Simple Monthly Invoicing for less than 10 clients

Just an FYI that Airtable doesn’t have the ability to generate PDF files, so you would need to turn to 3rd-party apps for that.

Here are a few popular 3rd-party apps for automatically generating documents from Airtable:

1. DocsAutomator — creates Google Docs documents or PDF files.
2. Typeflow — creates PDF files.
3. DocuMint — creates PDF files.
4. Make’s integrations — which can be integrated with any document-creation app or PDF-creation app of your choosing, such as PDFFiller or CraftMyPDF. You can even integrate something as simple as custom Microsoft Word documents.
   
   If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one way that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
5. Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable — Fillout lets you automatically generate custom PDF files from a form submission.
   
   I show off this feature on this Airtable podcast episode: Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

I’ve set up something here for you to check out!

The idea is to have an ‘Invoices’ table where each record represents a single Invoice to a Client.  Then we can populate it with an automation that runs once a month that looks for all of the active Clients, and for each of them, create one Invoice record:

And here’s the automation setup:

This way if we update the pricing of one of the Services it won’t affect any of the previous Invoices, does that make sense?

The ‘Invoices’ table would also have a field to let us key in Discounts, with a ‘Total’ formula field that outputs final value

For the PDF side of things, it depends on how complicated your invoices are, really

If the PDF has dynamic line items, then I’d recommend trying out DocsAutomator (https://www.docsautomator.co/) which costs $29 a month for 100 docs

If it’s a fairly simple PDF that doesn’t have dynamic line items, then I’ve actually had good results with using a Make scenario to create a Google Doc via a template and upload it as a PDF into the triggering record.  With <=10 Clients I think that’d fall within the free tier of Make too and so would cost you nothing

If you’re okay with a manual process of creating the PDFs then you could also try Fillout (https://www.fillout.com/) which generates PDFs for you.  If your workflow involves checking each invoice before finalizing it to be sent out this could work fine too, it’d involve you opening the form, ticking a checkbox and hitting submit to indicate that it’s finalized, and the PDF would then get created and uploaded into that Invoice automatically

Hey! You're closer than you think.

I'd set it up with three tables: Clients, Packages/Services, and Invoices. Each invoice record links to a client, and you use lookup fields to pull in their package and pricing. Add a Discount field you just leave blank unless you need it, then a formula field for the total, something like Subtotal minus Discount. Since the discount is usually empty it won't mess anything up.

For the actual invoice, use the Page Designer extension. You build the layout once with your logo, client info, line items, discount and total, and it fills in from whichever invoice record you pick, then you export it as a PDF. It's what I use for our packing slips and it works great.

https://support.airtable.com/articles/4670048293-page-designer-extension-overview

For the 1st of the month part, an Airtable automation with a scheduled trigger can create the invoice records for you. As far as I know Page Designer is still click-to-export though, so you'd select the records and export the PDFs yourself. If you want the PDF generated and emailed with zero clicks you'd need something like Zapier or Make on top of Airtable. I'd start with the manual export since it already saves a ton of time, and you can automate that last step later.

Happy to help with any piece of it!

Hi Kelli,

One thing nobody has covered: generating the PDF and sending it are two separate steps in most setups. The tool creates the file and drops it in an attachment field, then a second Airtable automation picks it up and emails the client. You asked about both halves and the replies so far only cover the first one, so it is worth checking how your chosen tool handles the send before you commit.

TypeFlow can generate the document and send it by email natively, in one step.