Create a Google Docs Invoice Template Open Docs for it with Ease

Google docs invoice template open docs for IT

hey I'm Jimmy from Jimmy Rose me and in this video you're going to learn how to automatically create Google Documents from a template by automatically populating certain fields in that document it's incredibly useful workflow for creating all kinds of documents one example might be that you have a standard proposal document and you have places in there for like the client name and the budget and that kind of thing and you want to automatically replace all of those fields with some data that comes in from somewhere else like maybe they have filled out a contact form you could take that data and plug it straight into a templated Google document I use this for my podcast so before someone comes on the show they book in with their name and some other information and give me a couple of ideas of what we can talk about in the show zapier then copies my run sheet for the podcast with a bunch of the information so I can just open that document right before the podcast and just run through it and I'm ready to go you can create basically any kind of document with this I'm going to go super simple today just so you can see how this works and just so I'm not repeating the same stuff in every video I assume you know a little bit about zapier already if you're brand new you might want to start with my zapier tutorial video which i will link up in the description as well as show in a little icon on the video at the top about now but for now let's dig into the workflow here is a folder on Google Drive that I've just called zapier examples and I've created a very simple document here where we've got client name and then you've got this funny tag looking thing here and that is to open curly brackets some text and to closed curly brackets and you'll see how this works with zapier shortly now this could be any kind of document right like this could be a complex invoice where you've got like an address maybe in the top right hand corner like a letterhead or something you can have whatever you want here I've just kept this really simple so you can see what's going on and I've got a list in here so I can show you a cool little trick and now we're gonna jump over into zapier I've already created a news app here I've called it create Google Doc from template and I've already created a trigger here using push by zapier now this can be anything it could be that a contact form has been filled out someone's signed a proposal I it's going to depend on your workflow the main thing I want to show you here is the action if you don't know how triggers work you'll probably need to go and watch that zapier tutorial that I linked up earlier but just know that in this trigger I've pulled in some data that includes the client name the client budget and this list and this is literally just a piece of text with a newline character after each one and that's it so I'm going to continue through and we'll add our action which is using Google Docs the action we want is to create a document from a template so let's pick that and continue I'm going to choose an account that I've set up earlier and now we come to actually choosing the document now if I click this arrow for some reason it's only bringing in at two documents it's saying there's only two in my account and I found that Google Drive can be a little bit funny like this at times especially if you're using team drives or one of those are more advanced tools so in this case if it's not loading because normally I just want to be able to click that my template in the list and search for it but it's not working so I'm going to use a custom value and then we need the document ID so just jump over to the document and actually copy this part of the URL out so everything between the slash D and edit and dump that in there and now we just need to give our new document a name so maybe it's a proposal for the new client name so we're just going to pull in that data from the trigger there's the clients name and then what folder we're going to put it in so select this and you can see it has given me my zapier examples option there same thing here if you cannot find the folder that you want you can do the same thing we talked about before by going to use a custom value and grabbing this ID out of the URL and the same sort of thing will apply as long as the account you are using has access to the ID that with a folder ID that you select it should be fine but for now I'm just going to clear this and use that folder here and you'll notice that it's actually just gone and found all the replacement tags in that document so if I jump back over remember there was client name budget and list and it's already gone and pulled these in so if you want to go and add a new one now you would just go and do that in the document and then refresh and it'll pull in these fields again but it's pretty simple now we're just going to map in our client name the budget and the list go ahead and continue and we'll test so it says it's successful so I'm gonna jump back over now and then we go we can see proposal for test client open that up and it's replaced the name the budget end the list it was smart enough to actually create that list just based on the new line characters that I'd put in there so obviously this is a super basic example but you can have all kinds of stuff in here like tables or any kind of formatting you like and you can automatically create documents without having to go in and like copy and paste things into a template so this is a super time-saver going one step further if you are on a premium zapier account I would recommend looking into Google Cloud Print and that will actually allow you to turn these documents into PDF and save them in your drive automatically as well I will go into that in a separate video however hopefully that was a fun little new workflow for you to save you a bunch of time that's it for this video if you would like to learn more about how to become advanced that zapier and save a ton of time in your business I'll head over to Jimmy Rose me slash zapier dash mastery which I'll link up below or otherwise just subscribe to the channel below to get more time-saving tips like this on the regular I'll see you in the next video