Streamline Your Workflows with Notion Invoices for Procurement

Notion invoices for Procurement

oh hey there sorry one second and just quickly need to send an invoice out uh shouldn't take longer than a moment um looks like it's already well on its way let's quickly check to see those actually looks right perfect awesome pretty cool isn't it now hello and welcome to this tutorial where you learn how you can easily create invoices like this using notion and make you might know the feeling finding a somewhat decent invoicing software is pretty hard in particular if you have some specific requirements so why not build your own invoicing tool in notion and save a lot of money while doing so it's fairly simple to set up endlessly customizable and again totally free in this video i'll walk you through the whole process step by step and if you don't want to build this yourself don't worry i have a free ready to use template for you with the free cool extra features in the description linked below i still recommend that you check out this video so you understand how it works and you can add your own customizations to it as always you can use the time stamps to jump to a specific section or watch the whole video if you do so thanks a lot that really helps me to create more content like this oh and remember there's probably specific legal regulations in your country as to what elements your investments contain i can't give you any sort of legal advice so do your own research and adapt this approach to create compliant invoices ing to the laws that apply to you and with that out of the way let's get started okay so for our invoice generator and notion we basically need three elements we need the invoice itself for that we're going to use google docs we need the back end where all the information is stored for that we obviously use notion and then we need an automation tool that uh combines both these things together and for that we're going to use make so the three uh distinct steps uh here to like set everything up in every app so in google docs we're going to create our template for the invoice then we're going to build out all the information that we need for all the invoices in notion and then we put it all together and the reason we start with the invoice itself is that this way we actually know what sort of information we all need in notion so that when we build out our databases we know exactly which properties we need so yeah we can just uh open up a new document in google docs and then start designing our invoice so again i can't give you any legal advice so do your own research look up like the requirements for an invoice in your country maybe you also find a template and you can obviously also use that and yeah so it's super straightforward use google docs like you would usually for invoice with just one difference instead whenever you put some information or like something in here now that you want to update dynamically for your invoice so say for example we have at the very top uh we have the um the date uh or something like that or then in the body of the invoice we have something uh like the the the address and then we have um uh after that let's say idea uh your customer um please find below the invoice services and then again below we can just insert a table uh oops inside the table uh like uh one for them the name of the product uh for the price the quantity and then the total price so we do uh service maybe um price quantity and total and then obviously add our our team services um and now whenever we have the information that we we want to update dynamically we don't just write a date or like the customer name instead we write a so-called merge tag a merge tag is a variable and it tells uh google docs or whatever program we use later that this section should be replaced by some other data and while that sounds complicated it's actually super super simple all you need to do is whenever you have the sort of information you just type two curly brackets then the name for the merge track so in this case it would be date and then you close again with two curly brackets uh the one thing to to remember is to not use um spaces in between so if you want to say like customer name and use an underscore and that way uh everything will be fine and yeah that's basically the only other thing to remember is to be specific with the merge text so don't just write address here because you will have your own address probably and your customer address so do customer address and so on and the cool thing with merge tracks is that you can apply formatting to them and that will carry over once uh information goes in so if you want this very topic now to be small uh you can do that if you want for whatever reason the customer name maybe not that but if you if you want uh um the first service uh that you that you offer or like the service always in in a different color right uh if you want this in a red you could do that at once information gets filled in later yeah it will carry over so write your invoice or if you intend to download my template you can use the one that i already created so this is just the sample that we are going uh that my automation the template uses so as you can see you have at the very top i fill in a date and then the invoice number uh my personal details are small the customer details are a bit bigger the subject line then the customer name and then up to five services the invoice total a payment goal the bank details and then the name but yeah you can do this uh however you want uh you can add some styling or some other elements to make it look a bit better or keep it rather minimalistic like i did here and then you're already done with the first step of this automation moving on to notion it's time to build the back end now we could just create one database and just create like one property for every merge tag that we have in our google docs invoice template and then combine it together that will be sort of the simplest version of this template but if you look to build like a slightly more scalable system for your invoices and maybe also want to have sort of a crm in it and calculate other stuff like customer lifetime value all these things then i would recommend that you break things out and create a few different databases in fact i would recommend that you create i think it's five uh databases let's count i would create one for your products i will create a database for your personal details one for your customers one for your invoices and then just this small helper database for your invoice number and that will make sense in a moment so these are the yes i counted correctly five databases that i would recommend to use so uh just i can just create them and then turn them into pages and then build out the databases for each section and i have also a blog post uh linked down below with like a list of all the exact properties that i use for every subsection i want to build out every single property with you that would take forever but we can just look at a few examples so the easiest and simplest database that we're going to create is the products database oops for that one all we need is the name of the product and then we want um the price obviously and then uh as an optional step i won't do this for this automation but the template below has it um if you for whatever reason need to offer your products in several currencies because you maybe do things internationally and you adjust like the currency that you use from time to time then i would recommend that you also add a currency field here and yeah then you can just fill this up with your products i'm going to put in some sample data here so uh sample product one will be 450 and we can mostly go in there and like just say okay please turn this into dollars and we can have sample product 2 for 25 and then last one will be for 30. so yeah it's super important when you build automations uh that you have always separate data in your databases because otherwise it will be a big mess when you're later trying to build the automation itself so that's it for products then you build out your details and your customer details i'm going to do this and i'll be right back with you and then just show you the different uh properties that i use for each uh table okay most of the databases are ready let's just quickly look at them so we have the customers and here we have the vat id and then we have basically fields for the address right so street city country the zip code and like a customer contact name just in case this is a company and we won't like address the different person in the invoice uh in the in this part and then just to make things easier for us because remember in the invoice we had one merge check address now we could create like five merch tags we could create one for street one for city one country but that would be a bit more work later down the line so even if you write them out individually here in your database i would recommend that you then create a simple formula to put everything together and there's actually like a neat little trigger notion to get like a line break in your formula and that's uh to type this uh in like a quotation marks and then an inverted backslash and then an n and that will give you this line break so as you can see if i were to take this out here and one of the plus lines there we go now it is in one line so now i will add the plus back in and uh the sign so that we are all correct here so that's the customers and your own details look pretty much the same you have again the valve id and then your um your address the and uh in your personal device you also want to include your payment details right so your bank account and then for both of these things you want to uh create formulas to put them together and as you can see i have two different styles here i have uh ones uh this sort of uh in a line with the dots and then uh this stack on top of each other again uh that's just because uh i want to paste my own address in the invoice template you know in the very top uh and the the header of the invoice in small so i want this layout and i don't want it stacked whereas like the payment details will be in the body of the email so there this is fine and yeah then just for the number of invoices uh super super simple uh we will have um a year property uh for another year you can create like a new thing and then i just have one with my last invoice and my next invoice and that's actually just put them to zero and one and yeah then a little formula that will tell me what's my next inverse is but that's not necessary great so all that's left to do is to um go ahead and create our invoices so let's do our invoices quickly um and uh look at the fields that we need here so first of you obviously want the name of the invoice and then um after that we want to be able to connect our uh details to this so who's our customer who are the computers like which are the person details right we might have several ones in particular several payment details so let's create two properties that relate to that so we do something for customer and it's a relation and we will relate it to your customers once it comes up so perfect your customers and yeah let's show this here as well the invoices awesome and let's do the same thing for our our details so again let's pick a relation pick this show on both and add that relation so now um oops let's just delete these two additional fields and first test invoice let's say we have our customer the game and our own personal details from susan doe so that's connected next we uh want uh to have in and definitely have to need to have the the products so we will create another relation for product and now the way this works uh you could do it probably also with all in one but to keep things uh easier to understand for the automation i would uh recommend that you create a separate uh product relation property for each product on your invoice so you remember like on my uh notion to my google docs template i had up to five products so i would uh just like quickly think okay how many products do you max invoice uh per invoice uh maybe add one additional for safety margin and do uh these that many uh i would go with five i think that's a it's a good number if you uh repeatedly invoice more than five products and maybe you need a more um robust solution uh you can obviously do this with notion you can do 50 here but it's just a lot of manual work because we made a later need to connect each product to the respective merge field so uh let's here in this example actually just do two products so we're going to do product one as will be relation to our products so let's look for the products perfect um both of them and then let's create another product too again it's a relation to our products here we are your products unique so something like this um awesome now we can pull in our product so let's put pulling product sample next up we need to specify okay how many remember we had quantity on our invoice template so let's do quantity p1 and this will be a number and then we can just duplicate this and do product two and then lastly we need to calculate the price for that so we will do p one total and that is a simple formula uh where we multiply up we forgot to pull the price so let's actually first let's get p1 price so this will be a rollup and we are looking up product1 and we want to get the price and we want to uh not show the original we want to have the sum otherwise we can make a calculation on it and we're going to duplicate this and take product two so we connect this to product tool to price here and again show some awesome so now we can create our p1 total property so we get a formula and we say please take product one quantity times product one press now in theory that should be all we need to do but unfortunately uh make currently has a slightly annoying bug where formula fields in notion that return a number value are sometimes not recognized i don't know why i hope they fix it soon but in the meantime we need to make sure that um our property uh our formulas don't return a number um and there's a very easy way to do this we simply wrap everything with a formula to string so the string command oops not i know sorry it's not to stream it's format confused for a second so we wrap everything with format and that will uh if you hover over it this will uh i format whatever we put inside as a string you can also see this numbers and notion if it's number output it will always be on the right if it's string output it will be left aligned so as you can see the price total is now a string and uh we actually didn't put in a quantity that's why so let's sell two of product one and one of product two perfect now again we're going to uh take this one oops uh and we want to create a duplicate for our product two so just quickly go in and change this to product two and the price to product too and now we have our total prices this is basically all that we need now depending on the other fields in your invoice you might want to add a few additional ones so we could add a payment goal right and we could add um an individual subject line maybe a quick line and we could say okay i want sometimes i need to add like specifically your remarks or so so like uh we just add like another key for specific remarks perfect now i would recommend that um in most of the cases to always always use just a simple text property here um the exceptions are when you need to run a calculation on it right with you with a quantity but otherwise i would just use a simple text one you good for a patient caller so could also uh use uh the select option uh select options also like just recognize as a string so that works too uh but yeah in general i would just keep it simple so let's put within one week in here and um again if you run the automation for the first time put sample data into every field even if you don't need a um like an individual subject line with this awesome invoice but otherwise it will make it much easier in the next seven specifically nothing really to add yeah okay great now that's that let's uh take a quick break and then we jump into the actual part of the automation okay so um now we are about to build our automation in make if you don't have a main account there's also a link for that in the description together with a tutorial that walks you through the beginner steps of make so that if you've never used it before you know what i'm talking about but for now we are just going to create our scenario to connect the data in notion with our template and we do that basically two distinct steps first we need to pull in all the information from the invoice into the automation and then in the second step we use that information to generate the inverse itself so we start with a notion module and we're going to pick the watch database items module and then we're going to grab the um id of our database so to copy this link to this page we paste this in our browser and then we pick whatever is between the the name of our workspace and the slash and then the question mark that's the database id so we copy that go here paste it in here we want to have it by updated time in case we do any changes and then we just set the limit high enough so that it grabs all the voices that we have perfect and then as always we want to run this once to make sure that it actually collects some data so i'm going in here and duplicate this once and then run this module only pull in some information oops okay that was too soon so we need to to wait for a moment uh sometimes if you create something in the same minute that the automation tries to pull data then this doesn't work so we're going to quickly wait a minute uh until the time uh is different and then we can create another version of our oops now 46 so now it should be fine let's duplicate this again let's run this again and hope that it now shows up yes perfect here it is so as you can see it pulls in our invoice and we have a bunch of data here perfect so that was now we looked up the information from our invoice database but as you remember we have also information on other databases so now we need to first um pull in the information from uh our customer so we want to get a database item uh again in this one and the database id will be from before and it will be if we say the customer it will be this id so now it will pull in the information from um what was that oh wait we have create a database item sorry that's the wrong module we want to get a database yeah get the data beside it sorry for that so we need the customer again this id not sugar perfect and then we do the same for our for our own details so then we say get a database item and this time the id is from our own details so we look here for because your details here get that id okay so now what we do is we go back in here we duplicate our trial and data and we run everything to make sure everything works properly awesome so as you can see it pulled in the information from our customers that we have connected so we have now our street and everything in there and same here everything got loaded in cool lasting uh piece of information that we need to add now is the um invoice number so again we need to this time search one object because we didn't even link our uh our invoice number database to the universal database that's in it we can just search for an object for that we're going to go back here go to our invoice number database copy the link to it so we can get the database id again copy this thing here between the slash and the question mark paste that here in this case we don't even need a high limit uh just one is enough and now we set a filter and we just want to get like this here right so we will say okay we want to make sure that year equals and then we're going to pick our current year so to do that we head over to the um date formulas and we got now and wait not just now we want to form a debate so we want to return a date in a specific format so we want to format the date now as year so just three y's and then we want to make sure that uh like because the information that we have in our notion database that's actually not found as a date right it's a string so we need to uh make sure that this whole thing is recognized as a string so that's actually quickly cut this out add the two string formula here and then paste this inside and now what should happen and we'll test this in a second is that it will check whether the title equals to the string version of the year that we currently have let's close this and we can actually run this in isolation so click on run this module only let's see what it pulled in perfect it found the correct property 2002 at 200 2022 and gathers our invoice number awesome so if you create now another year 2023 once it's 2033 it will pull in that information so the first step is then we have all the information inside our notion database a in our inside our automation that we need and now it's just about creating the invoice so for that we you need a different monitor and we need google docs and google docs has this awesome awesome function called create a document from a template and as you can see in the description it reads they will replace any merch tags with information that we can rapture so we pick our google account and then we will pick the specific location of the document so here we can uh click on it and browse it so we want our our shared templates i guess it should be and then within the shared templates we should have our yep invoice for notion youtube perfect and as soon as you collect it it will automatically load in all the merge tags that you had in the document as these fields to map and now you see also like if you create uh five products instead of two then you have a lot more fees to map because you need to map the name of the product the quantity uh the price and the total price every single time so again now that it's not possible just a bit more work cool so all that's left to do now is to map the information uh to the stuff that we pull in so our date field is actually i don't know we don't even have that information there so again we will go here and we will say okay uh please format the date format debate now when we create this invoice and please give return this as day month yeah with dots in between and if you are us-based obviously you can convert months or days and days even though that makes absolutely no sense but feel free to do whatever you like for the invoice number we're going to go to our data and like here the last object as you can see if you hover over data it always will show you from which module it comes that's super helpful so we need it from the last module uh where we pull in the invoice number and we just pick like next invoice number actually that's because i don't think in our template uh let's see it just says no it says invoice number okay perfect so we have a number and if we want to make it uh even a bit fancier we could also add the year to it so we could again say okay please give me um the format from a date with it but that's actually for this one let's just keep it at the number okay my details are again map data from the second round and we have one field for the complete address so we're going to open this to listen customer details again customer details and we have the complete ones and as you can see this is why we create this uh formula because otherwise we would need to do this now once for uh every step that comes with the street and so on and so on for our subject line we have something special if you remember in our database we have an individual subject line but we might not always fill this out so the way we handle this is we go to our settings and pick the fmt operator and what it does it's a bit confusing um if the first property is not empty it will take this and if the value that you put in the beginning is empty it will take the second one so it's actually right on burst i don't know why the way so we say please check whether um our individual subject line here it is plain text we need if this is filled out take this and if it's not filled out please just put something like okay um invoice number then the actual invoice number four and then let's pick the customer name so customer name should be somewhere here customer name yeah cool now our customer contact name so the person that we actually address in case it's a it's a company this is that's this one mr monopoly man and now we invoice our services so our service one that is product one so where is it product one here oh wait we have it uh we need to actually uh pull in that information we forgot uh to pull in the information so uh we need to go we need to go back to our um our our notion database and create a rollup for the name i forgot that so that we can actually pull the information in here so what we would need to do is go in here and create like not just roll up for the price but also for the name because uh as you see if you pull in on this field it will not give you the text it will just give you the id and i forgot that so let's just put in product one that's always now not dynamic but uh you get what i mean for the quantity we can do it correctly so we do product one quantity for the price of that one p1 price we're going to take this number and um the total will be product one total this year okay product two we obviously have the same problem so we take product two and then we take invoice quantity from p2 it's always a bit of a uh this is p two and p one where is the p2 total product 2 quantity here product 2 price is here product to total it's here awesome and then uh our invoice total i think that's another key that we forgot to add to our notion database so again we would need to to add a calculation field for the total and convert that to a string um let's just uh put 300 in here to for the sake of the demonstration let's pick our payment goal from here within one week our bank details that we also luckily have um this is the customer this is us some complete bank details our remarks if we have any we actually do i believe specific remarks yes our name from here thank me no where's our name address name here's the name and then our vit id and i guess that's a good opportunity and as you see um we don't this this simple version doesn't have the actual vit calculations uh built in but uh once you understand how to build this in general you could just as easily add now additional properties to your invoice that calculate your bat based on yet the price and the v80 amount and then you can obviously create just different merge tags in the google docs for that to reflect and then you need to put a title and as a title i actually want to have um this part here right that we already did so i just want to add the invoice number plus who is it for and then we choose where to save it so i would like to save it in finalized invoices and that's it so now we can test it we can go back create another version of this invoice and run everything once and hope that everything works properly uh we'll find out in a second also let's go uh in our drive uh and let's look for our finalized invoices and we have a bunch of other ones um try once using here this is the one that we just created so name is uh invoicing one for uh the game as you can see we forgot to put a space here so we can just uh go on back in here and do like a little bit of um debugging so actually we need to have a space here space and then we need to also have a space here so that this doesn't get added directly after let's click on okay and check the rest of it okay so we have our date uh that's the correct date yep 10th of june 2022 invoice number one uh susan doe our address all the details here uh an awesome invoice uh and everything that we need uh one other thing that we forgot is we forgot to add the currency symbols so uh again we would just head over to make and add that in the different parts uh in here for let's actually just just do it here but we would need to add whatever currency sign you want in front of i can actually do this suck quickly done in front of the prices awesome so that's nearly everything now all that's left for us is to make sure that our automation uh the invoice number actually updates so we go back to notion and we say update a database item and please update from oops this database that we had here that was our invoice number if you remember so please in the invoice number database update um the one where pulled information in from so this one and we would like to for the invoice number we would like to take the current invoice number and add one to it never sure whether the plus from there actually works so most of the time we use this plus and then as last invoice number just fill in what we just use as our next invoice number and now that updates if you leave something empty just doesn't do anything with it and press ok so let's try again just to see this works run this once wait for the new invoice to appear there it is and you see now we have the space here so it is correct and we should also have like dollar signs here yes awesome and if we go back to notion to our number of invoices this should have been increased yes one and two perfect that's about it uh last thing i can obviously now add to this automation in the blog post and description i also have like some explanation of how to now send this automatically to your customer based on the email that you put in that's also fairly simple um and if you uh wanted to uh download the pdf of this you can also do this you can just like add a module in between you can say google docs please download a document and then put in the document that you just added so you want to map this to the document id and of document created here and now you could in the next step uh insert another module and say okay gmail please send this via email to uh whatever email address i put in but yeah that's your invoice generator in notion fairly simple to build once you understand this concept of using merge text in google docs and super super powerful you can obviously use it for a ton of other things any sort of document that you ready you need to create use this way and yeah have fun with it so now you know how to create your own invoice generator in notion of pretty much any sort of document generator in notion um again the download for the free ready to use template is in the description below uh it has a few more additional features like as i said the send via email and there's also the blog post that walks you through everything in a bit more detail so with like the step-by-step properties that you need to create and lastly there's another tutorial down there for a simple twitter scheduling app using notion make that's also super cool and very good for beginners if you enjoyed this video it would mean a lot if you could uh give this a like or share with someone who might be interested that helps me out a lot and as always if you want to learn more awesome notion tricks get regular free notion templates and are looking for ways to streamline your workflow then you should definitely follow this channel see you in the next one