Bridging the Apps

Matthew and Dan will be talking about how Zapier offers a no-code way to connect applications that don't normally talk to each other.

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Dan DeLong and Matthew Fulton who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Earn CPE through Earmark: https://bit.ly/QBPHCPE 

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog

Register for upcoming webinars at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/

00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:21 Meet the Hosts
02:48 Overview of QB Power Hour
04:37 Today's Agenda: Zapier and QuickBooks Integration
05:06 Why Zapier?
07:17 Understanding Zapier Integrations
07:54 Poll Question: Familiarity with Zapier
15:08 Zapier Pricing and Task Accounting
20:27 Triggers and Actions in Zapier
21:35 Types of Triggers and Their Limitations
26:43 Action Steps and Field Types in Zapier
31:01 Advanced Features in Zapier
31:37 Understanding Zapier Icons
31:55 Integrating Zapier with QuickBooks Online
32:28 Setting Up Triggers and Actions in QuickBooks
37:02 Maintaining and Troubleshooting Zaps
41:00 Simple Zap Examples
46:20 Intermediate Zap Examples
51:31 Advanced Zap Examples
54:28 Exploring Zapier's App Directory
01:00:29 Conclusion and Future Topics

Transcript

Matthew Fulton: 0:33

It's good to see everybody here again today.

Dan DeLong: 0:36

Likewise. Welcome everybody to another QB power hour. We wanted to start on time because we have a lot of stuff to do and unpack. Cause we're going to be talking about bridging the apps using Zapier to enhance QuickBooks online. Integrations. Without ourselves, my name is Dan DeLong, owner at Danwith and School of Bookkeeping. I worked at Intuit for nearly 18 years, co hosting today as well as the workshop Wednesdays over at schoolbookkeeping. com. There's a link there for the Facebook group, which is Closing in on 20, 000 members. And yeah, I appreciate everyone that has been reporting the posts that are, that have been spammy in the Facebook group. It's really hard sometimes to manage those people from not getting in. It's a lot of work of all sorts. Yeah. Labor of love over at the Facebook group. So appreciate any everyone doing that. If you do if you want to be a moderator to, so that you can, you do can ban spammers from the Facebook group, please let me know. Matthew.

Matthew Fulton: 1:51

Hello, everybody. Matthew Fulton here. My friends call me Spot. I am the founder of Parkway Business Solutions, also known as CloudApps, Inc. One of the creators of the Facebook group, Quby Community Live. We are not at the 20, 000 mark. We actually, it's a smaller group, but we keep it that way on purpose because like you're talking about, it's sometimes it's difficult to manage everybody's best intentions inside there. Also do blueprints for business series and I am a total workflow nerd which means I like working with the API, working with app companies and trying to help them better understand how they can actually integrate their products to QuickBooks online. And how did I get the nickname Spot? Super fast version of it is I have a skin disease called vitiligo. It changes the pigment in your skin and turns it white in places. And when I was a freshman in high school, I grew up and moved a lot. Every place I moved, I always had to re explain it. When I was a freshman in high school, I moved to Hemet, California. And they said, everybody has a nickname. You have to have a nickname. And I said, how about Spot? So it stuck, took it with me along the way, and it turned negative into a positive. So it's a positive thing for me. Thank you for asking.

Dan DeLong: 3:02

And that, is what we love about you, Spot, is that you in, in, all things, not just not just with that, but like anything Intuit or QuickBooks, you always have a, nice objectively positive, view of things. So I really appreciate your perspective as well. A little bit about the QB Power Hour. It's every other Tuesday. 12 noon Eastern. We are eligible for CPE credits through earmark. So if you didn't catch the intro video there, there's a QR code to, to check that out and download the app. Most of our prior QB power hours, since we've started this are available for CPE credit. You can check out the channel on, earmark. Typically they're five, seven days after. The webinar there will be a new listing there on, on earmark to get your CPE credit. We're going to be talking about Zapier today, so if you have specific questions about the, about Zapier, and, how it works and, whatnot please put them in the Q& A, so it's a lot easier for us to follow up and keep track of those questions, because as I can see the, chat is going by, I don't get alerts on those things for, in in the comments please put those in there and Matthew and our helpers are, trying to make sure that we, we, get everyone everyone's perspective included so we can put them as in the, you can put that kind of stuff in the comments, like what do you eat for for Mardi Gras since it is fat Tuesday at my Mardi Gras. That's what Fat Tuesday is

Matthew Fulton: 4:48

about. Okay, I thought it was just really, big tacos. I didn't know what Fat Tuesday was, but anyway.

Dan DeLong: 4:54

Okay. It's Tuesday and I'm All right. And we also got the QB power, our story. You can check that out if you feel so inclined. So let's talk about what we're going to talk about. So what's on the agenda today. So we're going to set the stage on I guess this is a Shakespeare reference here with, to zap or not to zap. That's the question. So we'll unpack what's the need for, Zapier. And then we'll talk about what Zapier actually is. And just a brief overview of the. Under the hood of, Zapier, and then we'll talk about some, real world examples. So first off, I just wanted to talk about. Why I wanted to do a webinar on, Zapier because here this is the QB power hour and we're talking about a completely different application altogether. I went to into a connect last year and Blake, who is did a, little intro for us over here. He did a wonderful breakout session on how to use or how to automate. Advisory types of things using a couple applications. One was Process Street, which is a workflow automation task manager practice management type of thing and ChatGPT and Zapier. And it was really interesting to me that the it was probably it was one of the larger breakout sessions. So probably about two, 200 or so. Capacity that was there and a lot of the questions that were, that he was taking people could submit them and, A lot of them had to do with just what some, confusion about what Zapier actually is. So that's what we wanted to that's why we wanted to do this is, to make sure that people having a good understanding of what Zapier can actually do and how it can enhance some of these integrations. Because Matthew you, could probably attest to this pretty well. When a, when an app company says works with QuickBooks, I'm using air quotes there. The devil is always in the details and it may be not the kind of integration that you want it to have working with, QuickBooks. And Zapier is a way to be able to, augment some of those things when you're dealing with apps that connect to QuickBooks. What would you? What would you say? We're going to go into what it is and everything, but what are your thoughts on that?

Matthew Fulton: 7:50

I'd agree. So I've always felt that Zapier is a great product to help app companies test out what needs to be integrated to QuickBooks Online. It's a more cost effective way to connect to multiple different apps across the app sphere all at once. And then. Once you see that there's engagement, people are actually trying to use certain parts of it. Then maybe you spend the money through development to do a direct integration. And we're going to talk very briefly about the difference between a direct integration and one way versus two way, some of that stuff. We can dive in and show what that is,

Dan DeLong: 8:27

let's start off with the first poll question. I've lost it. There it is. So the first one is just to set the stage of how familiar are you with, Zapier. And that's the first thing is, how do you pronounce the word?

Matthew Fulton: 8:46

Zapier. I always heard Zapier makes you happier. Zapier makes you crazier.

Dan DeLong: 8:51

Exactly. That's their slogan or byline. It's, Zapier makes you happier. So we'll talk a little bit about that. It looks like, looking at people answering. It looks like never used it is, is 71 percent of the folks that have, taken taken the

Matthew Fulton: 9:16

Interesting question.

Dan DeLong: 9:17

Wow. I just brain, no, I haven't started drinking yet.

Matthew Fulton: 9:25

We've had two people mentioned give butter in the comments, just already talking about nonprofit and using that. So I'm going to have to take a note and check out that application as well. So

Dan DeLong: 9:36

go ahead and in the poll here, it looks like most, share it. Yeah. So 68 percent never used it. 17, Maybe heard about it before and like a little update and enough to be dangerous. I think that's, the trouble area. I think we're, we could feasibly get ourselves into. So hopefully as we unpack this here today, where did the mouse go? There it is. Okay. So let's, talk about to zap or not to zap. So spot, what would you, how would you, tease this off here?

Matthew Fulton: 10:14

So the first right off the bat, when we talk about using Zapier or otherwise, the whole point is how do you get data from one place to another? The ultimate, the best way of course, is a direct integration. So when one app is partnering up to the other using their APIs, and you're gonna have either a one way sync or a two way sync, one way sync is where. You may connect a different app to QuickBooks Online. And it gets a little confusing here because they may go and suck in certain bits of information initially, like maybe your vendor list or customer list, chart of accounts. They will pull that stuff over in certain transaction types. But then after that initial sync, it will only write data from the external app. Two QuickBooks online, only one way. It never goes both directions. Now a two way sync then probably becomes a little more obvious, that it's a situation where once you've done the connection, you pull information back and forth, it can actually write data both directions, and that It's a lot, it's a lot more challenging to code it that way, because you have to keep in mind, let's say both programs sent data at the exact same time, which one takes precedence? Which one is going to be the most important one if they're both trying to update something at the exact same time? And how do you track it with autologs, everything else? If you don't have a direct integration capability, this is where we start talking about different bridge apps such as Zapier, and there's other competitors that are out there as well which if, anybody watching has other suggestions, feel free to put in the chat as well, make is one IntegraMAT, Integra, Integrately, Pably, Automate. io. There's probably 10 other ones as well. But Zapier is the Kleenex of all these, where it came out really first, and it's got the biggest following of all of them. And it's, we call it a bridge app because it, what they do is they connect points to the different APIs and allow you a very easy way, like mind map way of, Connecting these pieces and trying to understand how to put the pieces together and even cooler is recipes to make it taste good, if you will. Exactly.

Dan DeLong: 12:25

So we did do we did do a webinar on Zapier back in 2021. So yes It deserves an updating but Heather Day Saturday she was very heavily, integrated

Matthew Fulton: 12:43

general course on it all. Which we all learned from big time. Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 12:48

Intro to zap your you can check that out. I've got it put on the QB power hour page so you can watch that as well. So if we're. Maybe talking a little bit differently about how, well it sinks in some of these topics that we're talking about here today. You can check that out and maybe Heather has a better way to resonate with that.

Matthew Fulton: 13:17

And we recorded the whole webinar. You guys can watch the rest. No, just kidding. And we're done.

Dan DeLong: 13:23

Yeah. Easy, but really what is Zapier? And I think that's, what we want to first foundational wise. It's really just a tool that connects cloud based applications and it, offers a low code or no code way to connect one app to another. Would you, say that's a pretty good?

Matthew Fulton: 13:50

Yeah, I think you nailed it, basically. The idea of low code, no code, it's, they use that terminology to motivate people to try it out. As we get into some of the examples, you'll see, I use the term mind mapping because it's going to be graphics where you can move around and you can see the pieces, that visually you can see what you're building. That's the beauty of this. Because if you look at the API documentation, Have fun. There's a lot more involved to that.

Dan DeLong: 14:21

Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense to someone, but it's just a question is whether or not you can actually make sense of it for yourself because, Accountants, bookkeepers, accounting professionals, peer advisors, this is probably the last thing that you wanted to get yourself into when it comes to, managing your clients. But it's not just as we're talking about the QB power hour and how Zapier can help with with QuickBooks online, it connects over to over 2000 different applications. And as we'll get. As we'll unpack not all applications are the same. James was saying in the in the Q and A, right? Like, how do you know if if an app is two way or one way or no way.

Matthew Fulton: 15:13

Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 15:14

Or are they just making it up? Each of these apps to Zapier. offers the same questionable options of how do they get, how do they get how do they integrate with Zapier so that you can integrate with these other apps? It's very powerful in that, it allows you to do more things with one action. Now, how much does Zapier cost? It depends. That's the answer for in most cases in our industry. I think there is a free option. You can go check it out on their, website. But the their pricing matrix is typically based on the type of connection whether you're using a premium app. Or a regular app connection. By the way, QuickBooks Online is a premium app, so if you wanna have anything doing with QuickBooks you're gonna at least have to go with the professional midway option. You can't use the free option. Then the other pricing consideration is the number of tasks, and we'll talk about what a task. Is and how do you account for the number of tasks and then the number of people on your team, you can have a team team of people and share, zaps between between you between your, between the team members. So there's a link there in the, slides on the, pricing but the, smallest or the lowest. Task option is 750 a month. And if you chose that with the professional, that would be like 20 bucks a month, right? So it's, not a lot. And then you figure out how many tasks you're actually needing, and then you can figure out what the pricing would actually be. Task accounting, I thought that was funny that on their website they have, how do you account for tasks, but what is a task? A task is counted when an action is successful. If something fails it doesn't count, right? If there's a problem, right? And that a successful action is either a read or write or a search, right? So if it's pushing something to the app of doing something else, that's considered a task. If it's reading it pulling in the information so that it can do something with it. Then that's a pull. And then searching, you're able to search within the applications that you're connected to now a trigger. And we'll talk about what a trigger is a little bit triggers don't count. So in this example, the trigger is an email coming in through Gmail. And then they want to do something with that email. They want to send it to Dropbox and Slack, right? So if 10 emails were received, the, okay. Whatever it's doing into Dropbox is 10, 10 tasks and then sending the next step or whatever that is after that DM sent to Slack is also 10. So one one, one zap can count for 20 different tasks, depending on how many how many steps you have in there. All right. So our next poll question is, have you ever been? Have you ever been disappointed by the limited integrations of apps to QuickBooks? Never happened, right? Every one Matt, right? Yeah. All the applications were exploded.

Matthew Fulton: 18:53

People are taking the poll. I'm going to go over real quickly, to some of the questions we had. So James was asking a question. So if you send from a CRM to QBO 30 customers, that would count as 30 tasks. So yes, what it would be there is because it's, in that scenario, And we'll, go a little bit deeper into it. You're looking at 30 independent records, a record being a customer pushing it over. So therefore it's going to complete 30 different tasks. Mary asks another question, which will probably go a little bit deeper into when we. Show some of the examples, but if she was asking, how does it work when you have multiple apps syncing, if all would update a client address, phone number, et cetera, which app takes precedence, or does the first one change things? And then the next one changes it again, the, way I used to do something like this, one of those apps I used to do back in the days, I would take an update from my CRM, I would push it over to, Different CRMs, because different ones would collect different places. But if you, can actually create a multi step action, where it acts almost as one task with lots of steps or actions within it. And that's a way to not use up as many of your tasks at once, by daisy chaining them. But if they're not daisy chained, then you could run into different updating issues where they're fighting over the stuff.

Dan DeLong: 20:20

Good fielding of questions here, Tomiwa, and in the poll and to share the results. By and large resoundingly 77 percent of you said yes, you're disappointed by some limited, limitation of integrations. Now, don't get too excited. There are plenty of limitations with Zapier as well, sorry, and we'll unpack some of those as, as, well. It's not going to be the magic pill, silver bullet for all things but it certainly could be a way to enhance depending on what it is that you're, looking to do. Spot, you want to take, these through about As we unpack, what is the overview of Zapier?

Matthew Fulton: 21:08

Yep. So when we're talking about Zapier, it all comes down to triggers versus actions. So after you connect your different applications together, what will happen is Zapier is going to watch for a predefined or defined activity to trigger the start of your own custom Zap. Once a Zap has been triggered, it will follow a series of actions that were signed as a part of your workflow. So when you organize them correctly, these apps can replace the need to manually transfer data from one program to another. Trying to break it down in little nuggets to get you really to what the difference in the variance is there. So a trigger leads to the action.

Dan DeLong: 21:52

Just like in that example of a a firearm, right? That's going to You know, if you want to have the action of firing a firearm, you got to pull the trigger. So you can only do it one at a time.

Matthew Fulton: 22:08

So then there's different types of triggers and they break it down into what they call pulling triggers and then instant triggers. The pulling triggers, depending on the plan that you're on, it's basically going to do a periodic poll to see if there is information that needs to be. If you need to activate an action, so your free plan is going to be every 15 minutes. It's going to do a search professional is two minutes. And team and enterprise is one minute, basically. The higher up you go, the faster it would be. What that really means is, the free plan, this is one of the few times where the free plan of a program, you're not the, as I say, if it's free, you are the product. Zapier's done a phenomenal job, they're not using you as the product anymore. It's a great gateway to get you into the product, to then get you to be willing to pay more, and do things even faster. We'll go through when you're doing testing the time wise you can do a manual quick push to make sure you're testing Your zap and it's good to go Now instant triggers webhooks if you've heard of webhooks before but always wondered what they are Put a one in the comments for me, please what a webhook is with an application It's when they send out a predefined message on a url and Other applications listen and watch for that web, that, that message and they're going to hook it and pull it in and say, okay, we need this information. So instead of having to always be pulling and looking for this stuff, it just listens for an RSS feed, if you will, an update from a web hook from something else and grabs it and then takes that as an action. Does that make sense, Dan? Do you have anything to add to that? Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 23:55

When people would listen for the train on a railroad track, hopefully the point triggers the

Matthew Fulton: 24:02

penny. You got it. Okay.

Dan DeLong: 24:06

There's a train coming, but yeah, this is a this is a great. Setting the stage as far as when is that trigger going to get pulled it's going to depend, right? Again, another, it all depends, right? So what, what plan you're on and what app you're actually using, do they use the webhooks? But if they're using an application, if there's an API that allows for their webhooks, it doesn't matter what plan you're on. It's, constantly listening for something to happen. With anything else there's limitations.

Matthew Fulton: 24:48

Yeah. So the limitation wise. All of this stuff is, it's basically determined by the different applications API. So in other words, if the application doesn't offer access computer language wise to do something Zapier can't make it happen at all. So it's only able to do what's available there. And it's only triggered by new data. So what this means is if you're trying to create a zap and then you want to do your historical stuff, that's not what it's made for. It's future, it's forward looking, unless you check out maybe like their Zapier transfer feature, that's something where you could try to pull historical stuff in, of course.

Dan DeLong: 25:25

Yeah. Or, one option is if you if, your zap is with a spreadsheet, right? If maybe you have a Google sheets, and, then you export whatever it is that you're doing, you have it in the exact same format as as a spreadsheet trigger, which one of that triggers could be a new row is created. And you then copy and paste it in bulk into that trigger, then it's going to go. Yeah. Line by line and then potentially, I wouldn't recommend that just because

Matthew Fulton: 25:57

there goes all your, you're going to use all your activities up real quick. There goes all your

Dan DeLong: 26:01

tasks and then and then you're going to be paying for additional ones if you're not on plan. Then there are other applications that will probably do. Historical uploads and things like that, maybe a little better than, especially if we're talking QuickBooks here. Yeah, that that's a great point that it's only triggered by new data. So this is like the line in the sand, Hey, we're going to take care of this. Issue that we're having with, this integration gap. Let's move it forward from here and then figure out some other option for the historical stuff.

Matthew Fulton: 26:42

Now we should real quickly, before I talk about this other part, we should say again, when you're testing out, creating your difference apps, it will. So in that specific scenario, try to pull the last three records of information over that you can use to try to push over the data over to a new platform. Only does that during testing. And that's important because you want to make sure things are working correct. And it walks you step by step, shows you the information before you push it over, of course. Now

Dan DeLong: 27:16

talk about these action. Steps.

Matthew Fulton: 27:19

Yeah, so there's this is an example as we go through some of these next sections guys There's this is where you really want to probably download these slides I'll put the link up again for everybody because there's a lot of words on here There's a lot of different types of steps that can be done within Zapier. So we're talking about when you're trying to figure out what's going to first like trigger something. And then if the action once it's triggered, what's the action it's going to take within the other app. So there's like a search step as it says here, it's going to be. Find your existing data. So if you've got an existing customer, and you don't want to create a duplicate customer, it can search for it and then use that. You can use filters to create conditional logic type scenarios. Formatting, so you can make sure your time is formatted correct, maybe your dollars is it, currency versus percentage, different things of that nature. Delay. Delay is an important one because sometimes you need to, if you're doing a multi tiered step, you need to give time for something to update and finish before you go to the next piece. And then paths, which is pretty cool. And Dan's got a kind of an example of one of those towards the end to blow everybody's mind of conditional logic where you start to branch things off. And you can make one crazy insane zap that does a lot of. Moves things to a lot of different places, right?

Dan DeLong: 28:45

Yeah. So the these are things that you can add in between your actions to get more out of right, because maybe maybe a transaction comes over to, QuickBooks with, the, decimals in the wrong place, right? You can use this numbering fill format or to, make sure that's entered in the, right way.

Matthew Fulton: 29:13

And then so fields wise, there again, many different types of fields that could be used. You've also got your date and time field. You've got a dictionary field, which this is something I haven't used enough of and it's pretty powerful. You, you can literally create. Two columns where one value pops up something and you tell it instead to provide a different value. So an example of that would be like for Stripe. If you have a name of a certain type, a description, an invoice, it could look for that word and then switch around to something you really wanted to trigger inside of QuickBooks Online. So we've got links back to all the help guide where this stuff is coming from as well for you. Drop down menus. That's a huge one, of course. So this is where if you want to predefine select a selected list of different items, you've got your file field. So this is great. If you want, let's say you've got one app that creates a downloadable PDF for you, you could then take it and have that zap, grab that file and attach it and push it into maybe QuickBooks online by having it select the file field in the way you would map it out. Then line item fields. This is a little deceptive. So line items are subsets of individual items One of the limitations I think we talked about a little bit later is in QuickBooks online, we were playing around before this, trying to see if they'd updated the ability, you can't create multiple line item invoices or sales receipts. But in other type of programs, there's different line items of data. You could use that in this scenario with them.

Dan DeLong: 30:54

And let's keep going.

Matthew Fulton: 30:55

I know they keep going. So list fields, number, decimal. We talked about those. Password fields so if you need to push a password over, you could do that as well. Again, download these slides and you'll be able to go through a lot of this without having to read all the words right away. String text. True false Boolean wise, and then custom modal fields. This is where you can basically create your own mapping of different fields between different programs and different answers. That's something you end up using quite a bit.

Dan DeLong: 31:29

If you're if you're, Brain's not full yet. There are other things in Zapier as well that can even augment this even further. Like they have their version of a spreadsheet where you can have Zap tables. Where you can store a lot of things in, a spreadsheet. So you don't have to necessarily, have Google sheets, for example to, be your source of truth for your spreadsheet and just keep it all in the Zapier, there's a chat bot option. I haven't really played around with that yet. I don't know. Have you? No, not yet. Any of the AI stuff as well.

Matthew Fulton: 32:09

And real quickly, Erickson, so what does, not have an icon mean? A lot of these, they've created custom little icons so they're easier to spot and know what part of it you're using. When it says it does not have an icon, that's what that means. It doesn't show you like a little icon on the side. It's not pronounced by that icon.

Dan DeLong: 32:28

All right, so let's now talk a little bit about how Zapier can help with QuickBooks Online. Here's the tie in to it, to QB, to the QB part of the PowerApp. So here's a listing of the QBO triggers, right? So anything that is an account, product, Customer project vendor. You can read these at your leisure, transactional information these can be triggered or triggers. And we'll, talk about that. One of the simpler ones, because there was a Facebook post on our, group that was, that could, I thought this would be, might be a good example of using how do I get alerted when my customer creates and modifies their chart of accounts, right? Maybe they're handling things in the bank feed and sometimes they create new accounts or QuickBooks creates the new account because they're trying to type in or find it and then they add an S or something like that to the category or the chart of accounts and then it creates a new. chart of accounts, which only makes work for you to go back and figure out how that got created, do it, merge it and whatnot. Maybe you want to get alerted when a, when an account is made or when a customer is made you can, trigger that from. QBO and correct me if I'm wrong, this is a, this is an active listening trigger, right? So it's, immediate. It's not going to you're not going to wait 15 minutes to alert you with that, right?

Matthew Fulton: 34:06

Yeah. So QuickBooks online started using web hooks about four years ago, I think is when they really started to initiate them. So they, you can use the web hook version of it. You don't have to do anything. Fancy to do it that way. I do want to draw attention to the ones that say new and update, just in case there's a question on it, that means as a trigger, any of those, so customer bill, estimate, invoice, and credit memo, those are the only ones that if there's already something created, but they update that, would also trigger an action or

Dan DeLong: 34:36

potentially be your, trigger. Yeah. So here's all the things that you can do inside of QuickBooks. As far as an action, this is not. Trigger doesn't have to mean the action, this could be something else and then something that you want to, an action that you want to take inside of QuickBooks quite a few, right? There's a lot of things that you, can do here. I haven't played around with the API requests yet. Or the get attachments. I'm, I am intrigued by that, get attachments as well. Maybe you can, take that attachment and put it somewhere else. If they upload a receipt and maybe you have a, document storage that Is not QuickBooks, right?

Matthew Fulton: 35:25

Correct. As, just again, I think everybody got this, but when we're talking about the trigger part, that is, you're using something in QuickBooks Online to trigger another action, which could be into a different application. The actions are when some other program triggers something to happen, and your action will happen inside of QuickBooks Online. Is the, difference there. Exactly. Limitations Dan? Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 35:53

Yeah here's dirty Harry again, he's showing up with his man's got to know his limitations. Transactions, and we mentioned this earlier, transactions are created are created to either one item or category before you say, Hey why don't you use a bundle? Bundle items are not supported. We're very sad to, to find that has not been. included in their in their update yet. So if you wanted to create a bundle and then have multiple line items from that bundle sorry. It's not an option yet. So for bills, expenses all the transactions it's, really only going to allow you to do one line item on the, on that, on that transaction and for fields or for list items like customers and vendors and products and services, not all fields for lists are, going to be available. And then of course our. Custom fields, womp, when it comes to that's always on the list of things that it doesn't integrate with.

Matthew Fulton: 37:07

That's a good example of API limitations, right? Because all the custom fields aren't necessarily available, you can't access all those different things. Previously, tags you couldn't. Now you definitely won't be able to, of course. But so if you can't get to some of the, if you can't get to it through the API, if you ever have a question on that, you can reach out. I can tell you. You won't be able to do with any of these kind of programs. And then I see your questions. We'll get to those here just shortly.

Dan DeLong: 37:35

And then once you set this up, sometimes it will require some maintenance, right? The great thing about QuickBooks is it's constantly updated. The bad thing about QuickBooks is it's constantly updated, right? That could have an impact on on, a zap that you might have set up. In which case you may need to update your connection to the zap. It may break, an update to to, to QuickBooks may hinder the zaps inability ability to do something. And so if you've got this really long multi step zap created and any one of those gets updated, that could. Potentially cause a challenge in that, zap running, error free when there is an error you'll get an email alert, say, Hey, we can't run this. And, at, best the layman's terms of how they, can help you. I don't know if you've gotten some of those errors Matthew, you know what it is by looking at it. Okay. This is, a challenge, but it's, sometimes very developer focus of string each,

Matthew Fulton: 39:05

they do a really good job. So the reason we're even able to show this image right now, Dan and I, before this, we got together and we were meeting and we're just. Brainstorming different concepts of things we could try to show. And we found as we were doing it on a lot of my older ones, I had to update my QuickBooks online connection. And it's because the API had changed. I hadn't been really using Zapier as much to push stuff in and out of QuickBooks online. So I had to go in and update it and it does a good job on existing zaps of giving you like a warning. And walking you through click this, to reupdate it. So you're not going crazy, but the key takeaway from this is Zapier is amazing, but you do need to maintain it. So you're, if you're really leaning heavily into this any platform like this, you need to put it on your counter to just do regular maintenance, make sure things are connected, correct. It'll make your life a lot better by doing that for sure.

Dan DeLong: 40:01

One thing that I had noticed is that if you do get an error. And it stops the, zap from running. When you fix it, you can't rerun that zap on that that, new iteration, because it records just Just Google Sheets, there's always this version history, of, things that you're anytime that a change is made it assigns the version that was used to that ZAP run in that history. So even if you fix it, you can't rerun it unless You start the trigger again, right? So once whatever caused the zap to run in the first place, if you do it again, then it will take the new, version of your zap with your changes.

Matthew Fulton: 40:50

Which means if it broke for a month or two and you don't fix it, you don't get to go back two months and start to rerun those that, you know because again, no historical from the point you fix it, it will start to do new future stuff, but the historical toast, right?

Dan DeLong: 41:08

Yeah, And I, think I think when I was, reaching out to zap, zap your support. I think they were trying to investigate how to, do that. So I may be probably a month from now, this is already going to be outdated with that and you might be able to use a new version, but that's probably. Some in a future state. So let's talk about some examples. So we'll go with a simple one and then go into a little bit more immediate and then more advanced. A simple, simple zap would be a a trigger to a single action, right? So one action creates one result. This would be a good example used in the in the free plan that they have because you can't do anything more than just have one action, right? But you can't use premium apps with with the free one. So this will be something, where, you would be. The apps that do connect and we'll share some links of how do you, tell what apps do, in Zapier. Let me links for that on the, website as well. But here's an example of the pro advisor who wants to be alerted when a new account is created on the chart of accounts. And you have some other simple examples, Matthew. What so in this particular case of multi factor security tokens.

Matthew Fulton: 42:38

In my practice, we've been using Dialpad for our phone system for a very long time. And we've always set up a separate phone line we call our security line. And we needed a way to make sure that whoever's requesting the token could get that token including my global team In india because I don't want to answer those questions at two three o'clock in the morning So with dialpad we have the ability be that it because it would integrate to slack We could take and set up to where the text message went straight to slack But because we were more of a microsoft teams family I needed to get it from Slack over to Teams, and I was able to set up just a quick zap and be able to push it from Slack over to Microsoft Teams, sending the message right over to a certain channel, and only the person who requested it would know who needed it, basically.

Dan DeLong: 43:29

So Dial, as an example, Dialpad didn't have a direct integration with Teams. Correct. Yeah, so it, but it did have a, to slack, A direct to Slack. So you can send it to Slack, move it over to, teams, because that's what you Yeah. Were using. So this is great example of augmenting, limitations. So you don't have to, you didn't have to search for another application. Yep. To, do what Dialpad was doing, just so that you could have it in. Show up in teams for this.

Matthew Fulton: 44:02

And then another simple example was using for the longest time I'd use toggle for time tracking and it's more of just quick, easy reports. And when I'm working on something, I can put it at beginning time, any time, tag it to a customer, that kind of stuff, because I'm not using it from my, actual. Time tracking for payroll myself. So what I did back in the day is I'd always have it set up that when I add a new customer and QuickBooks online, it would automatically create a new client for me and toggle. So I didn't have to go and set that specifically up each time. I could just go log in and choose the client and start putting my time in to create whatever reports I wanted.

Dan DeLong: 44:41

And this is this is, this is one of those things where, when you're bucketing. Your practice or anybody's business, right? There's the three P's of programs product processes and people, right? And if people are doing processes that can be easily done, this is a great. This is a great use case for something like that. Allowing you to automate what's, possible to automate and then humanize that relations that doesn't need, a human clicker to do that, right? Yeah,

Matthew Fulton: 45:26

it's really, right before you move on to this next piece, it's a good time to actually answer Lynette's as well. Full disclosure, both of those examples I gave, those were examples where certain integrations didn't already exist. Since creating those back in the day, Now Dialpad has integration to Teams, and that's going to be more, it's going to be a direct integration, more solid. I don't have to manage it all the time. And Toggle has one to QBO. So this allowed me to plan and make it work to begin with. But now I would move over to the direct integration most likely. So I don't have to manage some of that stuff. And Lynette's question was, so would Zapier be a good choice to integrate Salesforce? Used as CRM for proposals invoicing center with QBO. Lynette, I'm pretty certain there's, I thought there's already a direct integration to QBO. I know there's third party apps that can do some of it, but you could do that. I'd have to double check what's available through Salesforce. Yes, you would be able to do that kind of a connection to push stuff in. I've done that a long time ago in the past for the company.

Dan DeLong: 46:27

So we'll have a link for, how do you tell what triggers and what actions are available for each app? Zapier has a really nice page for, all of that to search that out. But you can find the app that you're looking at and, see what triggers are available for that app and what actions are available and then determine if this is even a good way to go. So here's, an example of an intermediate. So you have that single trigger, but you have multiple actions that are taken. That's global keeping. We use Kajabi and Kajabi is like American Express. It does things on its own. Maybe it doesn't play well with others, right? It wants to be a, it wants to be a QuickBooks of of the online learning, right? So all these things that they say they do, they want to have it all in one, place. But, trying to get Kajabi to integrate with QuickBooks? No, not gonna happen, right? So this is where, I can't Zapier came in to to, help me out. First thing was a new purchase would happen. Then I would add. A filter. So a filter then is, for a certain condition and you can use all sorts of, filtering, right? As to, so you don't want all, maybe you don't want all all sales or all actions to or all triggers to to create this, action so you can filter that out. I wanted a certain certain types of sales to to have this to run this app. Yeah. Just those two things the, sale and the filter doesn't cost me any tasks, right? So, there's no, no task usage when it's filtered, right? So putting those filters so best practice, put the filters up first so that you don't have a task usage. So what would happen if the filter was successful passed through then what it would do is it would find the customer, in my, QuickBooks. And then the nice part about These this app connection with Zapier is that there's really just a checkbox to say, if it's not found, create the customer. So rather than creating two additional steps it allows you to search for it first. And then if it's not found, it will find it. And this is where the double sided sword is here. There's only a few things that you can actually search on. And it's either going to be the display name. Or the display name, I think it's the display name and the email maybe those two things. So it's not necessarily, look for this phone number or look for this. This is where some of those limitations then come in, as long as you then you have your workflow laid out there. It will find the customer or create and create it if it's not found. And then after that, it will create a sales receipt in QuickBooks. Another thing that we use it for is also because it's an online company shipping addresses is very necessary for economic nexus. So we want to make sure that the address. Even though it's a billing address that is also copied over into the shipping address, which QuickBooks doesn't do that automatically. So you can have that Zapier do that, right? So it's make sure that your shipping address and your billing address are in alignment so that you the sales tax is going to be utilized properly. It's going to create that sales receipt. And then after that, it calculates some transaction expenses, right? So I'm, automatic I'm going to be charged by by Kajabi payments or Stripe or whatever the payment processor is. I know what that is, as long as that's consistent, based off of the sale, I can figure out what the expense would be and formatting of dates and those types of things. And then it creates. An expense for me as well. So one action of a sale being made on my website is then now either adding the customer, adding a sales receipt and creating an expense. So I've created basically three transactions in my QuickBooks where I wanted to go in, from, one action, and you can add more steps. There's no, I don't know if there's a limit of how many steps that you could actually have. Do you know Matt?

Matthew Fulton: 51:17

No, because I'm thinking of, I'm pretty sure it was Brian Clare did a 52 step zap one time. And I don't even think that maxed it out, but obviously the larger you go, the more complex it's going to be, the more management that's involved to it. So you can get pretty creative. I think that's just where some of using the branches and such, you evolve into the advanced class for sure. That's right. Jan was asking, would there be a way to add an attachment to the sales transaction in QBO?

Dan DeLong: 51:53

This is, yeah we'd have to, we'd have to check it out to actually see if that gives us some, if we have time we might. Might go into that. All right. So here's an example of an advanced one where you have one trigger and then multiple actions with potential multiple outcomes, right? So this is where we talk about where Matt was talking about the, conditional logic stuff. Yeah. So this, is what. Zapier looks graphically in, as you're creating it, right? So you can see where it starts to branch out where there's one, two, two, seven, seven different potential outcomes, right? So it is going to result in the. Wherever this ends up, whatever path this, chooses, it can't choose multiple paths, right? That, that's one thing to, point out here is that, you, typically want to have your paths at the end of your of your zap based on that conditional logic, because then you can't. rerun it to have it go through the second one. But you can have multiple zaps with multiple paths. Your end result here could be trigger the next step and then we'll run through that again, that does break things up for you so that you don't have this huge monster zap that you have to man. But that's, one of the, one example of. In this case it was, filtering for a certain, field, or it was a big form on, a website that people were filtering or filling out. And then depending on which option they selected for certain drop downs on the, on that form, it would choose a different outcome. So

Matthew Fulton: 53:55

I think it goes without saying, but just to say it anyways, if you're doing complex setups like this, do it to a test company. So this is where you, it's always good to have your own paid playground, because once you get it set up the way you want it you can then always turn around and change a company connects to, and this is another great piece here. There's sometimes. You can make zaps that fail. You need to have better forward thinking of this. An example being, I'm not a big fan of Twitter X or spending all much of time there, but I got this great idea Hey, I'm going to create this image. And every time somebody would follow me, it would zap and post this image up on my Twitter feed. If you don't go in and post anything else on there, it just became a wall of just this picture over and over and over and over again with nothing else. That was a really bad example of a zap because I didn't think about. Future wise, what it would look like, and was it really helping or not?

Dan DeLong: 54:52

All right. So let's let's launch the last poll question. Was this information useful? Did you learn something new or maybe you'd some help with with, Zapier? So let me go into, so here's our, here's, this is my Zapier. And this is a great place. So zapier. com slash apps is a great place to go to evaluate whether this is going to help you or not. So what was the one that went that people were asking about? QuickBooks

Matthew Fulton: 55:22

Online Attachments and Salesforce is the other one. Salesforce.

Dan DeLong: 55:26

Wait the non profit one that,

Matthew Fulton: 55:29

Oh, give butter, I think,

Dan DeLong: 55:30

give butter. So those search for, yeah, there it is. Let's take a look at so you'd search for any app here and then you'd go down to here. Oh, this is one other thing that we didn't even talk about was templates, right? So there's already there's, tons of templates in there. So you can just. Find if a template in this state update subscribers and MailChimp for new give give butter transactions, you can just start with this template that's already there. And then you don't necessarily have to build it from scratch but down here,

Matthew Fulton: 56:09

right there, if they add new, give better transactions as payments and QuickBooks online.

Dan DeLong: 56:14

Yeah. So you can just. If they, if give butter doesn't automatically do it you can you can use this app to do that. Down at the bottom here is where you really want to go into investigating what, whether it does this or not. So you can filter for just the triggers, right? These are the things in give butter that will spawn a trigger, right? So a new campaign, a new transaction, a new ticket. And updated campaign. It'll tell you if this is instant or not. So now you know that they have probably a webhooks, here at the railroad track. And then you can see what the action is. This would be if it's some other trigger from another app, what could you do? Inside of get butter. Exactly. Create a contact. And then yeah, so I was just looking and then you just look at them same time, right? So that you can see it all in one place. So, you can create a contact. Notice that creating a contact is not a trigger, right? If you're that's like the end of the line.

Matthew Fulton: 57:29

Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 57:29

that's what's going to happen as far as an action is concerned. What was the other one sales

Matthew Fulton: 57:35

Salesforce, was one. Yeah. Let's

Dan DeLong: 57:37

take a look at the,

Matthew Fulton: 57:38

I've, so for years, I've loved going over to Zapier's site to take a look at the different apps that are coming out on the market and what they're available to do. It's going to be. I think it's this one. Yeah. See, newly new records talking about estimates and such.

Dan DeLong: 57:57

So let's just look at the triggers here. So it's case attachment, new fields, new lead, new record updating a record, updating a field on a record, new outbound message. So these are all the things that can be triggered, by Salesforce. And then here's all the actions that can be done. Into side of it. Quite a few,

Matthew Fulton: 58:18

right? Salesforce.

Dan DeLong: 58:20

But there is there's a large number of third party apps that's all they do is build those integrations between, Salesforce and QuickBooks, for example. But if QuickBooks online is not your final destination or your integration between these two this can do all sorts of things elsewhere or back into Salesforce. It's another one that was, look at.

Matthew Fulton: 58:50

The only other question that was right off the bat was asking about trying to add attachments on in QuickBooks Online. But it was get attachments, if I remember correctly, it wasn't add an attachment on. QuickBooks. It's not liking it today. Okay.

Dan DeLong: 59:15

Where'd it go? And you can filter these too, right? So if you're just looking at the premium ones, there's QuickBooks Online here. There's a will, there's a workaround. Action. That was an action. That was an action, right? Yep. And then to get attached, there's a lot of them. Wait, where'd it go? Oh, F, there we go. Get attachments from a record.

Matthew Fulton: 59:45

So that's going to grab it. That wouldn't be to add it though. Now, if you go to create a sales receipt or update sales receipt, and maybe like two up, there you go. And in here, Do,

Dan DeLong: 1:00:05

These are all, what we're looking at here is, these are all the things that can do on a sales receipt. Good point. What is not on here is. Make add an attachment, right? So this tells us that it would not allow us to attach a transaction inside of QuickBooks if the attachment is already in QuickBooks, you can get it. But you're not going to be able to do anything with it back in QuickBooks once you've got it.

Matthew Fulton: 1:00:33

Yeah. Is that an attachment? If let us know what you find out, you said you can play around with it, or if you get stuck on it, reach out. Best thing you can do is if you get me excited with a very difficult challenge, you're going to get my attention big time. Be like, Ooh, let me try to figure out how we can solve it. So send me down a rabbit hole. I love it. So Dan, look at that. We were pretty close to time this time.

Dan DeLong: 1:00:57

Yeah, we we crammed all that in into, one hour. We really appreciate you joining us here today. Next and that's what we spot and I are, looking to focus the QB power hour moving forward is. Really uncovering and unpacking the data getting into or out of QuickBooks, because that's really where the QuickBooks ecosystem, especially online is, that there is a shallow under the pool of the, all the things that you can do inside of QuickBooks but that doesn't mean there's not neighboring swimming pools that we can, steal some water from, right? And then it all boils down to how that data is, moved. So we're going to start looking into, and, unpacking some of these apps that do integrate into, QuickBooks and what they're, what they do well, what they maybe need some help with and so we wanted to start with this as more of a way of, Hey, there's another choice, even you don't have to abandon your app if it doesn't, there is there's a way to augment that closing thoughts.

Matthew Fulton: 1:02:21

Yeah. If you guys have other topics that you are interested to learn more about, reach out to either one of us. We would love to hear your suggestions so we can, our goal is to help however we can to the community. So thank you for taking the time to be a part of this and joining us every other Tuesday and, appreciate it.

Dan DeLong: 1:02:40

All right. Y'all have a great Mardi Gras. Enjoy your Ash Wednesday tomorrow, but that Tuesday today, have a great day, everyone. We'll see you next time on the QB power hour.