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Airtable invoice for Logistics

[Music] hello and welcome to workflow live my name is andrew dodds and i am your host where we bring you a workflow built from the ground up in live to automate something within your business today we're looking at invoicing no one likes invoicing i know you don't you want to learn how to automate it stick around all right let's jump in so we're going to be using air table today and we're going gonna automate our invoicing i've got a demo and pull it over okay so here we are let's talk about what we're gonna we're gonna cover okay so automating invoicing we are going to go over the basic foundation so we're going to talk about the table design look at the fields that you need on each table the lookups that you need in order to create an effective roll-up of the information we're going to go through entering the data once we're going to talk about page designer which is the app that you're going to use to pull all of this information into an invoice and then we're going to look at ways to really power up the tool through the button field and some other really cool fun things like automations now you don't need a ton of air table knowledge for this but you need to have a little to to start so if you know nothing this probably isn't the session for you but i will be doing this step by step so you can follow along so feel free to jump into your air table and we can get started [Music] okay so you're going to need this build is is it's really simple you're going to need four tables this you're going to need an invoice table a customer table a services and products table and a company table okay so let's look at the fields that you need in each of these to start with okay i'm going to show you the the basic fields first i have the uh some of the other ones hidden right now these are these are mainly the lookups and when we'll be talking about the advanced button feature okay so your first field on the invoice table is going to be what's called an auto number so each new record you create in your invoice table will have a number that's your invoice number so you want to create that your next two fields are going to be linked records one is going to go to the customer table so you're going to link to another rest another record table customer table and same thing with your services and products you're going to want to link to services and products then fairly simple we've got the date field i'm going to come back to this one in a moment this is a rollup field we want a percent field for tax we want a formula field to calculate the tax amount and then we've got a ground grand total amount here as well we've also got a link to our company table okay you're going to want to do this as well and we have a lookup field here that we'll be talking about in a minute but for now i'm going to go ahead and hide that so go ahead make these fields definitely create the links okay and then we are well on our way all right so now let me show you the customer table for the customer table we have address email and name fairly simple okay email field type long text short text services and products really simple table as well just a single line text hourly rate in currency for that service how many hours it takes to deliver this service okay that's gonna be a number field and then based on that we've got a formula here for hourly rate times hours okay so that gives you your calculation and then on the company table you're going to store your company information here such as your logo email phone number and your standard terms okay so fill those out these are what's going to populate in every single invoice that you built great so uh now that we have these tables built we have the proper fields we have the proper links let's talk about um the how this how this all works okay so um we have the invoice sub total here okay now the invoice subtotal is a roll up field that's looking at our services and products table link and that is summing the values okay so as we add products and services here when they're available it changes the subtotal so you'll see if i take off the website build as part of this invoice we get an adjusted invoice subtotal on that okay i had the website built back now i've entered tax percentage here and we have a formula that's looking at the invoice subtotal and multiplying the tax giving us the tax amount and then we have all of that added together to give us our grand total okay so let's do one together and see what it looks and feels like okay so we're gonna hit the plus all right and we're gonna choose our customers princess leia she's doing a website build the invoice date is today tax is seven percent where she lives automatically fills out the tax amount in the grand total for us and my company is already linked here we didn't have to do that that's an automation we're going to talk about that in a moment and why that's important now we can just keep this hidden okay because it's just going to work in the background so as i mentioned in order to get this to work properly we're going to need to also have some lookup fields okay so [Music] we have the properly linked you know fields and we want to look up information so from our company table we want to look up the name email address phone and logo okay so in order to do that you just right click on the field say i want to add lookup fields and then you can toggle on the ones you want so you'll toggle them on just like that so we've got those there we've got the terms and then from the customer table we want name address and email and from the services and products table we want the hourly rate this is not completely necessary in fact i might even just delete it for now don't really need it so recap get your fields from your company table and the fields from your customer table okay now those are lookups these can all work in the background but i'll just untoggle them so you can see what it looks like all they're doing is looking up the information from that that tagged item so luke skywalker was tagged right and we see luke skywalker is the name he lives at this address with this email so similar for all those other fields as well like to leave them off it's easier to read less cluttered the reason we need them here is we're going to be using something called the page designer app to pull all this information into a document that we can download and send out to our customer okay and we access that here in the upper right hand corner that's the apps corner and i've gone ahead and pulled it together edit this so you can see how this comes together so you see all of the the information is is coming in here and this is essentially a blank canvas for me to move around static text and the information from in the database okay so you'll see all of my fields here on the left right so if i wanted to have the logo from my company information i could click here because that's the logo and now i have my logo okay and the great thing about this is once you've set it up okay um you never have to set it up again right each invoice will just automatically generate into the template that you've built so we're looking at the two different invoices here one for luke skywalker and if i click the next record this invoice is for princess leia with her details and stuff okay so every single one of these elements you can drag around and they dynamically populate and just a couple of tips so you can change the font size and the weight so if i wanted the invoice number here to be more bold i can put the weight up on that i can do the same thing with the date here so it's a little easier to read can also give this a subtotal that you see here the 750. um so we can actually this is a this is a good point this is a old part of the build so you're only seeing the hourly rate and i actually want to show you the uh the way that we should be looking at this so you'll see look these these aren't reflecting properly this is a great teaching moment all right we can bring in the table information since we link to it so we have the hourly rate there now we also want the hours that were spent so we have the hours spent and we also want the invoice total there it is okay so from that you'll see i made that change here and now that's how this one is set up as well so we've got our subtotals you can make lines under your you know so it's easier to read here by just toggling on a line so we've got an easier way to read this okay you can readjust the sizes of your boxes and now it's starting to look pretty good so we've automated an invoice just like that all my information is showing up here okay so a couple of ways to um superpower this you know we already looked at tax in creating a total based on that right so um we've got the the tax amount right so the eight percent that i entered this is a formula that calculates the tax and then adds it all back right um and then that allows us to do that line item like you saw here now it's important that you have those lookup fields that we did earlier for this invoice because if you don't you're not going to be able to pull in some of the information you need such as who it's getting billed to and your company information okay and uh you know what on my company i want to also have my email in there let's just put that there real quick my email's already there let's do something else uh let's do my address so i like to show off living baywatch okay so we have our invoice pretty simple um we can create that table because it's linked as we talked about before so this is just looking at that products table all right let's talk about taking this uh next level up okay so um another thing you can do here is so that i don't have to go in and open the correct invoice to find it you're going to create a button field okay the way you do that is button field type you're going to pick your style name it we're going to call ours open invoice and we're going to choose an action which is open in page designer you'll check the dashboard and the app name click save so now when i click on open invoice let me go ahead and close this i click click on open invoice now this is for the 1458 see that it launches the invoice here and if we pull it into full screen 1458 okay so that's great whichever one you record you click on the the button you click on it's going to take you to there's the 750. so that's one real quick piece of low-hanging fruit the final thing i want to talk to you about is automating this um so let's imagine that we want to automatically send an email to our customer once we um send the invoice out okay we want to automatically send it though once we're ready to send it it's got to go so you can do this a couple of different ways the way i like to do it is we're going to create a status field and we're going to use one called a single select and we might have a couple of different statuses for our invoices waiting since paid let's try that all right give it a different color cool and let's say these are waiting at this point so we have that one more thing that we're going to want is an attachment field okay so we're going to insert to the right and we're going to say invoice copy right now this is going to take one manual step which is to download the invoice that we've created and to upload it here into the attachment field i'm going to be holding on a more advanced session that will show you how you can completely automate that away it uses a few other tools though and so we're keeping it simple for today's stream so i'm going to go ahead and download one of these invoices and i'll show you how you can do that you're just going to click on print and you'll just save it to pdf okay so save the pdf save you can give it a name this is our invoice going to my downloads folder okay and so now i'm going to go ahead and add it here all right so we've got a copy of our invoice here now we're going to write an automation okay so we're going to create an automation now automations they have they have triggers and actions and this one is going to be send email to the customer now we have our customer information already remember we have our invoice information so with that we can say when a record matches conditions in our invoice table and when that condition is status is sent now we're gonna go ahead and choose the record to test now here's a good teaching point we don't have a record with a value of status sent so we need one in order to test this out so we're going to go back we're going to change this one to sent now we're going to come back to our trigger and we're going to say to choose a record to test step was successful we can move on to our actions so triggers and actions our trigger was we've put the status to send and our action is going to be to send an email to you remember we have that lookup field that's where this comes in handy so we're going to send an email to email from customer remember we looked that up there it is so that will dynamically fill the email to the right person and our subject is new invoice we can say hello we're going to get the customer's name in here customer name you have a new invoice for payment from let's say from company name now all those look up fields make sense don't they they didn't they do now uh we're gonna say please see attached now this is a little bit of magic here we can add attachments remember we uploaded that invoice so we're going to find that field invoice copy okay and uh we're gonna give it a test here make sure we did it right okay cool so we've got a test please see attached okay now let's watch it in action i'll show you what the email looks like all right so we've turned our automation on and remember what our status is so it has to move from waiting to send so let's give it a shot here we go moving to synth all right we'll give it just a moment here here we go see i have a new invoice from air table we see attached there it is so we've covered a lot we have showed you how to automate your invoices including automating and email out to your customers and so hopefully you enjoyed this if you did i i would love if you would like this video subscribe to the channel and more importantly come back and join me next time and hopefully this is helpful we'll be releasing one next week where we'll go over how you can create a a system in zapier that will remove you needing to download manually from the page designer in order to upload it here and get it on the way one thing i'll mention before i sign off is i did have a sneaky automation running in the background that gets me access to the company details and you may want to copy this as well now you could come here and manually enter you know tag your company info here that's a little bit of a pain so we have an automation assigning the company details where now that you understand automations whenever there's a new record created in the invoice table we update that new record with my company in the your company field if you've got more questions about that happy to uh happy to chat back and forth on that so just drop them in the chat um but thanks again for joining me here at workflow live i hope that this helps you automate a tedious process within your your business and if you have any questions get in touch and i'll see you next time alright bye for now