Formstack is one of several premium online form generator and spreadsheet companies. While Google Docs has a good spreadsheet and form creator for free, there are limits to what it can do. Premium services like Formstack give you a lot more features. One neat feature provided by Formstack in particular is its ability to receive payments. This can be handy for setting up a payment option on your website or even for generating invoices on the fly while on site with your customers.

Formstack Integrations

One of the great things about Formstack is that it integrates with a lot of great products. This list includes some of my favorite companies, such as Freshbooks and Mailchimp. When it comes to receiving payments, you can integrate your form with PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net or First Data. The last two options make it possible for you to hook your form up to your merchant account for direct credit card transactions.

Because of these integrations, you can easily receive payments using custom forms. The information you collect goes to a spreadsheet within Formstack, where you can integrate it with your CRM or export it via Excel.

Why Not Just Use Paypal?

This feature obviously makes it possible for you to set up checkout forms on your website for anything you would like to sell online. But the question you might have is, why not just use PayPal directly to process online payments?

PayPal has a nice website interface, but it does not provide a lot of customization. If you want to collect information on your customer when they check out, you can do so much more easily with a Formstack form. Plus, you can pull that information into your sales process and integrate it into a customer follow up plan.

If you want to collect some piece of information, say a birth date, you can do so very easily with Formstack. In essence, you have a fully customizable form to collect customer information with. Tagged on to that is the ability to process a payment right within the form, without having to go through any additional steps.

Using Formstack and Freshbooks to Create Invoices

Online checkouts aren’t the only thing that Formstack makes easy. If you integrate Formstack with your Freshbooks account, you can use forms to create invoices. There are a lot of applications for this. First, you could use this instead of setting up a merchant account or online payment system. Customers could order something from your website and receive an invoice via email or mail. This is especially helpful if you provide terms. You can also use it with Freshbooks’ recurring invoice option for things like memberships and subscriptions.

You can also use Formstack to create invoices when you are onsite with customers. Simply fill in the information on the form and an invoice will be automatically generated for the customer. There is no need to go back to the office and create the invoice as a separate step. I love the efficiency of this. To be even more efficient, you can create the invoices using Formstack’s iPhone app.

If you have ever been frustrated trying to set up and customize an online order function on your website or have wanted to find a way to more efficiently create custom invoices on the fly, you should try out Formstack’s features. The ability to receive payments using a custom form is just one of the many great features that Formstack provides.

Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Business Answers.

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