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Airtable invoice for corporations

if you're wasting a lot of time creating and sending invoices then you don't want to miss this video I'm gonna be going step by step into how to build an automated process that takes data from air table and automatically creates and sends an invoice from QuickBooks so if that's of interest to you stick around and let's get into it hey my name is Gareth Pronovost I'm the owner at Gap consulting where we help you to organize and automate your business and life if that's an interest and you want to learn more about how we can help you reclaim your time swing on by our website I will also include a link to our free crash course if you want to check that out you can always sign up and learn air table quickly and easily but without further ado let's just jump into the meat of today's video and that is all about creating these invoices now first before we get you know too far into it I do want to say that normally with an invoice you will create line item detail so you're going to normally have an invoice that links to a lot of different details so that you could have different line items they get added to your invoice that is an incredibly complex automation to build too much for this short video so I want to just preface this by saying we are going to be only using one single invoice table that stores our information there rather than linking to other line items far more complicated but I think the same you know framework will get you set up and running and then you could always explore the more complex relationships on your own so let's go ahead and jump into my screen here and you'll see that I have a pretty straightforward air table database already set up I have clients and I have invoices so my clients here pretty straightforward we have first name last name email company sometimes you'll link out to a different table for company in this case I'm just using text and then of course this table of clients contact are links to my invoices so let's flip over to invoices and take a look at that now you'll see that I've got a lot more views here for this and I'll go into detail on why in just a moment but the high-level information that we need in order to send an invoice is what's the product or service that's this part right here it's the amount that's this part and you know is it being created today obviously in this case this is a created time so this will always capture the metadata of the database whenever this record was created so this will this will not be altered right this this is always just going to be today whatever the day is that you create the invoice now we're gonna record when an invoice is paid of course that's another automation that I'm not going to get into here today but I and one other thing is of course we also want to bring back the invoice link it's really convenient to add that invoice link here because if you want to really quickly and easily take a look at that invoice without having to log out of err table log into your QuickBooks or whatever you know software you're using it's just more convenient to just click it and see what's going on there so you could always just pop that in and you know give it a moment to load and then of course this is going to show you oh this is the invoice from you know this particular example that we sent to that client etc so dropping back into err table you'll notice that I have this last field here that's called create and what I've done here is I'm actually using a web hook now there are two different ways that we write automations to zapier we can use the native integration between air table and zapier and what the way this one works is zapier will come and look at your air table database every few minutes depending on your plan and if it sees new stuff then it will fire an automation but sometimes you don't want to wait sometimes you don't want to wait a couple minutes and for those times for those instances we have web hooks web hooks are a feature within zapier where you get a specific URL for this particular automation and you can pass additional data to that URL that's exactly what we've done here so we've created a very special formula that i'm going to be going into detail on in just a moment but essentially when we hit this button to that whenever this URL is when we click it that will fire our automation instantaneously all right so let's take a look then at those formulas so I've built several formulas normally I would condense this all into one formula but I want to make this as straightforward as possible the first step to this is actually starting your automation in zapier so go to SAP your comm set up your SAP and the trigger event that you want to start with is called a catch hook so set it up as follows web books by zapier catch hook and then on your customize request you get a unique URL that is unique to you and your account by the way quick pause this does require a page zapier plan so if you're on a free plan if this is not available to you although I think after you see the power of this automation you're probably gonna want to be on a paid plan so copy this URL just grab it right here and that is gonna be the first of your formulas so I'm gonna flip over to my formulas view here and all I've done here is I've just created a view I've hidden all the other noise and I just want to look at my formulas so the first formula is your webhook URL and all i've done here is i've created a formula and inside of quotation marks either single or double quotes i've pasted my webhook URL that's the first step now second step is writing a long concatenate formula and what I'm doing here is I'm passing variables to that catch hook so that when I push a particular field and when I when I activate that URL it's gonna pass these variables over now this is obviously more advanced more complicated and we don't have to do this if we built with that native integration because zapier automatically gets all that data but if all I did was click the web hook by itself this isn't gonna pass over any unique information here because this is identical every time so what I need to do is I need to pass over data that's relevant to this particular record this particular invoice and client that I need to make sure that I'm working with so if you take a look at inside of this formulas it's pretty robust but don't let it scare you all we're doing is concatenating we're starting with the web hook URL that's this field right here and then we're adding question mark and then we're telling it the name of this variable that we're going to pass so in this case question mark company name and of course the company name has an underscore in between it and then equals now after that I need to pass through the company name field so this is data that I'm getting from this record so it's unique for every invoice after that this is the next parameter I'm passing I want to call you'll create a new variable and I'm calling this client email and then I want to pass the client email now one thing to note here is that in some cases I do need to use this encode URL component and we need to use this anytime there could potentially be a space in the text that we're passing into that variable so if you're passing in a company name that has maybe two or three words in the company name of course there would be space is there and we can't create a URL with spaces and so by wrapping that field with this encode URL component we then make sure that we pass it in a way that a URL can read you'll notice the same thing down here if we go into this you know go further into this if you're looking at the detail here I'm passing details about about the service through again this is the description here that I'm passing through is a field that has spaces in it so I need to make sure that I'm encoding that into a URL so essentially all I'm doing is I'm listing out all of the different things that I need to pass into my automation when I push this button so you see that in every case these these records are unique because each of them has you know different information that makes this particular invoice up right now the last part of this is my create formula and I don't want to ever accidentally create an invoice at the wrong time so I only use a create formula in this case where I'm only bringing in that special concatenate formula that I built I'm only bringing that in if I'm ready to submit the invoice so let me do one more thing and bring in my status formula here and you'll notice that my status is set to have a couple of different outputs and basically this is tracking where within the pipeline is that invoice if there is a date paid then my output is three my my invoice has moved into stage three which is the paid stage or the page the paid status on the other hand if it's not paid yet and if I have an invoice number then I know that it's been submitted already because and you'll see when I show you the automation that only when we submit the invoice do we get an invoice number for the record now if that condition isn't met and if I have you know an amount in there already and a date created and you could stipulate whatever you know pieces to your process you want to hear but only in that case am I going to say that the output is ready to submit so if there's for example not an amount in one of my invoices that that is I fail to put an amount in there then it's going to throw this error alright so let's take a look at those kind of like in use here if I flip into my all records view you'll see that I have my product service my description here is dependent on what product or service I've selected my amount here again is dependent on what product or service I've selected so these are formula fields that you know derive their value based on that product or service and then you see my different statuses here so essentially if I were to flip into my daily use view here you see that I have these different status and only in the case where the status is ready to submit do I get that create hook now once I click that hook that's what fires the automation so let's take a look at the automation inside of zapier we already talked about how we're gonna grab that webhook the next step but beyond that is to find or create the customer in QuickBooks now you might not use QuickBooks if you have another software it's a good chance that it also integrates with zapier and other automation tools so what I'm telling this is I want you to search for the email field in QuickBooks and I want you to look and see if that information that we captured as the email of this client I want you to tell me if you find that record now if you do that's great we're gonna take that record and we're gonna move on to the next step but if you don't I want you to create this customer and this is where we're gonna pass in the company name the first name of the person the you know yeah here and here it is again the company name and then the email so we want to pass all of this data into QuickBooks if they if we don't find that that client already exists in our accounting system now that's all we have to do for that one now we are gonna create the invoice and this is step three so in step three we're going to say that we are going to bring in the customer ID from Step two remember I told you if we find it great we'll move on if we don't we'll create it well in either case we have that customer ID so we're gonna use that customer for this invoice we can set it to be due on receipt unless you have other painting options and then bring in your product or service in this case I'm saying option one bring in your detail or your description and then bring in your amount now you might be doing something else where you have like a quantity or a rate if you have any of that information that you need to bring in you know be sure to bring that in as well from there we will go on to step four and this is where we're gonna actually send the invoice so if you look inside of here we're just bringing in the invoice ID that we created in step three and we are sending it to the email of the client that was passed in step one two more steps again I told you that this was a little bit complex just two more to get through now we're gonna find the record in air table that we just sent from and we are doing that by looking up the record ID and air table and we are matching it to the record that we got in our webhook and then lastly now that we've found that record we are going to update it with the invoice number that's number and we are also going to invoice it with the invoice link so now that I've walked through how this works let's take one out for a spin and take a look at how we get this to go so first and foremost we need to create a new invoice so we're gonna go to our form here and I'm gonna pick myself so that it gets sent to me and not a email address let's say we wanted to create an invoice for this client on this option I hit submit immediately that information shows up in air table now it shows up in there ready to submit status because of the formula that I described earlier once I click this URL it's going to open a new window and it's going to at the same time trigger this automation so let's go ahead and push that through and to take a look and you'll see everything update immediately on my screen here so that's how quick it all happened let's take a look and see exactly what went down here so we know that it created or found the customer in QuickBooks created the invoice then sent the invoice to the customer updated the invoice number here in our database and provided the invoice link you'll also notice that it automatically then got moved down to the submitted stage and that's because we have that formula and status that says hey once I have an invoice number and an invoice link then I know that this invoice has been submitted to be paid now the last part is of course once that invoice has collected on let's say we just received payment of course I said this would be another automation that you can build once we receive payment then that invoice moves into the last stage that is paid invoices one more thing to check here of course is to click on that invoice link and verify that everything got set up appropriately and so we should see then that you know the customer here is me and that it was in the amount that we said yes so this is description - $249 etc so everything you know got set up appropriately and it's looking good and that's it so now you have the ability to create an invoice immediately only by selecting the customer and what exactly they bought from you as always I hope you found that to be incredibly helpful if you did and you'd like to learn more we've put together a lot of resources on our website we offer a free air table crash course that will be delivered to your inbox and get you up to speed quickly and easily with air table and if you're looking for something more complex we do offer hourly consulting and courses and full-blown development so swing on by and let us know how we can help you further look forward to hearing from you soon [Music] [Music]