Managing invoices with Form Publisher, YAMM and Awesome Table
Post date: Jul 10, 2015 2:48:35 PM
Last September we introduced paying plans for Yet Another Mail Merge. This was a really good move since it led us to invest more in this add-on, develop many new features and improve the support. To offer those paying plans, we needed a payment process - we chose Paypal - and we soon got the need to print invoices.
Luckily for us, we have a set of wonderful tools to help formatting those invoices:
Form Publisher is a great tool to create PDFs based on a Google Docs template and data submitted via Google Form.
Yet Another Mail Merge is perfect to send beautiful emails upon form submission.
Awesome Table offers a nice UI to quickly find a specific item in a list.
Creating new invoices based on a template
The first step was simply to create a nice template on Google Docs to reuse with Form Publisher.
As we wanted a 100% automated process, the Paypal IPN service calls a very simple Apps Script web app that registers the transaction and submits a Google Form to trigger Form Publisher.
Form Publisher makes a copy of the template, replaces all markers (__##Price##__,...) by data submitted via the Google Form and stores a final PDF version in Google Drive.
We also asked Form Publisher to save the URL of the PDF in the spreadsheet containing the form responses (the Google Sheet linked to the form).
This is really useful as it will let Form Publisher, Yet Another Mail Merge and Awesome Table play together.
Sending those invoices
Form Publisher has basic email options. You can select a list of recipients and give different permissions to each of them (eg: give editor or reader access to the files created in Drive) but you can't really customize the emails sent (it's not possible to change the body of the email, add a logo and other images,...).
To do that, use Yet Another Mail Merge. This tool can send very personalized emails upon form submission and will wait until Form Publisher has created the PDF, stored it in Google Drive and added the link in the spreadsheet before beginning its job.
Even better, YAMM will understand that Form Publisher has created a PDF so it will retrieve it from Google Drive to send it as an attachment in the email sent.
Finding your invoices
Now each customer receives an invoice, all of them are also stored in our Google Drive and to quickly find a specific invoice or set of invoices, all we have to do is set up a new Awesome Table view (we don't even need to create a Google Sites as Awesome Table is now available as a web app on awesome-table.com).
