Typeform to PDF: Auto generate documents from Typeform using Docdown and Zapier

With Docdown, you can auto-generate and electronically sign your business documents, making it ideal for workflows that involve a lot of paperwork. By automating your repetitive PDF tasks using Docdown, you can save hundreds of hours of tedious work every month.

In this guide, we’re going to automate the generation of an event proposal from Typeform with Docdown. We will be using Zapier to connect these two applications.

This is a one-time setup that has three distinct steps:

1. Creating a Typeform to gather data
2. Setting up the document on Docdown
3. Automating PDF generation from Typeform entry using Zapier

Creating a form using Typeform

Typeform is a web app that lets you create interactive forms. It also comes with pre-built templates for convenience. We’ll be creating a short questionnaire to gather information for our document.

Step 1: Create a new form in Typeform. Every form comes with a multitude of response options including date, short texts, paragraphs, multiple-choice options, and even a file upload system!

Step 2: Create and customize response fields to your liking. To collect images for use as signatures, check out the end of this section.

Step 3: Publish your form.

This part of the process is done purely to collect information. Once the automation part is complete, users can open the form and type in the details. All responses will be automatically sent to Zapier, which will then communicate it to Docdown.

Collecting images for displaying the signature

For this guide, we’ll be collecting the image URL of the signature of the user.  The image will be used to represent the electronic signatures in the document.

• In the form, create a question asking for a client’s signature. Specify that the user should provide a URL for the signature image. The image should be publicly accessible (i.e not stored in Google Drive etc.) and be of either JPG or PNG format.

Setting up the document on Docdown

Docdown can edit and add on PDF documents with ease. As mentioned above, we will upload and customize one of our legal contracts for this demonstration.

Step 1: From the Document page, click on New Document and upload your PDF.

Step 2: Click on the uploaded doc to open the document editor. In the top-left pane, you will find various data types you might need in your document.

Step 3: Add the different fields in your document that needs to be dynamically filled out.

Step 4: To add the signature of your compnay, double click your signature field, find the Data Source option and select Predefined.

Scroll down the settings and click on the “Add Signature” button. In the popup modal, you can either sign on the canvas, type your name or upload an image of your signature. Now, this signature will be added automatically each time the document is generated.

Step 5: Now, navigate to the Workflow page and click on the New Workflow button. For the trigger, you can select either. of the “Incoming Webhook” or “Online Form” steps. We will be using the incoming webhook step as it requires no configuration for setting up any forms.

Step 6: In the ‘Document’ dropdown, select the document that was configured in the previous steps. To set the file name of the generated documents, you can add it into the “File Name” field. To use dynamic data from the form in the filename, click the plus sign on the right and select a field you want to use in the file name.

Optional: Set up email notifications

Step 1: Click on the ‘+’ button on the workflow editor. Then, select Email action to add it to your workflow’s sequence.

Step 2: Select an email address in the dropdown of the “From Email” section.

Step 3: Fill in the destination email address and other relevant fields. To ensure the generated document is added as an attachment, click on the “+” button in the right of the Attachment field and select {{1.generatedDocument}}.

Step 4: Save and activate the workflow with the toggle button at the top right of the window.

Connecting Typeform and your document with Zapier

Each Zap in Zapier has a trigger and an action. The trigger is the event that kicks off the Zap. The actions are the events defined by web applications to which Zap can deliver the data from the trigger event.

In this process, we will create a Zap that fetches all information each time a response is made in Typeform. The Zap will then specify where each data will be sent in Docdown. Docdown will finish the process by generating a unique document for every new response.

Step 1: Create a new zap and search for Typeform in the Trigger section. You will be asked to choose your Typeform account and the name of your Typeform.

Step 2: Next, Zapier will perform a test run to make sure everything is in order. Once this is done, proceed to the Action phase.

Step 3: Search and select Docdown as the Action. For Action Event, choose Execute Workflow.

Step 4: Log into your Docdown account next. For first-time users, you might be asked to enter your Docdown API key. You will find this in your Docdown account under Settings > Account.

Step 5: Next is the ‘Set up’ action step. Select your Workflow from Workflow Name. Here, we specify where each response data goes in the document. For example, in the Company-name field, we set ‘What is the company’s name?’ as the response from the Typeform.

Step 6: To fill out the signature field, we need to map three fields of information:

• Signer Name – Text of the client’s full legal name.
• Signer Email – Text of the client’s valid email address.
• Signature – The URL of the image to be used as a signature.

Step 7: After all data fields have been mapped to the responses, click on the continue button. Zapier will perform a test run to make sure the Zap completes successfully.

You can now turn on the Zap. The zap will run automatically to ensure new data is always communicated from Typeform to Docdown.

Testing out Typeform Docdown integration via Zapier

Now that the process is all set up, let’s test it out. Our document has 8 fillable fields and here is the input data we will send via Typeform:

1. Date: 15/07/2021
2. Company name: ABC enterprises
3. Company address: Tokyo
4. Client name: John Doe
5. Client address: Budapest
6. Payment sum: 40000
7. Company Signature: (Predefined in the document)
8. Client Signature: (Sent as an image URL)

Below, you can see the generated document in Docdown. Now, every time a new response is recorded, the process runs automatically and the generated document can be found in Docdown.

Conclusion

By combining Typeform and Docdown, you can easily automate all forms of paperwork with a one-time setup. Down the line, it could save you and your business hundreds of hours of paperwork. Another popular alternative to Typeform is Google Forms. Google Form is free and comes with every Gmail account. If you use Google Forms instead of Typeform, we already have a guide on setting up automatic paperwork with Google Forms. For more on business automation, check out our blog!