Automating invoicing is a great way of saving you time and preventing errors.
Did you know that small medium-sized businesses waste up to 567 hours per year on admin tasks?
That's almost three and a half months of one person's job!
So if you're not automating your invoicing you're missing out on potential efficiency gains...
and that's why in this video i'm going to show you how you can automate your invoices in just a few easy steps.
Hi everyone! My name is James, and on this channel we show you everything and anything you want to know about document automation...
and in this specific video i'm going to show you how you can automate your invoices in just a few minutes.
Now the tool we're going to use to do this is an app called Portant.
Portant allows you to automate different types of document workflows,
from Google Sheets and Google Forms into Google Slides or Docs templates
exporting pdfs and sending emails automatically.
But in this specific video we're going to take information stored within a Google Sheet...
run that through a Google Doc invoice template to export pdfs.
All you need to do to get started is to head on over to portant.co to sign up.
We've put the link in the description below.
After you've signed up we begin by creating a new workflow.
Here you can enter a workflow name pick an icon and a color and click create.
After we've done that we need to pick where this workflow gets its information from.
In this example i'm going to pick a sheet which has a list of orders that i want to make invoices from.
After you've picked your Google Sheet, Portant will open that up so you can check all the information within it.
The next step after this is to pick the invoice template you want to put that information into.
You may have one prepared earlier or you can create one from scratch here.
After you open the file you can see a table on the right hand side.
This is what we call the 'Source Table' and it contains a different row for every header within your source sheet.
You can use this table to select where you want to place the data from the sheet within your template.
Just click copy for the corresponding row and then press CTRL + V to enter that tag within the document.
You can then format the tag and the corresponding data will be inputted with that formatting.
After we've entered some of the tags we come to the line items table.
We can see if we open the spreadsheet there are multiple rows that we want to combine into one single invoice.
Portant has a feature which enables you to do this called 'Data Grouping'.
This feature takes a selection of rows within a spreadsheet and places into one document in a table.
To use 'Data Grouping' enter the tags as normal in a document table row.
Then go back to the spreadsheet block, open up the advanced options and pick the 'Data Grouping Field'.
This is the information that's unique per invoice and Portant can use to group the data via.
For example here we can pick 'invoice number'.
Then that's all set up.
After we've added the last few tags into this document we can move on to customizing the output name.
You can insert as many tags as you would like in this output name...
in this example i'm just going to pick the 'invoice number' and put it in at the end.
Finally, i'm also going to select to create a pdf copy as well.
Now that we've set up the workflow, we can start our first automation.
For this we've got two options, we can either do it for all the data in the spreadsheet or for a set of custom rows.
Then when you click start automation the workflow is going to check all the data in the spreadsheet and start making documents
Then as soon as the first document's made we can open it up...
and we can see there's three line items in here which correspond to the three rows within the spreadsheet.
So, that's how we create a batch of invoices from a spreadsheet of data.
Now if we want to do something a little bit more complex...
and email those invoices to each customer, we can add an email block to the end of this workflow.
The email block also has a source table which you can use to customize the email.
Then after you've customized your email you can add your invoice as an attachment.
There are a couple of options here. You can either share it as a Google Doc, with 'Viewer', 'Editor' or 'Commenter' permissions...
but in this case we're going to choose to attach it as a PDF.
Then finally, you have the option to change who the email is sent from.
For example we could change this to a group email address like accounts@portant.co
The thing to remember here is that this address needs to exist as an alias that you use in your gmail settings...
there's a link to learn more about that there.
Now we've finished that we can start our automation again.
But before we do we're going to click this check box which updates all the existing documents we've already made...
so there isn't an additional batch of documents within our Google Drive.
After you've started the automation you can then open up your sent folder in Gmail and check out the emails that Portant has sent your behalf
If we open this one we can see it's been customized for this order and contains an invoice as well, just like before.
And that's how you automate your invoicing using Google Workspace and Portant.
Now i'm curious, are you going to use the automatic email feature or are you going to do that bit yourself?
Just let me know in the comments below.
And if you want to watch more videos like this, teaching you document automation tips and tricks...
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And with that being said thank you very much for watching and i'll see you on the next video. Cheers!