Populate Invoice Templates in Excel from Airtable and Make

A TV series location manager used to manually create invoices for crew contractors every week. This involved hours every week, copy and pasting individual crew member's timesheet data into an Excel invoice template for billing.

The task of creating a solution to automate this was given to StructLabs and StructLabs was able to create an automation in Make.com that read all the details like crew personel data, timesheet information, and populated these into the Excel template for each of the crew members.

The automation duplicates the template in OneDrive and renames the duplicated file with the crew's name and the working week. The automation then executes a series of modules to populate invoice header information (crew name, address, bank information, etc.), and daily working times (start times, wrap times, hours worked, etc.). Finally, the invoice URL in OneDrive is then updated in the invoice record in airtable.

Undoubtedly, this totally removed the numerous hours of manual copy and pasting timesheet data. Now the location manager only has to review the invoice before sending it off for billing.

The client was obviously very happy with our work and they proceeded to ask us for our help again to duplicate the same setup for another TV show they were working on.

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