Hey Makers
Are you caught in an endless loop of manual invoicing?
Spending countless hours managing customer data and creating, storing, tracking, and sending invoices? Dive into today’s story and discover the way to break free from that tedious cycle by embracing the magic of automation.
Meet Alexander Lätsch, Co-Founder of SmartSuite Consulting, who built a powerful automated solution for a mobile dental anesthesia provider operating in the US.
Before Alexander stepped in, the client was overwhelmed with manual tasks. Every day, they had to create and send out numerous invoices. Each invoice requires dynamic and individual treatment information, dynamic pricing, medical coding, and payment information for different service providers. This process was time-consuming and costly, leaving no capacity to treat other patients. 
But Alexander was not going to let his client drown in paperwork. He rolled up his sleeves and built the ultimate automated solution with Make and the following apps:
• SmartSuite
• Google Docs
• Google Drive
• Gmail
• RingCentral
Thanks to Alexander’s expertise and the power of automation, the client now saves an incredible 280 hours and over $19,000 every year. 
Continue reading to learn all the juicy details.
What problem were you trying to solve with your automation?
The problem was on the one hand the data management for patients and treatments and on the other hand the creation of the invoice with all associated fields, sending as PDF, notification via email, and SMS.
To create and send the invoice, a lot of different data about the treatment (treatment duration, medical codes, prices, payment link, etc.) and the patient was required. To optimize this process, we took advantage of SmartSuite’s powerful fields and internal automations, integrating their entire business workflow seamlessly.
In short, this problem got solved, as the automation in Make now takes care of all these steps by retrieving the data from SmartSuite, creating a Google Doc, converting it into a PDF, attaching it to the record in SmartSuite, and sending the invoice to the customer.
Why did the problem exist?
There was too much data that had to be manually mapped into a document and too many processes (collecting data, creating an invoice and uploading it to Drive, converting it to PDF, sending it by email, including a payment link in the email, sending a text message), which took too much time and therefore cost too much money - and of course had the disadvantage that no other patients could be treated during this time.
How did you solve the problem? What does your solution look like?
In this scenario, SmartSuite is used to manage all business workflows for a mobile dental anesthesia provider in one platform, including various formulas and internal automations. To initiate the invoice creation, the user simply needs to press a button within SmartSuite. To break it down, there are three distinct service providers and two different payment options, resulting in a total of six unique invoice possibilities.
Make plays an essential role because it retrieves all the necessary data from SmartSuite and manipulates them so we can then automatically:
- map the data on the invoice,
- create a Google Doc,
- upload the Google Doc to Google Drive,
- convert the Google Doc to a PDF,
- attach the PDF to the matching record in SmartSuite,
- send the invoice to the patient/dental office (depending on certain conditions) including the payment link,
- send a text message with a notification to the patient (also based on certain criteria).
a part of the scenario powering this automated process
What did your solution achieve?
- Reduced manual work
- Enhanced operational efficiency and elimination of human errors
- Timely payments
- Adaptability to business dynamics
- Automated pricing calculation
- Automated field value population
- Enhanced patient relationship
- Minimized waiting times for patients
Alexander, the magician who automated this process
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