CRM for Printing Business using Google sheets & appsscript

Hello everyone. In this video, I will show you a CRM built specifically for artisans and creative businesses, not a generic enterprise tool that forces you to adapt. Quote your customers in minutes, generate a PDF, and email it all from one place. Convert accepted quotes into orders with a single click. Track every order through a visual stage-by-stage pipeline. Track stage transitions, field updates, and member assignments. Detailed scope of work, upload design documents, share them with your customer, manage reference files, upload images, generate and send invoices, log payments, track outstanding balances. Your team logs in with a PIN. Every action is tracked. Every stage is recorded. And it runs entirely on Google Sheets. No expensive subscriptions, no vendor lock-in. Your data, your spreadsheet. This works beautifully for digital printing, banners and signage, neon lights, custom apparel, fine art commissions, artisan crafts, corporate merch, and more. Before I start the demo, if this looks useful for your business, please hit subscribe. The full setup guide is at the end of this video, so stay till the end. Let me start with the settings tab, because this is where you make the CRM feel like it was made for your business. You fill in your business name, phone, email, and address. This information appears on your quotes and invoices. In branding, you can set a custom sidebar title. So, instead of a generic label, your staff sees your brand name. You can also provide a Google Drive link to your logo and it renders in the sidebar. One URL, instant branding. This CRM works globally. You pick your display locale, which controls how dates and numbers are formatted, and you pick your currency. Whether you're billing in US dollars, Indian rupees, euros, or British pounds, just flip this drop-down and every number in the app updates instantly. Now, here's something really powerful. We ship with 10 ready-made pipeline presets for different creative businesses. Standard print and signage, custom apparel, fine art commissions, artisan crafts, corporate merch, and more. You hover over the question mark to preview the full pipeline journey for that business. When you're ready, hit use this configuration and your pipeline stages are set up instantly. For this demo, I'm using the digital printing setup. You can also manually edit or extend the stages. The live preview shows you the full pipeline flow as you type, so you always know exactly what your order journey looks like. Finally, we have workflow automations. You can configure the CRM to automatically change an order's pipeline stage as soon as you execute certain actions, like converting a quote, sending design documents, or emailing an invoice. You pick the target stage and the CRM handles the transition for you. Work types are how you categorize the kind of service each order represents. Digital printing, custom apparel, signage and vinyl, neon signs, installation, whatever your business does. You can add them manually or use one of our preset packs. I'll click apply on the custom apparel and in seconds I have five professional work types ready to go. Each work type has a name, description, and a color label, so your orders are visually organized at a glance. On the team tab, you manage everyone who works in your business. Click add member, add their name, phone, email, their role, and their specialization. For example, large format printing or neon bending. The role you assign controls what they can access. Admin has full access to everything, including settings and team management. Manager can access all operational tabs, orders, quotes, customers, work types, and payments, but not the team or settings tabs. Staff are focused solely on their work. They see only the orders tab and can see only the orders assigned to them. When you add a member, the system auto generates a six-digit login PIN for them. You can see it right here on their card. That's what they'll use to log in. You can edit or remove any member at any time. The customers tab is your client directory. Add a customer with their name, phone, and email. These records are linked to quotes and orders, so you always know who each job belongs to. Now, let's start the main workflow. I'll begin from the quotes tab, where every new inquiry typically starts. Click new quote. I'll fill in a title, something like large format banner Cafe Blue, a short description, the customer I'm quoting for, and a validity date, how long this offer is valid. Now, I'll add line items. Each item has a description, a quantity, and a rate. Watch how the total is calculated automatically as I type. I can add as many items as I need. Printing costs, installation, lamination, whatever the job requires. There's a notes field at the bottom for payment terms, delivery conditions, or any other information you want to communicate to the client. Hit create quote. Done. The quote is saved. Let me open this quote. At the top, you'll see it's current status. It starts as draft. I'll go to the PDF tab. Click generate quote PDF. The system builds a professional PDF quote and saves it to your Google Drive. It's linked right here. Now, click send to customer. The PDF is emailed directly to the customer. Let's verify in my email sent box. And there it is, delivered. At the top, you'll see its status also changes to sent. Suppose the customer has reviewed the quote and accepted it. I can mark it as accepted like this. Then I can click convert to order. That's it. The quote status updates to converted and a new order is created automatically, carrying over all the details. Here in the orders tab, you can see that our new order has appeared at the top. There are three views. Let me show you each one. The progressive view is my favorite. These arrow-shaped filter buttons at the top represent each pipeline stage. Click all to see everything. Click any stage, say design in progress, and the table instantly filters to only orders at that stage. The count badge on each button tells you how many orders are sitting there right now. You also have a search bar that searches across order title, description, and customer name simultaneously. Then three drop-downs to filter by stage, work type, and assignee. Powerful for managers who need to see the full picture. The pipeline view gives you a Kanban-style board. Each column is a stage and you can see all orders side by side at a glance. And table view is a clean flat list with all key details in one row. Customer, assignee, description, stage, priority, due date, and amount. Click any row to open the order detail panel. You can also create a new order from scratch. You can leave out the quotes tab if it doesn't fit in your workflow. To really see the power of this tool, I'm going to show you two things. First, a completed project so you can see its entire life cycle, and then we'll jump back to our new order to see the entire workflow in action. I will click this row to open the order detail panel. Inside an order, you have a complete overview. Customer, assignee, priority, and the financial summary. Total amount, paid, and outstanding balance shown instantly. There are action buttons at the top. Advance moves the order to the next stage in your pipeline. Revert pushes it back one stage if needed. Notify sends a custom message directly to the customer via email. Invoice generates a PDF invoice and saves it to Google Drive. When you click advance, a small form pops up. You can add notes about what was done at this stage, and you can reassign the order to a different team member right here. This makes perfect sense because a design stage is typically handled by a designer and the production stage by a fabricator. Now, let's look at all the tabs inside the order. Each order has specialized tabs to keep everything organized. The scope of work is where you refine the job details. You can add items, update rates, and watch the total update in real time. This data is what builds your final invoice. The design documents tab is huge for creative shops. You upload your artwork here, PDFs, AI files, or mockups. Once they're up, hit send all to customer. The CRM emails the files directly to your client, and because of the automation we set up earlier, the pipeline stage automatically moves to design sent. If you have external links, like a Google Sheet for calculations or a Pinterest board for inspiration, save them in the reference files tab so the whole team can access them. The uploaded media tab is for site photos or production shots. Everything goes straight to your Google Drive, kept perfectly in sync with the order. Use the invoice tab to generate an invoice and send it to your customer. In the payments tab, you record every payment received against this order. Amount, method, such as cash, bank transfer, or UPI, the date, and a reference number. The app tracks total paid versus outstanding automatically. Finally, the timeline. This is your complete audit trail. Every stage transition, every field update, every team member change, all time-stamped and sorted newest first. If a customer asks what happened on Tuesday, you open the timeline and you know. Let's open our newly created order that was converted from the quote. You can see it's already at the design in progress stage. I will modify it a bit. Update the description, set its work type, assign it to somebody, and pick a suitable due date. Hit save changes. The changes are live now. First, I'll upload our final design document to send to the client. Once I hit send to customer, look what happens. The pipeline stage automatically updates to design sent. The CRM handles the tracking for you. When the customer approves the design, we proceed by clicking advance. In this pop-up, you can jump to any stage, change the assignee to a production manager, and enter notes like approved via WhatsApp. Let's confirm that. And there we go. The stage changed successfully. Now, it's quite common to have specifications in a Google Sheet or reference docs. We can store those in the reference files tab as well. I'll paste a link to our production sheet, and it's done. Your team has everything they need in one place. Once the final printable file is ready, we can store it in the media tab. You can also keep any production photos here. Now, suppose we've delivered the job. It's time to generate the invoice. I'll head to the invoice tab and click generate invoice. The system builds the PDF and saves it to Google Drive. Let's send it to the customer. Done. Let's verify in their inbox. And there it is. Back on the order detail, you'll notice the stage has automatically moved to delivered. Finally, the customer has paid. Let's log that in the payments tab. You can track installments or full payments easily. I'll submit the final payment. And you can see the balance hit zero instantly. From here, we just close the loop by moving the stage to paid or closed. That covers the entire flow from inquiry to final payment. Let me now show you what this looks like from a staff member's perspective. I'll log in using the six-digit PIN that was generated when we added this team member. I will enter my phone number and the PIN. Once logged in, the team member can see their profile and change their own PIN from the profile menu. When they open the orders tab, they only see the orders assigned to them, not all company orders, just their work. This keeps things clean and focused and prevents staff from seeing jobs they're not responsible for. All right, let's set this up for your business. I'll walk you through every step. Step one, get the Google Sheet. First, open the Google spreadsheet link provided in the description. This is the back end of the entire application. Click file, then make a copy to save it to your own Google Drive. Give it a name that makes sense for your business. Step two, deploy the app script. Now open the sheet. Go to the menu bar, then extensions, then app script. This opens the Google app script editor where the back end logic lives. You don't need to edit any code, just deploy it. Click the blue deploy button, then new deployment. For deployment type, select web app. Set execute as to me, so the script runs under your Google account. Set who has access to anyone. This allows the front end to communicate with it. Click deploy. Google will ask you to authorize. Click through the permissions prompts. This is safe. You're just giving your own script access to your own Google Sheets and Drive. Once deployed, you'll see a web app URL. Copy this URL. Step three, connect the front end. Now open the CRM application in your browser. You'll land on the setup screen. Paste the app script URL you just copied into the field and click save, then reload the tab. The app will connect to your Google Sheet. You'll see it load your data immediately. Step four, first log in. You'll be prompted for your admin username. Enter a name. This is your admin identity inside the CRM. This creates your admin account. Admin has full access to everything. Step five, initial configuration. Head to settings and fill in your business name, phone, email, and address. Your branding, sidebar title, and logo URL, your preferred locale and currency, and your pipeline configuration. Either use a preset or customize your own stages. Then go to work types and either add your service categories manually or apply an industry preset. Add your team members from the team tab. Share their auto-generated PINs with them so they can log in, and you're done. The CRM is live for your business. And that's the complete walk-through from setup to a fully operational CRM for your creative business. If you found this helpful, please like the video and subscribe to my channel. Drop a comment below if you have questions about setup, customization, or if you want a feature that isn't there yet. I read every comment. See you in the next one.