knows where to place the signature inside our NDA. The signature tag looks like: [sig|req|signer1]
Once we have our template ready to go, we need to upload it to Formstack Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and enter a name. On the next step, select “I have a document that I’d like to use” as your document template choice and then upload the file from your computer.
After you upload your template, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab for your document. On this page, you can change 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 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 merged document is automatically sent out for signature. On the Deliver tab, click the New Delivery button and select Formstack Sign from the list.
You’ll need to enter your Formstack Sign username & password to connect your accounts and then enter the signer’s information. We’re going to use merge fields for our signer’s information.
Once you have placed merge fields in place for your signers information, you are done with this part & can click Save Delivery.
Great work! Now we’re ready to set up the integration from Quickbase to Formstack Documents. For this integration, we’re going to use Quickbase’s integration service called Pipelines. Pipelines allow you to easily connect 2 services via their APIs without any coding.
Inside Pipelines, we’re going to click “Create Pipeline” to set up a new Pipeline. Then we’re going to find the Quickbase Channel, and navigate to the Records> “On New Event” step as the first step in our Pipeline. Simply drag this into your Pipeline.
Next, we’ll need to choose the Quickbase app, table & fields that you want to generate a document from. In our case, we are going to use the following:
- Quickbase acct: Customer Manager
- Quickbase table: Opportunities
- Quickbase fields: Account, First Name, Last Name, Email & Status
Last step in your Quickbase trigger is to set when you would like your document to be generated. In our example we want our NDA to be generated when our Opportunity Stage is set to “Generate NDA”.
To do this, go to the “Query” section of this step & click “Add Conditions”. We will select “Status” from the first dropdown, “is” from the 2nd dropdown & “Generate NDA” as our value. This effectively will trigger the generation of our NDA anytime the status is set to “Generate NDA”.
Now that you have your Quickbase trigger set up, you can set up your Formstack Documents action. To do this, find the Formstack Documents channel & drag and drop the “Document Merge” action into your next step.
Next, you’ll need to connect your Formstack Documents account to your Pipeline using an API Key & Secret. To find your Key & Secret:
- Log in to your Formstack Documents account
- Click Account>API Access>+New API key
- Give your new API key a name
- Copy & paste your key & secret into your Pipeline
Once we set up the authentication, our next step will be to pick the document template that we just uploaded to Formstack Documents. Pipelines will then load a list of the merge fields that are in the template. For each of these fields, we need to “map” them to the Quickbase fields like this:
After we have the fields mapped, we’re ready for a test run. Turn on your Pipeline & go ahead and run a few tests to make sure everything is working.
Here’s what one of our merged NDA’s looks like, with “TGG” as the Company name and “Gabe Caldwell” as the First name & Last name that were merged into the document from Quickbase:
Have any further questions? We’re here to help! Please reach out to support@formstack.com for additional assistance with your use case.
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