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Hourly invoice template google docs for Research and Development

If you've been wanting to create automatic documents from your Airtable database, it has never been easier than with the new feature that air table just released. Yes, in this video, I am going into detail about how you can use the new Google Docs automation inside of air table. 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 I'm going to help you save up to 20 hours of your time every week with no code automation. I'm talking about building automation in Airtable, Zapier and Make if that's of interest, and you want to learn more about how to get started with that, check out my free webinar, it's going to give you the fundamental building blocks so that you can start building automation to do your job on autopilot so that you can spend your time on the stuff that matters. But without further ado, let's hop into the heart of this video where we're talking about building an automation that's going to create an automatic document for us in Google Docs. Now, before we get into the automation itself, really quickly have to go through the structure of the database so that we can understand what we're working with here, I've kept it pretty simple for us, we are first looking at a projects table, I just have a name of a project, the stage of a project. And then this is linked to tasks, we want to know what tasks are associated with different projects. Because as we're moving a project through the process, well, then we're going to have different tasks to get us to the next stage. Now in my tasks, Table, Table number two, I have a name for my task. Of course, it has a status of that specific task, I also see the projects that it's linked to. But importantly, I'm also bringing in the stage of the project. This is done with a lookup field. And I simply say look at the projects that are related to this task and tell me what the stage of the project is not to be confused with the status of the task. So I've got both here on this table. Now, I also have a report log, this is going to make more sense when we build our automation. But we want a place to store records of all the Google documents that we've created. So here I have a pretty simple log where I'm asking for the name of the report, the date of the report, and the report link, because the report is going to be created in Google Docs. So of course, I am going to have a URL because that's cloud based. So I can link to that right here in my database. Alright, so let's get into building the automation. First, we go into the upper right corner, and we click on the automations panel. And that opens up the automations here. Now we're going to build this from scratch because I want to go step by step. But I want to point out that if you're new to automations, you can get started really quickly, by using the template here generate a weekly digest in Google Docs, we're going to be doing something similar to this, but we're going to have our own unique use case. So for that purpose, I'm going to build mine from scratch. But if you want to experiment with this, get started get up and running really quickly. So we're going to create a custom automation in this example, I make that selection. Now for my trigger, this is what's going to initiate the automation. In this case, I'm going to say run at a scheduled time, make that selection. And then over on the right hand panel again, tell your automation what that schedule looks like. For example, I might want to run this every week. So that would be every one week on Monday at 7am. Starting on a specific day, we can test the trigger, we're gonna get three different outputs here, we get the actual trigger time that it ran, we get the expected trigger time, so when it should have run, and then also when is the next time this automation will be performed. There's a number of different use cases for all of these different outputs here. In our case, we're going to mostly use that expected trigger time in the next steps of our automation. Now for the next step, we build our first action, and we first have to find the records that we want to put into this report. Now before I get into that, let's pause really quickly and flip back to our data structure. Let's look at those projects. Here I have a view called all projects. But below it you'll see I have a view for projects in phase one. Let's say on this report, we only want to look at the projects and tasks that are associated with any project that are currently in the phase one stage. So here I have a view called phase one where I've built a filter that says look, I only want to see projects where the stage is phase one. Now that I have this view, I can actually use this view inside of my automation when I'm finding records. But before we get to that, let's now flip over to tasks and look at the same thing for my views. Here. I have a task view of all tasks, but below it phase one tasks. So again, we've built a filter here that says I only want to see those tasks in which the project is in stage. phase one. And then you'll also notice that I've grouped by a field here, I've grouped by the project. So I see all of the tasks associated for project three, because project three is in phase one. And I also see all of the tasks associated for project four, because that is also in phase one. All right, let's hop back into our automation. And we're going to use those views as we are searching for records. So first step, here, I'm going to go to find records. And I'm going to first add a description that I'm going to find projects in phase one, because that is what I'm doing in this particular step. Projects table here is where I'm going to be searching. And I can look for those records either by a condition or a view. And since we've already built the view, let's just go ahead and use that now select the View, and phase one is right there. And we can test this action and see those two projects that are currently in phase one, that is project three, project four. Now for the next step, let's find the tasks associated with those projects. I'll add another action right below this one, find records again, and this time it will be find associated tasks. This time, I'm going to be looking in my tasks table. And I will be searching again based on a view what view Well, that's the Phase One Tasks view that I built. Let's test this action. And now we're able to see all of the tasks inside of our tasks table that have the project of phase one. That's exactly what we would expect. We only see tasks here for projects three, and projects. For now, let's add our doc, we're going to click on add action here and scroll on down to Google Docs, we're going to create a Google Doc. First, we have to select our Google Drive account. If you haven't already connected your account, you'll need to do so by clicking this button or manage your connected accounts. But in my case, I'm just going to use this account. Now you'll need a folder inside of your Google Drive account to store all of these newly created documents. In this case, I've already built a folder for me, and it's right here called Document automation folder, I can make that selection and then click Select. Any of the documents that we build through this automation will be automatically stored in that Google Drive folder, keeping them nice and organized in our Google Doc. Now we can add a title. So this will be a report of phase one projects on and now let's pick the day. So I can hit this go back to my scheduled time. And I'll bring in the expected trigger time this is going to bring in for us when that report should have run. And so we know when this document was created in the title itself. Now let's go for content. So Scrolling on down here, we're going to go ahead and put a report together. Now in order to make this stand out, I'm going to start with a header. So I'll use the header one. That's my large heading. And I'll say weekly report. Give it a couple spaces. Now I'll put in a different header size, this time three, and I will say projects in phase one. And here's where I can bring in those projects. Remember, we found those projects in this particular search phase, this find records step. So over here, inside of my report, I'm going to hit that plus button, continue on that second step of the automation, go to records. And I'm going to go with a grid view in this case, now it's going to ask me, what exactly do you want to show in this, these are the different fields that I have access to in the projects table, the name of the project, the stage of the project, and the associated tasks? Well, in my particular case, I already know that the stage is phase one for all of these, so it's redundant to bring it in. And I'm actually going to bring in those tasks in a more detailed way in the next part of this report. So in my case, I don't necessarily need to include anything else, you will notice that you have the option to include a link. And this is going to allow the person looking at the report to with a click of a button, open up your air table base and be taken directly to that specific project or task. So I will include that so that we can see what that looks like. Let's go ahead and insert that. And now I have the insertion of Microsoft records. Moving on down in my report, I want to look at tasks. Again, we're gonna go with header three here, and I will simply name the tasks. And then underneath here, I'll include my second search, which is my find records when I was looking for tasks here, I will hit that plus again, come down to my third step in my automation continue. Continue again, get that grid and here's where I get to choose what's showing up here. Well, in this case, I want to see the name yes, the name of the task. I also want to see the status of the task. I also want to see what project that specific task is related to. I don't care about the project stage. I know the project stage is phase one. So I'll leave that out. And here again I can get some options include a link to the view and or include a link to the record. I don't care so much about the link to the view. But I will go with link to record again so that we can go directly to that task from the Google Doc. Let's go ahead and insert this. Now I'm going to test this action. And it will be creating that Google doc in the background for me now that that's done, we can go ahead and add the final action to our automation, where I want to actually store the log of that Google doc bring it back into my air table database. So I'm going to create a record where that is going to go in my report log table. And I can choose the fields that I want to add information to the name of the report, the report link, and the date of the report, the only piece of this that comes from the previous step is going to be that report link. So here on the report link, I can go in and access the URL of the doc that was just created in the previous step. That's the only piece of information I get from that Doc. So insert that here. But you'll remember that we also named our report. So whatever we did, when we created the name, I had to go back to my Google doc to remember, we went with report of phase one projects on expected trigger time, just copy that, go back to my report log, and I'll paste it in here on the name of my report. That way, I have a nice consistent name throughout. And the last field here is going to be the date of the report, I can access this by going to dynamic here and saying I want the trigger expected runtime. Let's go ahead and bring that in. And let's run this as configured. Let's run a test here. And we'll pop out of our automation. And take a look at what was created in our report log. So I get this report of phase one projects on this particular date time. Here is the date of the report. Here is the report link. So far, so good, I can click on this link and now be taken to the actual report that was created. And it's exactly what we would have expected. Here's my weekly report projects in phase one, stage phase one. And we see here project three, project four, it's what we expected, we can click on these links here and be taken directly to that record. So it's going to open up our database in the projects table, but specifically opening it up for project three, just like that. Going back to the report. Now, underneath that I see my tasks tasks for project three groups nicely. This is all because of that view that we created. And then below that the tasks for project four, nicely grouped down here. And if we want to look at any one of these tasks, again, we have the ability to click here, it's going to open up our bass take us directly to the tasks table, more specifically, that specific task that we clicked on, in this case, task one for project four. I know we went fast here, but I hope you can see how powerful this automation can be. Check it out, start experimenting with it and build some cool reports for yourself creating some really nice Google Docs. It's gonna save you a ton of time and more importantly, give you a nice record of where things were at that stage. One thing to note here is that if I make a change to the task here, let's say this task was completed task two, that is not going to change my report. My Report is always going to show that task two at the time that report was run was in stage in progress. So this is a great way to get a timestamp of specific data in your base and a moment in time. I hope you got a ton of value out of this. If you did, be sure to subscribe to this channel so you don't miss out on future automation and no code news and I will see you in the next one. As always, I hope you found that to be extremely helpful. If you did and you'd like to learn more swing by our website and see how we can help. We offer a free air table crash course that will help you level up in air table quickly. And we also have some paid services including hourly consultations with our experts. We have some online courses and a group coaching program and for advanced needs, we can build a bespoke solution for you from scratch. So swing on by and I look forward to connecting with you soon.