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#002 A form to invoice customers

🌎 Overview

  • Often times you have one-off, or small scale needs to invoice your customers that don't fit in the regular sales channel
  • Manually invoicing customers can quickly turn into a load of work
  • Augment your simple order form with auto-generated invoices from your accounting system

Difficulty: Intermediate

Cost: Airtable - free Zapier - 19.99/mo QuickBooks - $12.50/mo

Tools Used: Airtable, QuickBooks, Zapier

🛠 The Build - 4 Steps

Core Functionality

  • Allows you to quickly design a form to issue invoices
  • Generates an invoice in your accounting system
  • Sends the invoice to the customer within a few minutes

1. Create an Airtable Base

In Airtable, create a new base from scratch with the following fields:

  • Customer Name
  • Customer Email
  • A field for each purchase option
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2. Create a Form

  • Customize the look of your form
  • Add helpful narratives
  • Mark fields as required
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3. Add Fields to Calculate Totals

  • Add three formula fields to calculate the total price of each item, based on the quantity provided by the customer
  • The third field uses a SWITCH formula. This is an alternative to an IF statement, when there are several different options. The SWITCH formula used here is as follows:
  • SWITCH(
    	{Package},
    		'Basic', 10,
    		'Medium', 100,
    		'Advanced', 10000,
    		'Legendary', 1000000,
    			'Error'
    )
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4. Create a Zap

In Zapier, create a Zap with the following steps:

  • Trigger when there's a new record in Airtable:
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  • Add a "Find or Create Customer" action - If it's not found, a new customer is created:
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  • Add a "Create Invoice" action with the first invoice line item
    • Use the customer from the previous step, and be sure to set "Send Later?" to True
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    • Add the details of the first line item. Note: QuickBooks requires a total "Amount" for line, so it will disregard the item price in the QBO file. If you are following this same process with Xero, you can simply provide the item and the quantity.
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  • Add subsequent line items using the "Update Invoice" action
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  • Add a "Send Invoice" action to send the final invoice
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💪 Additional Functionality

Mark the record "Sent" with Zapier
  • Add a Sent field to the Airtable base:
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  • Add an "Update Record" action to Airtable
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Send a thank you email with Zapier
  • Add a "Send Email" step in Zapier with your email provider
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Request a review in 7 days with Airtable
  • Add two fields to your Airtable base:
    • An order date
    • A date to request a review
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  • Create a view to trigger review request emails - Use the filter Request Review Date is on or before today
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  • Create an automation to send the review request emails automatically
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Notify someone of a submission via Email with Airtable
  • Create an Automation in Airtable with the following steps:
    • Triggered by a new record
    • Use the "Send an Email" action in Airtable to send a custom email
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📚 More Resources

  • A 12 minute video walkthrough of this build is available in the rlz.io community
  • If you haven't used Airtable before, signing up via this link gets me a $10 Airtable credit 🙏