Streamline Your Automated Invoice in Google Sheets for Higher Education

Automated invoice in google sheets for Higher Education

[Music] all right today we're going to be automating invoice creation with google forms sheets and docs at the end of this video you'll be able to enter data into a form and have that data automatically inserted into this invoice template to start you're going to have to have a google account it could be business or personal everything we're doing here can be done for free and we're going to need a template document like this one which you can download from the comments section below and let's go over this document first this is a pretty basic invoice template it has a first name last name company name phone number but there are some weird looking entries here that we see throughout the template so this is what's going to be replaced by the data we enter in our form and for this tutorial they must follow this curly bracket format so once you've got this downloaded we're going to go ahead and switch over to google forms and you can get there by going to your drive home screen you can do this by going to drive.google.com and click new google forms so you should see this screen and if you've never used forms before feel free to pause the video and take the tour but we've used this before here so i'm going to go ahead and click no thanks let's go ahead and rename this form invoice data entry and if you'd like you can add a short description so whoever is using this form knows what it's for now we'll create questions that represent the data we want for each variable if i go back to our template sheet you can see our first variable here is invoice number so i'm going to go ahead and copy this switch back to forms and paste it as our first question name and now it's really important that the question titles match the template variable names exactly and they are case sensitive now google has gone ahead and automatically changed this to a short answer for me which is good this is what we want however for the purposes of this video we want this invoice number to be a number so i'm going to go ahead and add response validation i'm going to leave number selected here and we don't care about if it's greater than or less than but we do care that it is a number so i'm going to go ahead and select is number and if you'd like we can add some custom error text here so people know why they're receiving an error and this is an important field so we're going to mark this as required let's go ahead and add our next field by clicking the plus sign here and this one is going to be invoice date and google has automatically recognized that this is a date if this didn't change for you go ahead and select date from the drop-down and this will also be a required field let's add another question this will be due date we'll make this required and let's go ahead and add the rest of the fields up to phone number and mark each of those as required for phone and email we can take advantage of data validation to ensure our users are entering data in the desired format so add another response validation for this one select regular expression select matches and add the phone pattern i've included in the comments section of the video and this will be required we're going to do the same for email so again select regular expression and select matches and paste in the email pattern from the comments section of the video and you'll see we've got a field for discount so we'll add that in here and again let's add some response validation to make sure this is a number and we won't mark this one as required so now we'll have to add entries for our actual line items you'll see we have five line items and there's three sections for each line unit name description and price so we're going to have to add each of these to our form we're only going to mark the first set as required since we want our invoice to have at least one line item now it's very important that we have something named price in here so if you do end up changing the template variables make sure that the word price is in this otherwise the script we're going to create later is not going to recognize the numbers and for each price we're going to want to add response validation so i'm going to pause the video here but go ahead and add the others do not add subtotal or total and come back when you're done so we're back and i've got my form filled out here you'll see that it ends at price five so i have not added the total or subtotal lines you'll also notice that i've not made anything after unit one required so everything from unit to onwards is optional so if you don't have more than one line item in your invoice you won't have to fill it out now that our form is filled out let's go ahead and click on the responses tab here click the google sheets icon and create new sheet so now you should be seeing a spreadsheet where the headers represent all of the questions that you've entered in your form and now to fully automate this process we're going to use the script editor select tools and script editor from the menu don't get scared when you see this you don't need to know any coding whatsoever what i want you to do is copy and paste the script from the github link i provided in the comments this is the magic that's used to replace the template variables with the actual values from the form the only thing we're going to have to do here is update these variables so we want to add your template file id here and your destination folder id here so how do we get those let's go back to our template file the file and folder ids are in the urls of your respective drive file and folder and we're going to copy this id from the url and we're going to paste it in this variable here and we're going to do the same thing with our drive folder and paste it here and let's rename the project go ahead and save the project and now we're going to have to grant the script permission to look at your drive folder and your template file select the function we want to run which is create doc from form and go ahead and click debug so after a few seconds you should get this authorization required message select review permissions and you should see this sign in prompt come up select the account you want to use to sign in and we get this verification message so this is not a verified app because we are creating it so what we need to do is select advanced and go to invoice template replacement and then we're going to see this final grant access dialog scroll down review the permissions to make sure you're comfortable with this script accessing your drive and your document i've made the code fully available if you'd like to review it it looks for those curly bracket template variables and replaces them with the values from your form select allow and your script should now have access to the template file that you've created and the destination folder what the script is going to do is make a copy of that template file and replace the values with the most recent form entry so next we want to add a trigger from the left hand menu select the alarm clock icon that says triggers in the bottom right select add trigger the function we want to run is create form from doc and let's set the event type to on form submit and if this fails we want to know immediately and then let's click save so now everything should be set up and ready to go let's go back to our form we want to get a shareable link you can bookmark this link or send it over to anyone who's going to need to fill out these invoices so let's go ahead and fill out our form and you'll see when we enter our email incorrectly and try to click off our form will yell at us we'll have a three dollar discount here our first item will be carrot cake this will be a very expensive carrot cake our second item will be a cookie this will be a fun cookie not as expensive as the cake we have nothing else to add you'll see in our drive folder once we click submit a new document is going to appear and if we double click it to this new document you'll see that our invoice has been filled out our template variables have been replaced with the data we entered and we've even done some dynamic totaling and subtotaling and even took into consideration the discount that was added all right so there you have it please subscribe and hit that like button and if you have pain points or manual tasks you'd like to learn how to automate please leave them in the comments i do read all the comments and i'd love to make a future video to help