Elevate Your Business with Creative Invoice Design for Production

Creative invoice design for Production

If you're ready to create invoices inside of no code, you have come to the right place because in this video, I'm going to be showcasing how you can use the Page Designer extension inside of air table to do exactly this. That's right. Once you build your invoice, you can automatically create that PDF with just a few clicks. So if that's of interest, stick around, and let's get into it. Welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Gareth. I'm the owner of gap consulting. And it's our mission to help you get organized and automated with no code tools air table is one of our favorite no code tools. And in this video, we're going to be breaking down exactly how to use a feature in air table called Page Designer to create a PDF directly from the data that lives inside of your database. Now in a previous video, we already uncovered how to build the data schema to support invoice creation for your business. So if you haven't already checked that out, be sure to first watch that video. Otherwise, this one's not going to make a lot of sense. But once you have that schema put in place, it's super easy to put together your page designer. However, before we get into the heart of the video, I want to first invite you to join me for my air table crash course this is the best way for you to get up to speed quickly inside of air tables. So if you're new to the tool, or if you've been using it for a while, but you know that there's more to it that you haven't unpacked yet, check out my crash course it's going to walk you through all the key features. And the course is entirely free, you can sign up at https://.garethpronovost.com/airtable-crash-course. I will be sure to include links below this video. But without further ado, let's hop into the heart of it. We've already got our data schema put together, we're already all set up in airtable. But we want to create those PDFs using Page Designer. So first thing we want to do is flip over to our Invoice table. This is the table where we've already linked to all the stuff, we've got the invoice ID, we've got all the line items that we've already linked up to, we know what the total is. And of course, we also know if we drill into these line items, we have information about what's the cost of this service, what's the quantity purchased. And what's the subtotal. Again, we covered all of this in the previous lesson. But it's important to make sure that you have this foundation. Before we move on to the next step. Now we are ready to create the actual element itself of the invoice. So we'll go up to extensions in the upper right corner of our airtable database. And this is going to open up the ability to just add and plug in these extra little extensions that enhance the data that already lives in our database, we're going to add an extension here. And if you don't see it right on top, which it usually is here, page designer, but you can also search for it here, just type in page, and you're going to find it right here. Now this particular extension was built by airtable. You can see that here, I just want to highlight that because I am generally a little bit cautious about adding new extensions to a database if they are not actually published by air table itself. So here I am, I'm going to add this element. And again, this is just adding that extension right in here. Now once that loads, you'll see by default, what I have is the opportunity to decide what table I'm looking at. In our case, we're building an invoice. So you bet we're going to be looking at the invoice table. And I also get to choose the size of the page. In our case, an eight and a half by 11 is perfectly fine in portrait mode. If you want to make changes here feel free, I'll keep them and I'll click Done. Now the first piece we see is actually an element that's been added to our page designer. But before we drill into this, let's actually back up in order to do that, I'm going to click this X. And you can see what I have here on the side. And this is all the different pieces that we can choose from at the top, you'll notice that we have the text and image elements, these are static, meaning that they will never change every time we create an invoice from this designer template. Well, the static elements will be static. Now the other parts that we can bring in our variable, and this is going to be different for whatever record we're looking at. So presumably we send out more than one invoice, we might have dozens and dozens that go out at any moment in time. The nice thing about this is every time we create an invoice, it's going to be different regarding whatever invoice number it's looking at. So I can include the company for that particular invoice the billing email for that particular invoice. This will become more clear as we move on. Let's start by adding our line items elements to the invoice. Of course we have the linked relationship to line items. So I can just bring in with a simple click the link that we have to these line items. Now I want to make this almost the width of the full page. But I want to make some changes. Remember that this is a linked relationship to other records and these records live in my line item detail table. So what I want to do is actually getting really particular about the information that I'm bringing in here. I can do this by scrolling down On here on the left hand side, this is the element itself once I'm selecting that element, and I can choose what I want to bring in. Now, I don't care so much about the line item ID, but I do really care about the service that we sold. So I can click on Add Column and find service from the list. Now when I do that, it's adding this second column here, the services column. And I want to bring in more information, namely, what's the cost, what's the cost of a service member service, one back in our template was $1,000. Service Two was $2,000. Now I want to bring in the quantity, so I'm going to add another column include quantity here. And then lastly, I'll bring in the subtotal. So I can now remove my line item ID and I can simply hit the X on here and get rid of it. Now one other thing you might want to do after you've built this out, is rearrange these elements on your table. So you can always grab them and drag them and drop them and put them in what order you desire for your particular layout. I like it like this, that, hey, here's the service. This is the cost. This is how many you ordered. And here's your subtotal. Now, of course, if you had more line items, this would need to be longer. So I strongly recommend that you expand this down to allow for as many different items as you might think you would sell on a given invoice. Now at the bottom, we're going to want to include the total here. So again, I'll X out of this element, because I'm currently inside of the line items element of X out of here, and I'll come down to total. And I can drag this down and just drop it here. Now if you include tax or some other features like that in your particular business, you would need to include that under here. So you'd have additional calculations for tax and then produce the final total after tax under this. In our example, though, I'm going to imagine that there's no tax and keep it a little bit simple for the Page Designer. Now, I also want to point out in page designer that you can adjust the font size and the weight of any element. So I might want to draw more attention to this total. So I can increase the weight to say 700, which of course makes that stand out a little more. And I can also up the font size just a bit. Now another trick inside of Page Designer is I can use a static element with dynamic elements. Let me show you what that looks like. I'm going to exit the total here. And maybe I want to at the top here include some information about the company. So what I can do is bring in a text element and drop it in here. And remember, this is static text over here on the left in the menu for this text, I can type in whatever I want. So I might say billing two. And then on the next line, I might want to include the company name, so I can access the company name. If I bring in squiggly brackets, let's make sure we're zooming in on this as much as we can just to see what this is inside of the squiggly brackets, I need to use the field name. So I believe in our example, we call it company, let's actually back out just to verify that. So here I've got my link to company, I can just copy this field name. And again, inside of those squiggly brackets, when I'm inside my page designer, I can drop in the name. Now it matters that I match this exactly, case sensitive here. So this is now going to pull in the dynamic company name so that depending on what record it's looking at, it will change the company name. Let's look at this. So if I expand this, you can see that I've got billing to GAAP consulting, maybe on the next line, I want to include another element, the billing contact, and then on the next line, I want billing email. Easy enough, go back into my layout here, inside of my static element. Remember inside of squiggly brackets drop in billing contact. And then I will also add billing email. And I'm just going to use billing contact and then rename it. So once I'm good here, you can see that I've got a combination of both static and dynamic elements, the static element is billing to. And then I'm bringing in dynamic elements, the company name, the billing contact, and the billing email. Now I'm going to want a very similar element to this one. And this is going to be where I put in my company information. So I can scroll all the way to the bottom of that element and duplicate it. And let's just drop it over here. And then same element. I'm going to drill into this one though. And here I'm going to say billing from and of course when I'm billing from because it's always my company, this is going to be really static. So I might say building from gap testico. And I might say, Gareth, and I might use my own email here. So this part here not to be confused with the dynamic data. This is your company information that will never change. And so you've hard coded it here it is static. Whereas over here, depending on what client you've linked to, you've got different information. You'll also notice that by default it brought in the invoice ID and This is the primary field from our Invoice table, you can make a change to this if you'd like. Or you can keep it for our example. I'll keep it. And of course, one last element that you will need for every invoice is when did you submit the invoice? When was it paid. And when is it due, those three date fields are important for every invoice. So we definitely need to go back to our Invoice table and actually bring them in here, let's actually add those elements, I'll shrink down my dashboard for just a second. And I will add those elements. This is date submitted. And this will be a date field type, make that selection. And then again, I'll just use my trick where I hold down Alt on my keyboard, click this and drag it and drop it. And then I can just duplicate this simply this will be date do. And lastly, I will have date paid. Same thing here, drop in and make a quick change. Now these dates are going to be really important, of course to demonstrate to your client that you know when the invoice went out so that they know when you expect payment. And then you can record when the invoice is paid in your date paid field here. So let's go ahead and fill this information out. Let's imagine that we sent this invoice on the first of March and we have 30 day terms. So we expect it to be paid on the first of April, no problem, I can make that selection. And now if we go back into our Page Designer, we can go into the edit. And we can add these elements as well. So now we see the date submitted date due. And we can bring them in, I like to generally do this with some static text, just as we did with the billing information. I'll drop this in here, maybe make it a little bigger and increase the weight, just a touch. And I will say something like submitted on and then I'll bring on date submitted. And there we go. It's bringing in that information for us nicely. And I can even break this up and then say due on and then date to do. So just like this, we're able to bring in those dynamic elements again, and include them with this invoice. One final touch you might want to include is ACH information or other instructions for how you expect your clients to pay your invoices, of course, you're going to want to include that here. So we include our banking information, and some terms and conditions and other small things like that, you can easily include those on your invoices here as well. And of course, once you are done, the final step then is to print this invoice and you don't have to necessarily do a hard print, you can save it in the next step here as a PDF. So I can then take this invoice that we just created, save it as a PDF, and name it whatever I want. This will be test. And we'll go ahead and save that here in my downloads. And then as a final step, I can go back to my air table schema, and I can add one more piece here will attach the invoice as an attachment in the record itself. So I now added that attachment field, I can upload that and just grab it right here, drop it on in. And now I have the invoice actually stored as a PDF inside of my invoice database. Once it gets paid, I can mark it as paid. And we're good to go. Now there's one final element, let's make sure that we can test that this works in other examples. I'll go into my company here and add a new test code. And let's build a new contact. This will be John Smith. And will include example.com for him. Of course, that's not an email address, but I'm just trying to bring in some information. And I'm going to need to connect John to test codes. So let's go ahead and make him the billing contact. Now that that's setup, I can go into our invoices and create a new invoice 1002. Of course, this could also be set to an auto number so that it automatically is created with the next number in sequence. Let's now flip into our line items. And we can actually group this by the invoice number and in the bottom left, I will add an item. I'll scroll on over to my invoice and link up to 1002. And now I've got the ability to add new invoice line items, I can choose service two, and then another one here, let's make service three. And we'll set some quantities of two and three here. And so we see the subtotal automatically calculated. On our invoice page, we should see that information automatically pull in as soon as we link to the company. This particular invoice is going to Tesco, there's John Smith, his email address. And if we pop up in our extension and we flip over to our second invoice 1002 We can drill in here and see that all that information is properly filled out. It's a little bit of work to set all this up as you can see, but once you're done, it's all in one place. Super easy to move forward. So I hope you got a ton of value from this. Of course subscribe to the channel if you haven't already to stay up to date on no code news just like this. And in the meantime, keep on building