20 Epic Ways to Automate Documentation with Zapier

As consumer demands become more unique and varied, in order to keep up with big businesses, small businesses must change their back-end operations. With the accessibility and affordability of automated software solutions, this demand is not only possible, but it also saves time and money for small business owners.

Where do you start? That’s easy! Zapier and WebMerge.

Zapier provides businesses with the ability to sync any application they want. Based on the uniqueness of your operations, you could use Zapier to share new Tweets on Slack, send RSS feeds to Buffer, and more. With Zapier and WebMerge’s powers combined, you can automate your documentation process and eventually… rule the world!

Here are 20 ways you can use Zapier and WebMerge to automate your business:

1. Create and Sign Real Estate Contracts with CudaSign
   Real Estate agents are always on the go.  From meeting with new clients, running around town showing homes, to closings, real estate agents are rarely in the office. Here’s how you can create quick contracts and save some energy.
    
2. Create Contracts and Agreements from Nutshell CRM
   Managing your contacts, leads, and opportunities can be a daunting task, but with choosing the right CRM can be a life saver.  Nutshell is a great CRM and in combination with WebMerge you can save your sales team countless hours.  In this example we’re going to show you how you can create a contract from a lead in Nutshell and automatically send it to your customer.
    
3. Generate Contracts from Opportunities in TrackVia
   Managing your workflow can be a daunting task, but with tools like TrackVia, you can keep track of everything from start to finish – all within a single platform.  From managing a projects to collecting data in the field, TrackVia is a great solution.
    
4. Send a Letter of Engagement from Clio
   Document generation in the legal world is a must-have.  By auto-populating letters, contracts, and other types of legal documents, attorneys and paralegals can save countless hours.  Another way lawyers can save time (and their sanity) is by using a practice management system like Clio.
    
5. Populate a PDF Receipt from a Formidable Order Form
   Formidable is a popular Wordpress form plugin for creating contact forms, order forms, registration forms and many more types of web forms.  But what if you want to take that information collected on the form and populate a Word document or PDF?  Your options are very limited.  Unless you have WebMerge, of course!  
    
6. Send an Order Invoice from Smartsheet
   Smartsheet is a pretty cool tool that allows you to easily collect data from customers and team members, plus offering an easy platform to manage that information.  It’s like Excel, but on steroids.  In this example, we’re going to show you how to send an invoice created with WebMerge directly from Smartsheet as a new order is entered into our sheet.
    
7. Create and Send an NDA from Zoho CRM
   Keeping track of all your customer information can be difficult, but getting data out of your CRM can be an even bigger hassle.  Most often you end up re-typing information into other systems, documents, etc.  With Zoho CRM you can easily capture your leads, plus manage your customers, partners, and opportunities.
    
8. Send Customized Invoices for Magento Orders
   Let’s face it – e-commerce is here to stay and is an important part of any business.  Today there are many services out there that can help you build and maintain an online store front without the need of expensive coding or customization.  One of the most popular services is called Magento and they offer a product that can fit your every need.
    
9. Send Welcome Letters to Hubspot Form Leads
   You’ve jumped into the world of HubSpot marketing and sales tools, collecting all of this data on your website visitors, leads, and customers.  But, you don’t have an easy way to populate documents (letters, contracts, offers, etc) from that customer data.  Until now!  With the help of WebMerge (via Zapier) you can take your HubSpot data and populate documents on the fly.
    
10. Create PDFs and Reports from Knack
    If you’re looking for an easy way to build an online database application without the need for programming, you need to check out Knack.  With Knack you can get rid of those clunky spreadsheets and build easy to use web applications such as a custom CRM, proposal tracker, order management, and more.  Knack allows you to build some pretty powerful apps and we’re going to show you how you can easily generate documents directly from Knack using WebMerge.
     
11. Create Service Contracts from Batchbook
    If you’re looking for a great CRM to help you with organization and productivity, then we suggest you take a close look at Batchbook.  With Batchbook you can track your contacts, manage your deals, maintain your communication with customers, and more.  Let's take it one step further and generate documents from Batchbook using WebMerge.
     
12. Create and Send Contracts from Solve CRM
    In today’s competitive landscape for the CRM space, it’s tough for services to stick out from the rest.  You have to fit the needs of specific verticals or use-cases and do that really well.  In the case of Solve CRM, they have wisely picked a deep integration with Google for Work and all the apps that come along with it.  From Calendar syncing, to Gmail integration, to managing Google Drive files, Solve integrates seamlessly.
     
13. Create and Manage HR Documents from ZOHO Creator
    Managing your HR processes can be a daunting task.  From collecting new employee information, tracking time off, and handling payroll, there is a lot to keep track of and a lot of documentation to go along with it.  No sweat!  There’s a great tool called ZOHO Creator and you can build a customized HR app that allows you to manage all of your HR data across your entire business.  Then, combined with WebMerge you can generate employee contracts, insurance applications, state forms, and more.
     
14. Create Custom Invoices and Letters from Harvest
    Managing projects, finances, timesheets, and deliverables can be a job in itself, but with Harvest you can make life a whole lot easier.  Harvest can track all your expenses throughout a project and make it easy to bill your customers when the project is complete.  Sounds great, right?  Well, we agree, but what if you want to customize the invoices or send letters to your new customers?  Your options are limited.
     
15. Create and Send a Custom Payment Receipt from Freshbooks
    Freshbooks is one of the leading accounting solutions on the market and they do a great job of helping your manage your invoices, time, and expenses.  You can keep track of all of your customers and send invoices in minutes.  But what if you want to create a customized invoice or send a receipt to your customer when you receive payment?  Your options are very limited.
     
16. Send Customized Payment Receipts from PayPal
    PayPal is a great way to get paid for things online without the hassle of gateway fees, setup charges, or merchant accounts.  You can easily integrate PayPal into your shopping cart, website, or registration processes.  However, your options are limited if you want to customize the receipt that a customer receives when they pay your through PayPal.
     
17. Create Customized Invoices from Xero
    Managing your small business has never been easier than with Xero accounting software.  From your billing to payroll to contact management, Xero has got you covered and will save you hours upon hours every month.  Xero has a built in feature to send invoices to your customers and it will show you when they have viewed the invoice, but customization is limited.
     
18. Create Customer Receipts from Stripe Charges
    Let’s face it, Stripe is awesome at making payments easy.  You can integrate with their API in a matter of minutes and collecting money instantly.  The best part is that you don’t have any monthly fees to worry about.  You only pay when you get paid.  The only downside to Stripe is that it is hard to send customized notifications to your customer about their payment.  Unless you’re the developer behind the Stripe integration, your options are limited.
     
19. Email Personalized Receipts for Braintree Payments
    Accepting payments online is a great way to streamline your business and offer your customers an easy way to pay you. With Braintree you can easily integrate your payment process into your website, app, or shopping carts.  With just a few lines of code you can start accepting payments.  Unfortunately, sending customized receipts is not quite that easy.  Your hands are pretty tied if you want to customize the receipt.
     
20. Upload a TypeForm Medical Patient Intake Form to Box
    Have you ever thought filling out forms is a pain in the neck? TypeForm makes the experience of filling out forms fluid and fun. At the doctor’s office, filling out an intake form is often the first experience the patient has upon arriving for his or her appointment. If you have a medical practice, then you might be interested in improving your intake process. With TypeForm, in conjunction with WebMerge, you can merge the form submissions with a template document and automatically file them in your digital document storage system and/or as easily print them out as hard copies.

Instantly Populate Contracts from PayPal Payments

PayPal makes it easy to collect payments from anywhere and can be a great way for your customers to pay for your services.  Add WebMerge to your payment process and you can automatically populate all kinds of documents.  You’ll never have to copy and paste or manually fill out a document again!

In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically populate a contract when we receive a payment from a customer.  We’ll then automatically email the contract directly to our customer for their review.

To get started, we’re going to setup the template for our contract using a Word document.  Inside our template, we’re going to add our logo, company info, and repeating contract info.  For the spots that we want to customize with our customer’s information, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$FirstName}, {$LastName}, {$Address}, etc.

Here’s what our contract template looks like:
 

Once we have our template ready, we need to upload it to WebMerge.  From the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button and enter a name.  On the next step, click Office Document then select the file from your computer.
 

After you’ve uploaded your template, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify various options like the type of file that is generated and the name of the merge document.  For this example, we’re going to populate a PDF and then include the name of our customer in the contract file name.
 

Once you have saved your settings, we need to setup the email delivery so that the merged document is automatically sent to our customer via email.  From the Deliver tab, go ahead and Edit the default email delivery.  For the To address, you’ll want to choose the merge field for the customer’s email address.

If you don’t have a merge field in your document for the email address, choose <<other>> from the dropdown then enter something like {$Email}.

Feel free to edit any of the other email settings.
 

After you saved your email delivery, we’re done with the setup process inside WebMerge and we’re ready to setup the integration with PayPal.  To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.

Inside Zapier, we’re going to create a New Zap.  For the Trigger, we’re going to choose PayPal as the app then Successful Sale as the trigger.
 

Once you authenticate your PayPal account and setup your IPN, Zapier will run a test to make sure everything works correctly.  Follow those steps and continue.

Next, we’re going to setup the Action of our Zap.  For the app, we’re going to choose WebMerge and then Create Document Merge as the action.
 

After you authenticate your WebMerge account, Zapier will load a list of the documents in your WebMerge account.  Go ahead and pick the contract that you just setup and Zapier will load a list of the merge fields in your document.

For each merge field, you need to pick the corresponding fields from PayPal.  This tells Zapier how to send your PayPal information over to WebMerge so that it is populated in the correct spot on your template.
 

After you’ve matched up all of your merge fields, go ahead and save your Zap then turn it on.  We’re ready for a test!  Submit a new test transaction through PayPal and Zapier will send that transaction information over to WebMerge and your contract will be emailed out.

Here’s what our merged contract looked like:
 

Congrats, you’re all finished!  You can now instantly populate all types of documents from PayPal transactions.  Can you think of any other ways you can use WebMerge to simplify your paperwork process?