Automate Document Creation and Send for Signatures

imagine if you never had to manually create a document again if it was all driven instead by your database or your your back-end system and documents were created manually that were unique for every customer that you have and they were sent up automatically for signature well that is exactly what we're gonna tackle in this video as you can probably imagine this is going to wind up saving a ton of time especially if you have a document heavy type of business so without further ado let's just get on into it hey my name is Gareth Pronovost I'm the owner of Gap consulting where we help businesses build automated back-end systems that help them maximize the efficiency of their business now in this video as I said we're going to be going into how you can build a process around your document creation so that it is fully automated and that it gets sent out to recipients for signature but before we get to it if you are new to this channel and you want to check out more on automation and learn more tips on how to use air table efficiently be sure to click Subscribe at the bottom of this video somewhere and give this a thumbs up so you don't miss out on our future content that being said though let's just jump on into my screen here so what you see in front of you is the air table setup and so we're going to imagine a scenario here where we've got you know a bunch of different contacts that live in our contacts table and then we link to the contacts table in whenever we create some sort of a contract so for this example we're sending out an agreement and you could have any number of different contracts that you might send out right in this case we're just gonna select send agreement but it could be any number of different contracts and this same automation could be built for every single process that you have documentation was okay so what we're doing here is we are creating a new contract by bringing in the contact information so if you're not familiar with the lookup field this is going to come into play here the lookup field is a way that we're going to bring in data that exists in another table so we need specifically to know what the contact email is the contacts company name and some other variables and we'll go into those the important thing is that they exist in the contacts level and that we bring them in through the lookup field and that means that once we've established the linked relationship to the contact that we know what those other data points are and we can go ahead and illustrate those here by for example bringing in the contact company you see this is a lookup here and so we know that the company name that Yosemite Sam is working with is signature example okay so we're gonna go ahead and hide this back but just know that these things are working underneath the surface here and so if you need any additional advice on setting that up be sure to look at the air table lookup field alright so this is a two-parter in part well let me let me be more precise first of all we're gonna build an automation that takes this new agreement in air table and it creates a document inside of a software called dock you pilot and document allows us to have a template that has merge tags in it and each one of those tags we're going to relate to a data point in air table so for example we might say fill in the client name here and then we point to the client name in air table and plug it in and so really easily that documents created in the cloud through document now the second part of this after that happens in zapier every time a new document is created inside of occupy tlit as the second step then we will say and now send an email through a signature software in this case we're going to use sign request so let's go into how we set all this up alright so first and foremost let's jump into dock you peel it and take a look at this so the first part of this is we have our document and we add a document here just by going to upload a new version so if we were to drop into our documents here we have you know different folders in this case we might have a retainer agreement and we have our retainer agreement here and you can see that the file that we already have uploaded for this example has a lot of things that don't really make a ton of sense and this is how we write these merge tags inside of document so we are going to tell it you know this is where we're gonna bring in the client first name and the last name this is where we bring in the client company and the client email right and we can have all sorts of these things all throughout the document then we go into preferences we can set up the name of the document we can even include these merge tags so that the name of the document updates every time all right actually let me go ahead and add a little colon in here and save that change and then down here we need to choose a delivery mechanism now here we are going to use sign now and we've already set this up inside of sign now the advantage to sign now is that inside of our document we can actually include the signature tags sign now is going to read those and it knows this is where a signature needs to go so if we drop back into our document and we scroll down to the very bottom of this example you'll see that we have these funny-looking things here inside of single squiggly brackets and this is basically telling sign now hey right here this spot needs to take the signature from signer one and this spot needs to accept the date from signer one and then inside of the configure setup here we connect our sign now account we name this automation and we give the email subject a name as well this needs to match signer one is going to match the tags that we had on the document and then we need to make sure that we're sending this to the client email and then we can give it a little bit of a you know blur up here and you know give them some instruction about you know what to expect for next steps alright so that's how we build the automation inside of document and how we get it to create this document for us let's take a look at what the automation looks like inside of zapier so this is going to be for this case a three-step sap we're looking for a new record in a view in air table so let's jump back in to air table really quickly and here we have our agreements and we have a specific view built for send agreement automation and inside of this view we have a number of filters set up but the most important one in this case is that we're looking for the outcome that is unique to this document so we're looking for send agreement if that doesn't show up then no records will be in this and so once a new record appears in here that's what we want to trigger the automation so just a you know kind of showcase this we could create a new one here a new document for Yosemite Sam and we'll see that it's not showing up here yet we only have two but once we change that outcome to send agreement and we apply the other filters as well for example giving it estimated hours for the project and things like that then it's going to create this automation we'll come back to this in just a moment but once we have that new record in the view then we are going to set up this is a little date formatter so what we're taking here is the date that comes from air table is in UNIX and this is virtually unreadable for most people so we want to transform this into something that makes sense inside of an agreement and so here we are going to use this data from air table and transform it into the full you know this is you know writing out the month with the day comma and then the four-digit year so that's what we're doing here is we're just formatting the the date and then we're going to push this to doc you peel it and so in our third step third and final step of this automation we create the document first we have to connect our document account then on the template we're going to directly tell it what data in air table is pointing to all of these different merge tags that we included in the document now if any of these are left blank then the document won't be filled out so make sure that all of these corresponds to something in the document and that then that we fill it out for everything all right so let's go ahead and jump out of here and we'll go back to our dashboard here and let's set this up we'll send the agreement which means that now it should be available as the third record in this specific view so zapier is now going to see it but I'm gonna run it manually zapier would normally take five minutes to 15 minutes depending on what plan you're on and we see that zapier saw that new record it it's formatting the date and it takes a minute but now it's created that document and occupy late' now I set this up to send to my own personal email so let's take a look and see if we received anything there you bring this into my other window and this is what just came in and so you see that we're bringing in information that was unique to that record in this example we have you know Yosemite Sam is the the character that we're sending to and so it's addressed to to him and we can then ask the client just respond to this email by opening this document I'm going to open it up in an in Cognos and take a look at what the document looks like from the client perspective so you know we we get a little thing here that says you know Gareth has invited you to fill this out please sign get started and we can see the document now all of the fields in the document and again let me flip back to my my previous one if we were looking at the document itself inside of docket remember these document or the document has all these tags right client first name client last name etc well for our purposes let's find that again once we bring that document in or once we create this document it's getting filled out with that information in air table so we don't have to manually put this in and so now we have the client name the client you know example business and then of course my personal email here all of this information then is unique for the client and then we get to the bottom and the client has the opportunity to sign the document and I can go ahead and you know create a signature here like so they will type their type their you know name in or otherwise sign the document and add that signature then the date gets filled out as well and once that's done the client needs to just click done now once that's finished the client is going to receive an email with the fully automated document for available for download but also you as the business are going to receive that notification as well and here this is now an entirely automated process all you need to do now in order to create this document every time is to go into your air table database select the contact and select the type of document and that's it everything else is done for you documents created the client receives the information and the document and can sign electronically then in there alright as always I hope you found that to be super helpful if you did and you have some business questions that you'd like to run by us definitely swing by our website the link will be in the description and we offer up times so that we can hop on a call with you you can book directly there and we can set something up that works for both of us what we'll be discussing is building a solution for you they put all of your data in one place and gives you a nice concise dashboard so that you know what's happening in your business at all times additionally we will work on building custom bespoke automation for you so that you can eliminate the time that you spend on repetitive tasks and save countless hours every week so if that's of interest definitely swing by our website and check out the different offers that we have there you [Music]

Channel: GAP Consulting

Views: 8,743

Keywords: airtable tutorial, airtable walkthrough, airtable example, GAP Consulting, Gareth Pronovost, automated entrepreneur, airtable consultant, automating airtable, notifications when files are added, automate file sharing, create a form for signature, automate signature requests, create paperwork automatically, automate paperwork, create documents automatically, automate documents from airtable, automate documents for signatures

Id: c_pG5R3XkTk

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2019