How Movium turned manual invoicing into a fully automated workflow

We do invoicing every month. Before Portant, it was fully manual. Another person on the team would gather data, sit with the accountant, and create all the invoices together. When that colleague left, the task landed on me. I don't like to work too much, so I started looking for automation.

The challenge was that we have monthly recurring invoices, but the amounts and the mix of products and services change. One month a customer might add services or buy a product. Each month is different. I needed something that could handle that.

We run everything on Google

Our product is on Google. We use Workspace. The fact that Portant integrates directly with Google Sheets was a big selling point.

My colleague does the data gathering and puts it in the sheet. I double check and run the workflow. I created a Google spreadsheet, configured the columns, created a template, connected the data to the template, and set up email sending with the PDF. When I run the automation, both the PDF and the Word version are saved in our Google Drive. For each month I create a new folder and store everything there.

The accountant downloads from Drive and creates the official invoice for the government and the customer. We still send the email with the PDF to inform customers that an invoice was created and what the amount is. Otherwise the data goes to the government and to the accountant and operations wouldn't see it.

Multiple rows in the same document

The feature that made it work was coupling multiple rows into the same document. When I was searching online, I was looking for a tool I could use for recurring invoicing where the data varies each month. When I found Portant, I stopped searching. I did the demo, did the setup, and it was exactly what we needed.

The setup was straightforward. I had a couple of questions on configuring the email sending domain, and there were one or two times where data was sent wrong until we figured out we should update from the Google Spreadsheet directly. But so far so good.

The stability we didn't have before

The major improvement was the stability of invoice creation. Previously it depended on when two or three people had time to gather data and create invoices. Now we have a workflow. My colleague has the data in by the end of the month. I run invoice creation and sending on the first or second working day. It's quite fixed.

We also have regulations. For monthly services we need to send the invoice within five days after the start of the month. That's covered now.

Building the spreadsheet forced us to collect the data in one place. We can use it for client revenue analysis and revenue distribution between services and products. The same data we need for invoicing is now useful for reporting.

What's next

I'm exploring contracting automation and automated offerings. When a customer signs up or asks for a quote, I'd like to automate quoting based on parameters like number of vehicles. We don't have HubSpot right now, but it's on the list.

If you're on Google and tired of manual invoicing, start for free at portant.co.