Admin edition: automate tasks
At PandaDoc, we’re all about streamlining workflows to reduce the manual labor for you and your team. That’s why we’ve set out to make your document process as automated as possible.
In this post, we’ll walk through the entire automation process from Signing in to celebrating wins, and every step along the way.
Quick provisioning with SSO
Give employees safe and easy access to sign in to PandaDoc through an identity provider (IdPs such as Okta, OneLogin, Microsoft AD FS, etc.). With SSO and Just-in-time (JIT) provisioning, you can also automate employee account creation in PandaDoc. The first time your employees try to log into PandaDoc, they’ll be added to your account as users (no manual invites necessary). More info here.
Setup your information flow
Direct the order your recipients receive a completed document
Using Roles and Signing order, you can set up Templates to automatically send an email to someone when a document is completed. Use this technique to automatically give folks (like your CEO or billing team) access to documents only after the doc has been completed.
Quickly send information from one document to another
When sending multiple documents to the same contact (first a proposal, then a contract, then an invoice, for example), you can automatically transfer data from one document to another with the “transfer data” feature. Easily push contact details, token values, and pricing information from one doc to the next.
Use this to quickly:
- create a contract from a proposal
- create an invoice from a contract
- create an onboarding letter or guide from a contract
Pro Tip: Use this during the renewal process as well to quickly map over the relevant company and opportunity information from the previous contract. Then remember to enable reminders so you don’t miss the next renewal date!
Ensure everyone receives a copy of the finalized document
To ensure all recipients have a PDF copy of their completed document, enable the “email attachment” feature in your template or document settings. With this setting turned on, recipients receive an automated email with a PDF copy as soon as the document is completed.
Zapier – Where automation meets customization
If you’re not familiar with Zapier yet, you should make yourself acquainted. Their platform, whose tagline is “Zapier makes you happier,” empowers you to connect the apps you use everyday to automate your work and be more productive in a fraction of the time.
How does Zapier work?
With Zapier, you have triggers and actions. When you set up a “zap” you determine the trigger and the resulting action. For example: when a document is completed (trigger) >> create an invoice in QuickBooks (action).
Next are a series of our most common Zaps we recommend for expediting your workflows.
Creating invoices when PandaDocs are completed
Use the QuickBooks zap or FreshBooks Zapier integration to automatically generate invoices once a PandaDoc document has been completed.
Uploading a PDF copy to cloud storage
Automatically upload a PDF copy of a completed document to Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, or OneDrive to keep all your docs in one place and allow everyone to have access to them.
Updating stages in your CRM
Keep your CRM stages up-to-date as your document changes status from “draft” to “sent” to “completed” to “paid,” etc. with the Salesforce and Pipedrive Zapier integrations.
Posting to Slack when a deal closes (#sales-wins!)
Create visibility into sales wins to spark excitement and some friendly competition with a #sales-wins channel in Slack. Automatically post to the channel every time a proposal or contract is signed with our Slack zap.
(Step by step instructions here)
Creating a Trello card or board
Kick off a project in Trello as soon as a document is completed by automatically creating a new card or board using the PandaDoc-Trello Zapier integration.
As you can tell, the possibilities are pretty much endless. Check out this page for even more inspiration.
Skip the invoice with Payments
If your business is set up to accept payments from Stripe, Square, PayPal, Authorize.net, or QuickBooks payments, there’s no need to automate invoice generation. You can streamline the collection process even further (and get paid faster!) by embedding the Payment block in your documents so your customers can pay online right after they sign.
For more details on each of these Payment Gateway integrations, check out this page.
Wrapping up
From templates to automated file storage and email delivery to auto-generating invoices and automating collections with Payments, you’re well on your way to a streamlined workflow. Go forth and automate some of those tedious, repetitive tasks out of your life!
Note: many of the more “advanced” automation features are intended for Enterprise accounts. If you are interested in a feature that is not available on your current plan, please reach out to either a Customer Success Manager, Sales contact, or our Support team. To get really fancy with automation, you’ll want to dig into our CRM integrations or leverage our API.