How a Coding Bootcamp Automates Invoice Creation and Cuts Out Manual Work

We all know the pen is mightier than the sword. Possibly surpassing the pen these days is writing code. If you know how to code, you can build just about anything digital you set your mind to. From a website to a brand new application, coding makes it all possible. But how do you learn a programming language?

Covalence is a coding bootcamp, aiming to get their students from zero to software developer. They offer a 10-week full-stack development bootcamp for those in need of a career change and a one-week front-end fundamentals course for designers and marketers. Since 2015, Covalence has grown from one location in Alabama to five locations across three southeastern states.

With admissions accepting more and more students, Covalence had to scale their processes at the same rate as their growth. For that, they automated their workflows.

Automatically Create Quickbooks Invoices and Notifications

Let us know if this sounds familiar: A new client signs up for your service and you create a profile for them in your customer relationship manager (CRM). Then, in order to be paid for your service, you jump into your accounting software and build an invoice, copying over the client's information. Finally, you email the invoice to your new client.

That's a lot of manual work. William Johnston, Covalence's Chief Technology Officer and his team had built a custom backend that connected all their tools, but it lacked flexibility: "It was cumbersome to add new tools or change the way the process worked," William says.

William and his team transitioned to app automation tool Zapier. With Zapier's automated workflows, called Zaps, Covalence builds connections between apps as needed. If they switch to a new piece of software or application, all they have to do is swap apps in their Zap.

Some of their most essential Zaps automate Quickbooks invoices. Covalence uses Zapier to automatically create invoices, email them to students, and update their CRM, Pipedrive, once paid.

For every new deal in Pipedrive, Zapier creates a person in Quickbooks and then builds an invoice. Next, Zapier updates Pipedrive that the client has been invoiced. Covalence then sends the invoice, delaying it a couple of hours with Delay by Zapier.

To make it a bit more customizable for your processes, we broke this workflow up into a few different Zaps so you can adapt it to your workflow.

Now that their student has the invoice, Covalence just has to wait for the payment. When the invoice is paid, another Zap jumps into action to update the deal. This Zap frees up the accounting team from having to manually update each deal as paid.

Send Slack Messages for Your Calendly Events

With admissions growing as quickly as they are, Covalence's instructors are in high demand, because, as part of the admissions process, an applicant can schedule an interview with an instructor. Covalence uses Calendly to simplify scheduling.

When an applicant selects a time in Calendly, Zapier sends a Slack message to the instructor. And instead of digging through Pipedrive for details, Covalence uses Zapier to send the information in that Slack message.

More automated workflows means the Covalence team has more time to focus on their students. "We spend less time trying to work with the tools or complete processes manually and more time interacting with applicants, students, and employers," William says.

Their approach to using Zapier is a good one to copy, too:

"Talk with your employees to see where the pain points are in their day-to-day job. Think about how Zapier might be able to alleviate the pain," William says. "This could be anything from providing more notifications to connecting different tools together to achieve something they would otherwise have to do manually."

Cut out the manual work and spend your time doing more with less effort.

All images courtesy of Covalence.