How to automate your invoices and payment process.
Guess what!?
Your prospect signed the proposal!
They are no longer called a prospect, soon they’ll be a client. But before they can be called that, they need to pay you.
I don’t know about you, but I love to get paid. I don’t like the paperwork and the hassle that goes with it, though.
And so… I’ve created a part of the workflow that solves that.
Have the signature on the proposal trigger creating an invoice in your accounting tool of choice.
If you are in the US or Canada, you should consider using Wave. They give away so much in their free plan. And it integrates well. But this is great for Quickbooks online, Xero, and other tools as well.
The process here is a bit more complicated - you will need to search for the client and have the zap create one if one doesn’t exist.
Then you need to create the invoice in the next step.
In order to have this fully customizable and automated, make sure your PandaDoc document (proposal in our case) has all the line items mentioned as fields. Or else, you can add a step in the zap to pull the data from your database (for example Airtable) by looking up the client.
This means that you will be able to map them in the zap to products you have created in your invoicing tool.
It also means your pricing will be mapped properly.
If you’ve been following till now - you will note that if you create these fields correctly in your Airtable, spreadsheet, CRM, or PM tool, and if you insert the data there once, while on the call or after the call with the prospect - these fields will automatically populate in the Zap.
After the client has paid, you want to send them a receipt.
This too can be done automatically via a Zap.
I won’t set that up here because the payment methods are SO varied and there are so many different workflow options here.
I do recommend having all your invoices in one central location.
If you are using Stripe or PayPal, they create invoices automatically and you can integrate those directly with your invoicing tool. So any time a payment is created in one of these, trigger a zap to create a ‘duplicate’ invoice in your accounting app. Make sure to add a comment that this is based on the automatic invoice created in the payment tool.
What I do want to cover is what happens on the business side of things, after your client has paid you.
There are many steps you will want to take when you onboard a new client.
In order to trigger this, we need to mark the payment as complete.
Changing the status to Paid can be manual or automated, but because there are so many different payment options, in our workflow, it’s manual.
I would recommend having either a single select field where you can mark the proposal as paid, or else having a single select field called ‘Payment’ with an option of ‘Complete’.
Airtable triggers are based on “Last modified” columns (date and time). So when an entry is updated (a row in the spreadsheet), the last modified time changes and triggers the zap. We need to be sure to set this column to activate based on the Payment field.
Next → Client onboarding
Feel like you needed a clip that would help walk you through this?
Maybe you needed the Zaps ready to go instead of fiddling with it?
Did you feel like you would have loved to have the Airtable databases themselves?
Well… I've got you covered.
I have a PDF that you can purchase that includes everything I mentioned above. You can basically plug it all in with the help of clips and your workflow sequence will be up and running in no time.
