Extract a Link from a PDF in Zapier and Matching to a Person in Airtable

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Hello All,

I absolutely love listening to the show. It caught me on the right day, I can’t remember what episode it was but it was where I first heard about Airtable. Since then it has already saved me many hours in paperwork in my business. Now for Zapier! :wink: There are questions on the Zaps I built below, but if anyone wants to know how I did what I did, let me know.

Question 1:
I’ve built a Zap, that takes some information in Airtable > Assigns it as a product sign up > Then emails the invoice out in Xero (accounting software). It’s a bit of a workaround but the only access I can get to something so that it automatically sends is a PDF attachment. Unless someone can spot anything different.

I’ve then got another zap which can auto mark this product as paid.

That email attachment is a PDF, but it contains a link to the online invoice where people can pay. I’d love to be able to pull this out and put the link directly in the email.

Question 2:
I am trying to get Airtable to link the product order to a specific customer in the products database. I’ve set up a quick assign view, so it’s not that bad. But I wondered if anyone had a way to automatically match a product order to a contact field in another sheet of Airtable? I have Student Name, Fee Payer Name and Primary Email as potential matches.

Keep up the great work on the show.

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Hey Bobby!

I’ve been loving Airtable as well.

For Question 1 - Assuming the links are unique here. Could you manually extract the link yourself, add it to the Airtable and have the Airtable fire off the email you want via Zapier instead?

For Question 2 - You could consider using a Zapier Utility to store the customers email for faster referencing. You’ll need to update it with each new customer but it will still save you time. Otherwise, you’ll need a unique identifier that is found in the email and Airtable to connect the two.

If you had to rebuild your system knowing what you know now, how would you approach it differently?

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Hi Dillon,

I did in the end build a successful set up using Integromat.

However, I would NOT recommend using the approach I ended up using for businesses that require anymore than a few invoices sending per day.

It worked 90% of the time. But the 10% of the times that it didn’t caused me a lot of issues. I can tell you that a different business type, with less difference in pricing could absolutely create automatic invoicing through Air Table and Xero. Especially with someone on hand to monitor for any issues.