Automating Documents in monday.com with PDF Maker
A step-by-step visual walkthrough for teams that want to stop drafting documents by hand.
Uddhav Jadhav
Last Update sebulan yang lalu
In today's fast-paced business environment, teams spend countless hours creating repetitive documents — invoices, contracts, quotes, work orders, reports, and certificates. Manually copying data from monday.com boards into Word or PDF files is not only tedious, but also prone to human error.
The setup breaks into three phases: prepare the template inside PDF Maker (Steps 1–3), open monday.com automations and pick a method (Steps 4–5), then either use a ready-made recipe (Steps 6–7) or build your own workflow (Steps 8–9), and finally enable, test, and verify (Steps 10–13).
1. Start Automating Your Template
Once your document template is designed and ready inside PDF Maker, head back to the Templates page. Locate the template you want to automate, click the three-dot menu next to it, and select Automate. This is the starting point of the entire automation flow.
Before PDF Maker can push generated files into your board, it needs permission. A monday.com authorization window will appear requesting access. Click Authorize to allow PDF Maker to:
- Read board data used to populate the template
- Generate documents on demand
- Upload the finished files to a Files-type column on your board
3. Configure Document Delivery
Now configure how and where your document is delivered. This screen lets you set every important output detail.
- Select output column: Choose the Files-type column on your board where the generated document will be uploaded (only Files-type columns appear in the dropdown).
- Attach to Updates feed (optional): Toggle on to also attach the document to the item's conversation feed.
- Custom document name (optional): Enable this and use column tokens (e.g., "Invoice_{Name}_{Date}") so each file is named dynamically.
- Document format: Enable PDF, DOCX, or both. At least one format must be enabled.
When you're happy with the settings, click Save & Exit.
💡 Tip: Use dynamic file names
A file called "Invoice_INV-001_2026-01-15.pdf" is far more useful than "document.pdf" — search, sorting, and audits all get easier
4. Open Monday Automations
Switch back to your monday.com board. At the top-right of the board, click the Automate button (the robot icon) to open monday.com's automation center. This is where the trigger for document generation will live.
5. Choose Your Automation Method
You have two ways to build your document automation. Both are covered on the following pages — pick whichever fits your workflow.
- Method 1 — Predefined recipe: Fastest option. Use one of PDF Maker's ready-made automation recipes.
- Method 2 — Custom workflow: Full control. Build your own trigger → condition → action pipeline using the PDF Maker Generate block.
Method 1. Predefined PDF Maker Recipe
The predefined recipes cover the most common automation patterns and get you running in under a minute. If your trigger is standard, this is the recommended path.
6. Find PDF Maker Recipes
In the automation center, click Create at the top and type "PDF Maker" into the search bar. This opens PDF Maker's recipe gallery, showing every predefined automation available.
7. Select a Predefined Recipe
Browse the gallery and choose a recipe whose trigger matches your process. Common triggers include:
- When a button is clicked, generate a document from this template
- When an item is moved to a group, generate a document
- When a date arrives, generate a document
- When an item is created, generate a document
Click Use template on the recipe that fits, then fine-tune the condition inside the workflow editor.
Method 2. Custom Workflow
Prefer full control? Build the automation from scratch and chain PDF Maker's Generate action after any monday.com trigger and any conditions you like.
8. Build a Custom Workflow
Click Create automation in the automation center. From there, choose your own trigger (e.g., "When status changes to something"), add any needed conditions, then add an action and search for the PDF Maker Generate Document block.
9. Select the Document Template
Inside the PDF Maker action, click the underlined "this" placeholder and choose the template that should be used whenever this automation runs. Only templates you've already prepared and authorized will appear in the dropdown.
10. Create and Enable the Automation
Review your entire workflow configuration end-to-end — trigger, conditions, action, and template. When everything looks correct, click Create automation. This saves the automation and enables it immediately.
11. Confirm the Automation is Active
Open the board's automation menu (Automate → Manage) and verify that the new automation appears in your list with the toggle switched ON. An active automation is ready to fire the moment its trigger condition is met.
12. Test the Trigger Condition
Now the fun part — test it. Perform the action that matches your trigger. In this example, the trigger is "When status changes to Paid," so open any item and change its Status column to Paid. This starts document generation in the background.
13. Verify the Generated PDF
Give it a few seconds. Once the automation completes, the generated PDF (or DOCX, depending on your settings) will appear inside the Files-type output column you selected in Step 3. Click the file thumbnail to preview or download it.
💡 Success!
You've just automated your first document. From here, every matching trigger will produce a fresh file with zero manual work.
Why Automating Documents Matters
Document automation isn't just a nice-to-have — it's a genuine productivity multiplier. Here's why setting up PDF Maker is worth the effort.
✓ Saves significant time. A team producing 20 invoices a day at even five minutes each is losing over 400 hours a year to manual document work. Automation drops that to near zero.
✓ Eliminates human error. Copy-paste mistakes, missed fields, and outdated pricing all disappear when documents pull directly from live board data.
✓ Ensures brand consistency. Every document uses the same approved template — no rogue fonts, mismatched logos, or accidental formatting drift.
✓ Speeds up your customer experience. Contracts, quotes, and receipts reach clients instantly instead of waiting on someone to draft them manually.
✓ Creates a reliable audit trail. Every generated file is stored on the board next to its source data, making it easy to trace who received what and when.
✓ Frees your team for real work. Instead of formatting documents, your team can focus on strategy, sales, and building relationships.
- Do I need coding skills to use PDF Maker?
Not at all. PDF Maker is fully no-code. Everything is done through visual template editors, dropdowns, and Monday.com's standard automation interface. - What file formats can PDF Maker generate?
You can generate PDF, DOCX, or both simultaneously from the same template. The choice is set in Step 3 during document delivery configuration. - Can I use dynamic data from my monday.com board inside the template?
Yes. Templates support placeholders that pull live data from any column on your board — text, numbers, statuses, dates, people, formulas, and even mirrored columns. - Where are the generated documents stored?
They're uploaded directly to a Files-type column on the same item that triggered the automation. This keeps every document tightly linked to its source record.
Automating documents inside monday.com with PDF Maker turns a tedious, error-prone chore into a background process that just works. In thirteen straightforward steps, you can go from a static template to a fully automated pipeline that generates professional documents the second your workflow calls for one.
💡 Your next move
Open PDF Maker, pick one recurring document, and follow this guide start to finish. Total setup time: about 10 minutes. Ongoing time saved: hours every week.