March 4, 2025 • 63 mins
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
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matthew Fulton (00:33):
It's good to see everybody here again today.
Dan DeLong (00:36):
Likewise.
Welcome everybody to another QBpower hour.
We wanted to start on timebecause we have a lot of stuff
to do and unpack.
Cause we're going to be talkingabout bridging the apps using
Zapier to enhance QuickBooksonline.
Integrations.
Without ourselves, my name isDan DeLong, owner at Danwith and
(00:58):
School of Bookkeeping.
I worked at Intuit for nearly 18years, co hosting today as well
as the workshop Wednesdays overat schoolbookkeeping.
com.
There's a link there for theFacebook group, which is Closing
in on 20, 000 members.
And yeah, I appreciate everyonethat has been reporting the
(01:19):
posts that are, that have beenspammy in the Facebook group.
It's really hard sometimes tomanage those people from not
getting in.
It's a lot of work of all sorts.
Yeah.
Labor of love over at theFacebook group.
So appreciate any everyone doingthat.
(01:40):
If you do if you want to be amoderator to, so that you can,
you do can ban spammers from theFacebook group, please let me
know.
Matthew.
Matthew Fulton (01:51):
Hello, everybody.
Matthew Fulton here.
My friends call me Spot.
I am the founder of ParkwayBusiness Solutions, also known
as CloudApps, Inc.
One of the creators of theFacebook group, Quby Community
Live.
We are not at the 20, 000 mark.
We actually, it's a smallergroup, but we keep it that way
on purpose because like you'retalking about, it's sometimes
it's difficult to manageeverybody's best intentions
(02:14):
inside there.
Also do blueprints for businessseries and I am a total workflow
nerd which means I like workingwith the API, working with app
companies and trying to helpthem better understand how they
can actually integrate theirproducts to QuickBooks online.
And how did I get the nicknameSpot?
(02:35):
Super fast version of it is Ihave a skin disease called
vitiligo.
It changes the pigment in yourskin and turns it white in
places.
And when I was a freshman inhigh school, I grew up and moved
a lot.
Every place I moved, I alwayshad to re explain it.
When I was a freshman in highschool, I moved to Hemet,
California.
And they said, everybody has anickname.
You have to have a nickname.
And I said, how about Spot?
So it stuck, took it with mealong the way, and it turned
(02:58):
negative into a positive.
So it's a positive thing for me.
Thank you for asking.
Dan DeLong (03:02):
And that, is what we love about you, Spot, is that
you in, in, all things, not justnot just with that, but like
anything Intuit or QuickBooks,you always have a, nice
objectively positive, view ofthings.
So I really appreciate yourperspective as well.
A little bit about the QB PowerHour.
(03:24):
It's every other Tuesday.
12 noon Eastern.
We are eligible for CPE creditsthrough earmark.
So if you didn't catch the introvideo there, there's a QR code
to, to check that out anddownload the app.
Most of our prior QB powerhours, since we've started this
are available for CPE credit.
(03:45):
You can check out the channelon, earmark.
Typically they're five, sevendays after.
The webinar there will be a newlisting there on, on earmark to
get your CPE credit.
We're going to be talking aboutZapier today, so if you have
specific questions about the,about Zapier, and, how it works
(04:10):
and, whatnot please put them inthe Q& A, so it's a lot easier
for us to follow up and keeptrack of those questions,
because as I can see the, chatis going by, I don't get alerts
on those things for, in in thecomments please put those in
there and Matthew and ourhelpers are, trying to make sure
(04:31):
that we, we, get everyoneeveryone's perspective included
so we can put them as in the,you can put that kind of stuff
in the comments, like what doyou eat for for Mardi Gras since
it is fat Tuesday at my MardiGras.
That's what Fat Tuesday is
Matthew Fulton (04:48):
about.
Okay, I thought it was justreally, big tacos.
I didn't know what Fat Tuesdaywas, but anyway.
Dan DeLong (04:54):
Okay.
It's Tuesday and I'm All right.
And we also got the QB power,our story.
You can check that out if youfeel so inclined.
So let's talk about what we'regoing to talk about.
So what's on the agenda today.
So we're going to set the stageon I guess this is a Shakespeare
(05:16):
reference here with, to zap ornot to zap.
That's the question.
So we'll unpack what's the needfor, Zapier.
And then we'll talk about whatZapier actually is.
And just a brief overview ofthe.
Under the hood of, Zapier, andthen we'll talk about some, real
(05:36):
world examples.
So first off, I just wanted totalk about.
Why I wanted to do a webinar on,Zapier because here this is the
QB power hour and we're talkingabout a completely different
application altogether.
I went to into a connect lastyear and Blake, who is did a,
(05:59):
little intro for us over here.
He did a wonderful breakoutsession on how to use or how to
automate.
Advisory types of things using acouple applications.
One was Process Street, which isa workflow automation task
(06:19):
manager practice management typeof thing and ChatGPT and Zapier.
And it was really interesting tome that the it was probably it
was one of the larger breakoutsessions.
So probably about two, 200 orso.
Capacity that was there and alot of the questions that were,
(06:46):
that he was taking people couldsubmit 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 tothat's why we wanted to do this
is, to make sure that peoplehaving a good understanding of
what Zapier can actually do andhow it can enhance some of these
(07:08):
integrations.
Because Matthew you, couldprobably attest to this pretty
well.
When a, when an app company saysworks with QuickBooks, I'm using
air quotes there.
The devil is always in thedetails and it may be not the
kind of integration that youwant it to have working with,
(07:29):
QuickBooks.
And Zapier is a way to be ableto, augment some of those things
when you're dealing with appsthat connect to QuickBooks.
What would you?
What would you say?
We're going to go into what itis and everything, but what are
your thoughts on that?
Matthew Fulton (07:50):
I'd agree.
So I've always felt that Zapieris a great product to help app
companies test out what needs tobe integrated to QuickBooks
Online.
It's a more cost effective wayto connect to multiple different
apps across the app sphere allat once.
And then.
Once you see that there'sengagement, people are actually
(08:10):
trying to use certain parts ofit.
Then maybe you spend the moneythrough development to do a
direct integration.
And we're going to talk verybriefly about the difference
between a direct integration andone way versus two way, some of
that stuff.
We can dive in and show whatthat is,
Dan DeLong (08:27):
let's start off with the first poll question.
I've lost it.
There it is.
So the first one is just to setthe stage of how familiar are
you with, Zapier.
And that's the first thing is,how do you pronounce the word?
Matthew Fulton (08:46):
Zapier.
I always heard Zapier makes youhappier.
Zapier makes you crazier.
Dan DeLong (08:51):
Exactly.
That's their slogan or byline.
It's, Zapier makes you happier.
So we'll talk a little bit aboutthat.
It looks like, looking at peopleanswering.
It looks like never used it is,is 71 percent of the folks that
(09:12):
have, taken taken the
Matthew Fulton (09:16):
Interesting question.
Dan DeLong (09:17):
Wow.
I just brain, no, I haven'tstarted drinking yet.
Matthew Fulton (09:25):
We've had two people mentioned give butter in
the comments, just alreadytalking about nonprofit and
using that.
So I'm going to have to take anote and check out that
application as well.
So
Dan DeLong (09:36):
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 beforeand like a little update and
enough to be dangerous.
I think that's, the troublearea.
(09:56):
I think we're, we could feasiblyget ourselves into.
So hopefully as we unpack thishere today, where did the mouse
go?
There it is.
Okay.
So let's, talk about to zap ornot to zap.
So spot, what would you, howwould 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 toanother?
The ultimate, the best way ofcourse, is a direct integration.
So when one app is partnering upto the other using their APIs,
and you're gonna have either aone way sync or a two way sync,
one way sync is where.
You may connect a different appto QuickBooks Online.
(10:36):
And it gets a little confusinghere because they may go and
suck in certain bits ofinformation initially, like
maybe your vendor list orcustomer list, chart of
accounts.
They will pull that stuff overin certain transaction types.
But then after that initialsync, it will only write data
from the external app.
Two QuickBooks online, only oneway.
It never goes both directions.
(10:58):
Now a two way sync then probablybecomes a little more obvious,
that it's a situation where onceyou'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 youhave to keep in mind, let's say
both programs sent data at theexact same time, which one takes
(11:20):
precedence?
Which one is going to be themost important one if they're
both trying to update somethingat the exact same time?
And how do you track it withautologs, everything else?
If you don't have a directintegration capability, this is
where we start talking aboutdifferent bridge apps such as
Zapier, and there's othercompetitors that are out there
as well which if, anybodywatching has other suggestions,
(11:44):
feel free to put in the chat aswell, make is one IntegraMAT,
Integra, Integrately, Pably,Automate.
io.
There's probably 10 other onesas well.
But Zapier is the Kleenex of allthese, where it came out really
first, and it's got the biggestfollowing of all of them.
And it's, we call it a bridgeapp because it, what they do is
(12:07):
they connect points to thedifferent APIs and allow you a
very easy way, like mind map wayof, Connecting these pieces and
trying to understand how to putthe pieces together and even
cooler is recipes to make ittaste 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 updatingbut Heather Day Saturday she was
very heavily, integrated
Matthew Fulton (12:43):
general course on it all.
Which we all learned from bigtime.
Yeah.
Dan DeLong (12:48):
Intro to zap your you can check that out.
I've got it put on the QB powerhour page so you can watch that
as well.
So if we're.
Maybe talking a little bitdifferently about how, well it
sinks in some of these topicsthat we're talking about here
today.
You can check that out and maybeHeather has a better way to
(13:12):
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 wantto first foundational wise.
It's really just a tool thatconnects cloud based
applications and it, offers alow code or no code way to
connect one app to another.
(13:46):
Would you, say that's a prettygood?
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 itout.
As we get into some of theexamples, you'll see, I use the
term mind mapping because it'sgoing to be graphics where you
can move around and you can seethe pieces, that visually you
can see what you're building.
(14:11):
That's the beauty of this.
Because if you look at the APIdocumentation, Have fun.
There's a lot more involved tothat.
Dan DeLong (14:21):
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes sense to someone, butit's just a question is whether
or not you can actually makesense of it for yourself
because, Accountants,bookkeepers, accounting
professionals, peer advisors,this is probably the last thing
that you wanted to get yourselfinto when it comes to, managing
(14:43):
your clients.
But it's not just as we'retalking about the QB power hour
and how Zapier can help withwith QuickBooks online, it
connects over to over 2000different applications.
And as we'll get.
As we'll unpack not allapplications are the same.
(15:03):
James was saying in the in the Qand A, right?
Like, how do you know if if anapp 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 questionableoptions of how do they get, how
do they get how do theyintegrate with Zapier so that
you can integrate with theseother apps?
It's very powerful in that, itallows you to do more things
(15:39):
with one action.
Now, how much does Zapier cost?
It depends.
That's the answer for in mostcases in our industry.
I think there is a free option.
You can go check it out ontheir, website.
But the their pricing matrix istypically based on the type of
connection whether you're usinga premium app.
(16:02):
Or a regular app connection.
By the way, QuickBooks Online isa premium app, so if you wanna
have anything doing withQuickBooks you're gonna at least
have to go with the professionalmidway option.
You can't use the free option.
Then the other pricingconsideration is the number of
(16:23):
tasks, and we'll talk about whata task.
Is and how do you account forthe number of tasks and then the
number of people on your team,you can have a team team of
people and share, zaps betweenbetween you between your,
between the team members.
So there's a link there in the,slides on the, pricing but the,
(16:45):
smallest or the lowest.
Task option is 750 a month.
And if you chose that with theprofessional, that would be like
20 bucks a month, right?
So it's, not a lot.
And then you figure out how manytasks you're actually needing,
and then you can figure out whatthe pricing would actually be.
(17:07):
Task accounting, I thought thatwas funny that on their website
they have, how do you accountfor tasks, but what is a task?
A task is counted when an actionis successful.
If something fails it doesn'tcount, right?
If there's a problem, right?
And that a successful action iseither a read or write or a
(17:29):
search, right?
So if it's pushing something tothe app of doing something else,
that's considered a task.
If it's reading it pulling inthe information so that it can
do something with it.
Then that's a pull.
And then searching, you're ableto search within the
applications that you'reconnected to now a trigger.
(17:50):
And we'll talk about what atrigger is a little bit triggers
don't count.
So in this example, the triggeris an email coming in through
Gmail.
And then they want to dosomething with that email.
They want to send it to Dropboxand Slack, right?
So if 10 emails were received,the, okay.
(18:12):
Whatever it's doing into Dropboxis 10, 10 tasks and then sending
the next step or whatever thatis after that DM sent to Slack
is also 10.
So one one, one zap can countfor 20 different tasks,
depending on how many how manysteps you have in there.
(18:34):
All right.
So our next poll question is,have you ever been?
Have you ever been disappointedby the limited integrations of
apps to QuickBooks?
Never happened, right?
Every one Matt, right?
Yeah.
All the applications wereexploded.
Matthew Fulton (18:53):
People are taking the poll.
I'm going to go over realquickly, to some of the
questions we had.
So James was asking a question.
So if you send from a CRM to QBO30 customers, that would count
as 30 tasks.
So yes, what it would be thereis because it's, in that
scenario, And we'll, go a littlebit deeper into it.
You're looking at 30 independentrecords, a record being a
(19:15):
customer pushing it over.
So therefore it's going tocomplete 30 different tasks.
Mary asks another question,which will probably go a little
bit deeper into when we.
Show some of the examples, butif she was asking, how does it
work when you have multiple appssyncing, if all would update a
client address, phone number, etcetera, which app takes
(19:36):
precedence, or does the firstone change things?
And then the next one changes itagain, the, way I used to do
something like this, one ofthose apps I used to do back in
the days, I would take an updatefrom my CRM, I would push it
over to, Different CRMs, becausedifferent ones would collect
different places.
But if you, can actually createa multi step action, where it
(20:00):
acts almost as one task withlots of steps or actions within
it.
And that's a way to not use upas many of your tasks at once,
by daisy chaining them.
But if they're not daisychained, then you could run into
different updating issues wherethey're fighting over the stuff.
Dan DeLong (20:20):
Good fielding of questions here, Tomiwa, and in
the poll and to share theresults.
By and large resoundingly 77percent of you said yes, you're
disappointed by some limited,limitation of integrations.
Now, don't get too excited.
There are plenty of limitationswith Zapier as well, sorry, and
(20:41):
we'll unpack some of those as,as, well.
It's not going to be the magicpill, silver bullet for all
things but it certainly could bea way to enhance depending on
what it is that you're, lookingto do.
Spot, you want to take, thesethrough about As we unpack, what
(21:05):
is the overview of Zapier?
Matthew Fulton (21:08):
Yep.
So when we're talking aboutZapier, it all comes down to
triggers versus actions.
So after you connect yourdifferent applications together,
what will happen is Zapier isgoing to watch for a predefined
or defined activity to triggerthe start of your own custom
Zap.
Once a Zap has been triggered,it will follow a series of
(21:31):
actions that were signed as apart of your workflow.
So when you organize themcorrectly, these apps can
replace the need to manuallytransfer data from one program
to another.
Trying to break it down inlittle nuggets to get you really
to what the difference in thevariance is there.
So a trigger leads to theaction.
Dan DeLong (21:52):
Just like in that example of a a firearm, right?
That's going to You know, if youwant to have the action of
firing a firearm, you got topull the trigger.
So you can only do it one at atime.
Matthew Fulton (22:08):
So then there's different types of triggers and
they break it down into whatthey call pulling triggers and
then instant triggers.
The pulling triggers, dependingon the plan that you're on, it's
basically going to do a periodicpoll to see if there is
information that needs to be.
If you need to activate anaction, so your free plan is
(22:30):
going to be every 15 minutes.
It's going to do a searchprofessional is two minutes.
And team and enterprise is oneminute, basically.
The higher up you go, the fasterit would be.
What that really means is, thefree plan, this is one of the
few times where the free plan ofa program, you're not the, as I
(22:51):
say, if it's free, you are theproduct.
Zapier's done a phenomenal job,they're not using you as the
product anymore.
It's a great gateway to get youinto the product, to then get
you to be willing to pay more,and do things even faster.
We'll go through when you'redoing testing the time wise you
can do a manual quick push tomake sure you're testing Your
zap and it's good to go Nowinstant triggers webhooks if
(23:16):
you've heard of webhooks beforebut always wondered what they
are Put a one in the commentsfor me, please what a webhook is
with an application It's whenthey send out a predefined
message on a url and Otherapplications listen and watch
for that web, that, that messageand they're going to hook it and
pull it in and say, okay, weneed this information.
(23:40):
So instead of having to alwaysbe pulling and looking for this
stuff, it just listens for anRSS feed, if you will, an update
from a web hook from somethingelse and grabs it and then takes
that as an action.
Does that make sense, Dan?
Do you have anything to add tothat?
Yeah,
Dan DeLong (23:55):
When people would listen for the train on a
railroad track, hopefully thepoint 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 whenis 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 andwhat app you're actually using,
do they use the webhooks?
(24:28):
But if they're using anapplication, if there's an API
that allows for their webhooks,it doesn't matter what plan
you're on.
It's, constantly listening forsomething to happen.
With anything else there'slimitations.
Matthew Fulton (24:48):
Yeah.
So the limitation wise.
All of this stuff is, it'sbasically determined by the
different applications API.
So in other words, if theapplication doesn't offer access
computer language wise to dosomething Zapier can't make it
happen at all.
So it's only able to do what'savailable there.
And it's only triggered by newdata.
(25:09):
So what this means is if you'retrying to create a zap and then
you want to do your historicalstuff, that's not what it's made
for.
It's future, it's forwardlooking, unless you check out
maybe like their Zapier transferfeature, that's something where
you could try to pull historicalstuff 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 Googlesheets, and, then you export
whatever it is that you'redoing, you have it in the exact
same format as as a spreadsheettrigger, which one of that
triggers could be a new row iscreated.
(25:45):
And you then copy and paste itin bulk into that trigger, then
it's going to go.
Yeah.
Line by line and thenpotentially, 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'renot on plan.
Then there are otherapplications that will probably
do.
Historical uploads and thingslike that, maybe a little better
than, especially if we'retalking QuickBooks here.
(26:21):
Yeah, that that's a great pointthat it's only triggered by new
data.
So this is like the line in thesand, Hey, we're going to take
care of this.
Issue that we're having with,this integration gap.
Let's move it forward from hereand 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 shouldsay again, when you're testing
out, creating your differenceapps, it will.
So in that specific scenario,try to pull the last three
records of information over thatyou can use to try to push over
the data over to a new platform.
Only does that during testing.
(27:04):
And that's important because youwant 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 nextsections guys There's this is
where you really want toprobably download these slides
I'll put the link up again foreverybody because there's a lot
of words on here There's a lotof different types of steps that
can be done within Zapier.
So we're talking about whenyou're trying to figure out
(27:40):
what's going to first liketrigger something.
And then if the action once it'striggered, what's the action
it's going to take within theother app.
So there's like a search step asit says here, it's going to be.
Find your existing data.
So if you've got an existingcustomer, and you don't want to
create a duplicate customer, itcan search for it and then use
(28:01):
that.
You can use filters to createconditional logic type
scenarios.
Formatting, so you can make sureyour time is formatted correct,
maybe your dollars is it,currency versus percentage,
different things of that nature.
Delay.
Delay is an important onebecause sometimes you need to,
if you're doing a multi tieredstep, you need to give time for
(28:24):
something to update and finishbefore you go to the next piece.
And then paths, which is prettycool.
And Dan's got a kind of anexample of one of those towards
the end to blow everybody's mindof conditional logic where you
start to branch things off.
And you can make one crazyinsane zap that does a lot of.
Moves things to a lot ofdifferent places, right?
Dan DeLong (28:45):
Yeah.
So the these are things that youcan 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 fillformat or to, make sure that's
(29:08):
entered in the, right way.
Matthew Fulton (29:13):
And then so fields wise, there again, many
different types of fields thatcould be used.
You've also got your date andtime field.
You've got a dictionary field,which this is something I
haven't used enough of and it'spretty powerful.
You, you can literally create.
Two columns where one value popsup something and you tell it
instead to provide a differentvalue.
(29:36):
So an example of that would belike for Stripe.
If you have a name of a certaintype, a description, an invoice,
it could look for that word andthen switch around to something
you really wanted to triggerinside of QuickBooks Online.
So we've got links back to allthe help guide where this stuff
is coming from as well for you.
(29:56):
Drop down menus.
That's a huge one, of course.
So this is where if you want topredefine select a selected list
of different items, you've gotyour file field.
So this is great.
If you want, let's say you'vegot one app that creates a
downloadable PDF for you, youcould then take it and have that
zap, grab that file and attachit and push it into maybe
(30:19):
QuickBooks online by having itselect 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 ofindividual items One of the
limitations I think we talkedabout a little bit later is in
QuickBooks online, we wereplaying around before this,
trying to see if they'd updatedthe ability, you can't create
(30:42):
multiple line item invoices orsales receipts.
But in other type of programs,there's different line items of
data.
You could use that in thisscenario 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 needto push a password over, you
could do that as well.
Again, download these slides andyou'll be able to go through a
lot of this without having toread all the words right away.
String text.
True false Boolean wise, andthen custom modal fields.
(31:18):
This is where you can basicallycreate your own mapping of
different fields betweendifferent programs and different
answers.
That's something you end upusing quite a bit.
Dan DeLong (31:29):
If you're if you're, Brain's not full yet.
There are other things in Zapieras well that can even augment
this even further.
Like they have their version ofa spreadsheet where you can have
Zap tables.
Where you can store a lot ofthings in, a spreadsheet.
So you don't have tonecessarily, have Google sheets,
(31:53):
for example to, be your sourceof truth for your spreadsheet
and just keep it all in theZapier, there's a chat bot
option.
I haven't really played aroundwith 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 createdcustom little icons so they're
easier to spot and know whatpart of it you're using.
When it says it does not have anicon, that's what that means.
It doesn't show you like alittle icon on the side.
It's not pronounced by thaticon.
Dan DeLong (32:28):
All right, so let's now talk a little bit about how
Zapier can help with QuickBooksOnline.
Here's the tie in to it, to QB,to the QB part of the PowerApp.
So here's a listing of the QBOtriggers, right?
So anything that is an account,product, Customer project
(32:50):
vendor.
You can read these at yourleisure, transactional
information these can betriggered or triggers.
And we'll, talk about that.
One of the simpler ones, becausethere was a Facebook post on
our, group that was, that could,I thought this would be, might
be a good example of using howdo I get alerted when my
(33:14):
customer creates and modifiestheir chart of accounts, right?
Maybe they're handling things inthe bank feed and sometimes they
create new accounts orQuickBooks creates the new
account because they're tryingto type in or find it and then
they add an S or something likethat to the category or the
chart of accounts and then itcreates a new.
(33:36):
chart of accounts, which onlymakes work for you to go back
and figure out how that gotcreated, do it, merge it and
whatnot.
Maybe you want to get alertedwhen a, when an account is made
or when a customer is made youcan, trigger that from.
QBO and correct me if I'm wrong,this is a, this is an active
(33:57):
listening trigger, right?
So it's, immediate.
It's not going to you're notgoing to wait 15 minutes to
alert you with that, right?
Matthew Fulton (34:06):
Yeah.
So QuickBooks online startedusing web hooks about four years
ago, I think is when they reallystarted to initiate them.
So they, you can use the webhook version of it.
You don't have to do anything.
Fancy to do it that way.
I do want to draw attention tothe ones that say new and
update, just in case there's aquestion on it, that means as a
trigger, any of those, socustomer bill, estimate,
(34:26):
invoice, and credit memo, thoseare the only ones that if
there's already somethingcreated, 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 thatyou can do inside of QuickBooks.
As far as an action, this isnot.
Trigger doesn't have to mean theaction, this could be something
else and then something that youwant to, an action that you want
to take inside of QuickBooksquite a few, right?
(34:58):
There's a lot of things thatyou, can do here.
I haven't played around with theAPI requests yet.
Or the get attachments.
I'm, I am intrigued by that, getattachments as well.
Maybe you can, take thatattachment and put it somewhere
else.
If they upload a receipt andmaybe you have a, document
(35:21):
storage that Is not QuickBooks,right?
Matthew Fulton (35:25):
Correct.
As, just again, I thinkeverybody got this, but when
we're talking about the triggerpart, that is, you're using
something in QuickBooks Onlineto trigger another action, which
could be into a differentapplication.
The actions are when some otherprogram triggers something to
happen, and your action willhappen inside of QuickBooks
(35:47):
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 hislimitations.
Transactions, and we mentionedthis earlier, transactions are
created are created to eitherone item or category before you
say, Hey why don't you use abundle?
Bundle items are not supported.
(36:14):
We're very sad to, to find thathas not been.
included in their in theirupdate yet.
So if you wanted to create abundle and then have multiple
line items from that bundlesorry.
It's not an option yet.
So for bills, expenses all thetransactions it's, really only
(36:36):
going to allow you to do oneline item on the, on that, on
that transaction and for fieldsor for list items like customers
and vendors and products andservices, not all fields for
lists are, going to beavailable.
And then of course our.
(36:56):
Custom fields, womp, when itcomes to that's always on the
list of things that it doesn'tintegrate with.
Matthew Fulton (37:07):
That's a good example of API limitations,
right?
Because all the custom fieldsaren't necessarily available,
you can't access all thosedifferent things.
Previously, tags you couldn't.
Now you definitely won't be ableto, of course.
But so if you can't get to someof the, if you can't get to it
through the API, if you everhave a question on that, you can
reach out.
I can tell you.
(37:27):
You won't be able to do with anyof these kind of programs.
And then I see your questions.
We'll get to those here justshortly.
Dan DeLong (37:35):
And then once you set this up, sometimes it will
require some maintenance, right?
The great thing about QuickBooksis it's constantly updated.
The bad thing about QuickBooksis it's constantly updated,
right?
That could have an impact on on,a zap that you might have set
(37:56):
up.
In which case you may need toupdate your connection to the
zap.
It may break, an update to to,to QuickBooks may hinder the
zaps inability ability to dosomething.
And so if you've got this reallylong multi step zap created and
(38:21):
any one of those gets updated,that could.
Potentially cause a challenge inthat, zap running, error free
when there is an error you'llget an email alert, say, Hey, we
can't run this.
And, at, best the layman's termsof how they, can help you.
(38:47):
I don't know if you've gottensome of those errors Matthew,
you know what it is by lookingat 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 toshow this image right now, Dan
and I, before this, we gottogether and we were meeting and
we're just.
Brainstorming different conceptsof things we could try to show.
And we found as we were doing iton a lot of my older ones, I had
to update my QuickBooks onlineconnection.
And it's because the API hadchanged.
(39:25):
I hadn't been really usingZapier as much to push stuff in
and out of QuickBooks online.
So I had to go in and update itand it does a good job on
existing zaps of giving you likea warning.
And walking you through clickthis, to reupdate it.
So you're not going crazy, butthe key takeaway from this is
Zapier is amazing, but you doneed to maintain it.
(39:48):
So you're, if you're reallyleaning heavily into this any
platform like this, you need toput it on your counter to just
do regular maintenance, makesure things are connected,
correct.
It'll make your life a lotbetter 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 fromrunning.
When you fix it, you can't rerunthat zap on that that, new
iteration, because it recordsjust Just Google Sheets, there's
always this version history, of,things that you're anytime that
(40:25):
a change is made it assigns theversion that was used to that
ZAP run in that history.
So even if you fix it, you can'trerun it unless You start the
trigger again, right?
So once whatever caused the zapto run in the first place, if
you do it again, then it willtake the new, version of your
(40:48):
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 getto go back two months and start
to rerun those that, you knowbecause again, no historical
from the point you fix it, itwill 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 toinvestigate how to, do that.
So I may be probably a monthfrom now, this is already going
to be outdated with that and youmight be able to use a new
version, but that's probably.
(41:30):
Some in a future state.
So let's talk about someexamples.
So we'll go with a simple oneand then go into a little bit
more immediate and then moreadvanced.
A simple, simple zap would be aa trigger to a single action,
right?
So one action creates oneresult.
(41:51):
This would be a good exampleused in the in the free plan
that they have because you can'tdo anything more than just have
one action, right?
But you can't use premium appswith with the free one.
So this will be something,where, you would be.
The apps that do connect andwe'll share some links of how do
(42:13):
you, tell what apps do, inZapier.
Let me links for that on the,website as well.
But here's an example of the proadvisor who wants to be alerted
when a new account is created onthe chart of accounts.
And you have some other simpleexamples, Matthew.
What so in this particular caseof multi factor security tokens.
Matthew Fulton (42:38):
In my practice, we've been using Dialpad for our
phone system for a very longtime.
And we've always set up aseparate phone line we call our
security line.
And we needed a way to make surethat whoever's requesting the
token could get that tokenincluding my global team In
india because I don't want toanswer those questions at two
three o'clock in the morning Sowith dialpad we have the ability
(43:00):
be that it because it wouldintegrate to slack We could take
and set up to where the textmessage went straight to slack
But because we were more of amicrosoft teams family I needed
to get it from Slack over toTeams, and I was able to set up
just a quick zap and be able topush it from Slack over to
Microsoft Teams, sending themessage right over to a certain
(43:23):
channel, and only the person whorequested 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 ofaugmenting, limitations.
So you don't have to, you didn'thave to search for another
(43:52):
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 fortime tracking and it's more of
just quick, easy reports.
And when I'm working onsomething, I can put it at
beginning time, any time, tag itto a customer, that kind of
stuff, because I'm not using itfrom my, actual.
Time tracking for payrollmyself.
(44:22):
So what I did back in the day isI'd always have it set up that
when I add a new customer andQuickBooks online, it would
automatically create a newclient for me and toggle.
So I didn't have to go and setthat specifically up each time.
I could just go log in andchoose the client and start
putting my time in to createwhatever 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'sbusiness, right?
There's the three P's ofprograms product processes and
people, right?
And if people are doingprocesses that can be easily
(45:03):
done, this is a great.
This is a great use case forsomething like that.
Allowing you to automate what's,possible to automate and then
humanize that relations thatdoesn't need, a human clicker to
(45:25):
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 toactually answer Lynette's as
well.
Full disclosure, both of thoseexamples I gave, those were
examples where certainintegrations didn't already
exist.
Since creating those back in theday, Now Dialpad has integration
to Teams, and that's going to bemore, it's going to be a direct
integration, more solid.
(45:47):
I don't have to manage it allthe time.
And Toggle has one to QBO.
So this allowed me to plan andmake it work to begin with.
But now I would move over to thedirect integration most likely.
So I don't have to manage someof that stuff.
And Lynette's question was, sowould Zapier be a good choice to
integrate Salesforce?
Used as CRM for proposalsinvoicing center with QBO.
(46:10):
Lynette, I'm pretty certainthere's, I thought there's
already a direct integration toQBO.
I know there's third party appsthat can do some of it, but you
could do that.
I'd have to double check what'savailable through Salesforce.
Yes, you would be able to dothat kind of a connection to
push stuff in.
I've done that a long time agoin 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 areavailable for each app?
Zapier has a really nice pagefor, all of that to search that
out.
But you can find the app thatyou're looking at and, see what
triggers are available for thatapp and what actions are
available and then determine ifthis is even a good way to go.
(46:52):
So here's, an example of anintermediate.
So you have that single trigger,but you have multiple actions
that are taken.
That's global keeping.
We use Kajabi and Kajabi is likeAmerican Express.
It does things on its own.
Maybe it doesn't play well withothers, right?
It wants to be a, it wants to bea QuickBooks of of the online
(47:18):
learning, right?
So all these things that theysay they do, they want to have
it all in one, place.
But, trying to get Kajabi tointegrate with QuickBooks?
No, not gonna happen, right?
So this is where, I can't Zapiercame in to to, help me out.
(47:38):
First thing was a new purchasewould happen.
Then I would add.
A filter.
So a filter then is, for acertain 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 alltriggers to to create this,
(48:00):
action so you can filter thatout.
I wanted a certain certain typesof sales to to have this to run
this app.
Yeah.
Just those two things the, saleand the filter doesn't cost me
any tasks, right?
So, there's no, no task usagewhen it's filtered, right?
(48:21):
So putting those filters so bestpractice, put the filters up
first so that you don't have atask usage.
So what would happen if thefilter was successful passed
through then what it would do isit would find the customer, in
my, QuickBooks.
And then the nice part aboutThese this app connection with
(48:45):
Zapier is that there's reallyjust a checkbox to say, if it's
not found, create the customer.
So rather than creating twoadditional steps it allows you
to search for it first.
And then if it's not found, itwill find it.
And this is where the doublesided sword is here.
There's only a few things thatyou can actually search on.
(49:08):
And it's either going to be thedisplay name.
Or the display name, I thinkit's the display name and the
email maybe those two things.
So it's not necessarily, lookfor this phone number or look
for this.
This is where some of thoselimitations then come in, as
long as you then you have yourworkflow laid out there.
(49:32):
It will find the customer orcreate and create it if it's not
found.
And then after that, it willcreate a sales receipt in
QuickBooks.
Another thing that we use it foris also because it's an online
company shipping addresses isvery necessary for economic
(49:53):
nexus.
So we want to make sure that theaddress.
Even though it's a billingaddress that is also copied over
into the shipping address, whichQuickBooks doesn't do that
automatically.
So you can have that Zapier dothat, right?
So it's make sure that yourshipping address and your
billing address are in alignmentso that you the sales tax is
(50:14):
going to be utilized properly.
It's going to create that salesreceipt.
And then after that, itcalculates some transaction
expenses, right?
So I'm, automatic I'm going tobe charged by by Kajabi payments
or Stripe or whatever thepayment processor is.
I know what that is, as long asthat's consistent, based off of
(50:35):
the sale, I can figure out whatthe expense would be and
formatting of dates and thosetypes of things.
And then it creates.
An expense for me as well.
So one action of a sale beingmade on my website is then now
either adding the customer,adding a sales receipt and
creating an expense.
(50:55):
So I've created basically threetransactions 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 ifthere's a limit of how many
steps that you could actuallyhave.
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 stepzap one time.
And I don't even think thatmaxed it out, but obviously the
larger you go, the more complexit's going to be, the more
management that's involved toit.
So you can get pretty creative.
I think that's just where someof using the branches and such,
(51:39):
you evolve into the advancedclass for sure.
That's right.
Jan was asking, would there be away 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 thatgives us some, if we have time
we might.
Might go into that.
All right.
So here's an example of anadvanced one where you have one
trigger and then multipleactions with potential multiple
outcomes, right?
So this is where we talk aboutwhere Matt was talking about
(52:16):
the, conditional logic stuff.
Yeah.
So this, is what.
Zapier looks graphically in, asyou're creating it, right?
So you can see where it startsto branch out where there's one,
two, two, seven, seven differentpotential outcomes, right?
So it is going to result in the.
(52:40):
Wherever this ends up, whateverpath this, chooses, it can't
choose multiple paths, right?
That, that's one thing to, pointout here is that, you, typically
want to have your paths at theend of your of your zap based on
that conditional logic, becausethen you can't.
(53:01):
rerun it to have it go throughthe second one.
But you can have multiple zapswith multiple paths.
Your end result here could betrigger the next step and then
we'll run through that again,that does break things up for
you so that you don't have thishuge monster zap that you have
(53:26):
to man.
But that's, one of the, oneexample of.
In this case it was, filteringfor a certain, field, or it was
a big form on, a website thatpeople were filtering or filling
out.
And then depending on whichoption they selected for certain
(53:50):
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 doingcomplex setups like this, do it
to a test company.
So this is where you, it'salways good to have your own
paid playground, because onceyou get it set up the way you
want it you can then always turnaround and change a company
connects to, and this is anothergreat piece here.
(54:15):
There's sometimes.
You can make zaps that fail.
You need to have better forwardthinking of this.
An example being, I'm not a bigfan of Twitter X or spending all
much of time there, but I gotthis great idea Hey, I'm going
to create this image.
And every time somebody wouldfollow me, it would zap and post
this image up on my Twitterfeed.
If you don't go in and postanything else on there, it just
(54:36):
became a wall of just thispicture over and over and over
and over again with nothingelse.
That was a really bad example ofa zap because I didn't think
about.
Future wise, what it would looklike, and was it really helping
or not?
Dan DeLong (54:52):
All right.
So let's let's launch the lastpoll question.
Was this information useful?
Did you learn something new ormaybe you'd some help with with,
Zapier?
So let me go into, so here'sour, here's, this is my Zapier.
And this is a great place.
So zapier.
com slash apps is a great placeto go to evaluate whether this
(55:16):
is going to help you or not.
So what was the one that wentthat 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, thereit is.
Let's take a look at so you'dsearch for any app here and then
you'd go down to here.
Oh, this is one other thing thatwe didn't even talk about was
templates, right?
So there's already there's, tonsof templates in there.
(55:52):
So you can just.
Find if a template in this stateupdate subscribers and MailChimp
for new give give buttertransactions, you can just start
with this template that'salready there.
And then you don't necessarilyhave to build it from scratch
but down here,
Matthew Fulton (56:09):
right there, if they add new, give better
transactions as payments andQuickBooks online.
Dan DeLong (56:14):
Yeah.
So you can just.
If they, if give butter doesn'tautomatically do it you can you
can use this app to do that.
Down at the bottom here is whereyou really want to go into
investigating what, whether itdoes this or not.
So you can filter for just thetriggers, right?
(56:35):
These are the things in givebutter that will spawn a
trigger, right?
So a new campaign, a newtransaction, a new ticket.
And updated campaign.
It'll tell you if this isinstant or not.
So now you know that they haveprobably a webhooks, here at the
railroad track.
And then you can see what theaction is.
(56:57):
This would be if it's some othertrigger from another app, what
could you do?
Inside of get butter.
Exactly.
Create a contact.
And then yeah, so I was justlooking and then you just look
at them same time, right?
So that you can see it all inone place.
So, you can create a contact.
(57:20):
Notice that creating a contactis not a trigger, right?
If you're that's like the end ofthe 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 atthe different apps that are
coming out on the market andwhat they're available to do.
It's going to be.
I think it's this one.
Yeah.
See, newly new records talkingabout estimates and such.
Dan DeLong (57:57):
So let's just look at the triggers here.
So it's case attachment, newfields, new lead, new record
updating a record, updating afield on a record, new outbound
message.
So these are all the things thatcan be triggered, by Salesforce.
And then here's all the actionsthat 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 buildthose integrations between,
Salesforce and QuickBooks, forexample.
But if QuickBooks online is notyour final destination or your
integration between these twothis can do all sorts of things
(58:41):
elsewhere or back intoSalesforce.
It's another one that was, lookat.
Matthew Fulton (58:50):
The only other question that was right off the
bat was asking about trying toadd attachments on in QuickBooks
Online.
But it was get attachments, if Iremember correctly, it wasn't
add an attachment on.
QuickBooks.
It's not liking it today.
(59:14):
Okay.
Dan DeLong (59:15):
Where'd it go?
And you can filter these too,right?
So if you're just looking at thepremium ones, there's QuickBooks
Online here.
There's a will, there's aworkaround.
Action.
That was an action.
That was an action, right?
Yep.
And then to get attached,there's a lot of them.
(59:35):
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 itthough.
Now, if you go to create a salesreceipt or update sales receipt,
and maybe like two up, there yougo.
And in here, Do,
Dan DeLong (01:00:05):
These are all, what we're looking at here is, these
are all the things that can doon a sales receipt.
Good point.
What is not on here is.
Make add an attachment, right?
So this tells us that it wouldnot allow us to attach a
transaction inside of QuickBooksif the attachment is already in
(01:00:27):
QuickBooks, you can get it.
But you're not going to be ableto do anything with it back in
QuickBooks once you've got it.
Matthew Fulton (01:00:33):
Yeah.
Is that an attachment?
If let us know what you findout, you said you can play
around with it, or if you getstuck on it, reach out.
Best thing you can do is if youget me excited with a very
difficult challenge, you'regoing to get my attention big
time.
Be like, Ooh, let me try tofigure out how we can solve it.
So send me down a rabbit hole.
I love it.
So Dan, look at that.
(01:00:55):
We were pretty close to timethis time.
Dan DeLong (01:00:57):
Yeah, we we crammed all that in into, one hour.
We really appreciate you joiningus here today.
Next and that's what we spot andI are, looking to focus the QB
power hour moving forward is.
(01:01:18):
Really uncovering and unpackingthe data getting into or out of
QuickBooks, because that'sreally where the QuickBooks
ecosystem, especially online is,that there is a shallow under
the pool of the, all the thingsthat you can do inside of
QuickBooks but that doesn't meanthere's not neighboring swimming
(01:01:40):
pools that we can, steal somewater from, right?
And then it all boils down tohow that data is, moved.
So we're going to start lookinginto, and, unpacking some of
these apps that do integrateinto, QuickBooks and what
(01:02:01):
they're, what they do well, whatthey maybe need some help with
and so we wanted to start withthis as more of a way of, Hey,
there's another choice, even youdon't have to abandon your app
if it doesn't, there is there'sa way to augment that closing
thoughts.
Matthew Fulton (01:02:21):
Yeah.
If you guys have other topicsthat you are interested to learn
more about, reach out to eitherone of us.
We would love to hear yoursuggestions so we can, our goal
is to help however we can to thecommunity.
So thank you for taking the timeto be a part of this and joining
us every other Tuesday and,appreciate it.
Dan DeLong (01:02:40):
All right.
Y'all have a great Mardi Gras.
Enjoy your Ash Wednesdaytomorrow, but that Tuesday
today, have a great day,everyone.
We'll see you next time on theQB power hour.
It's good to see everybody here again today.
Dan DeLong (00:36):
Likewise.
Welcome everybody to another QBpower hour.
We wanted to start on timebecause we have a lot of stuff
to do and unpack.
Cause we're going to be talkingabout bridging the apps using
Zapier to enhance QuickBooksonline.
Integrations.
Without ourselves, my name isDan DeLong, owner at Danwith and
(00:58):
School of Bookkeeping.
I worked at Intuit for nearly 18years, co hosting today as well
as the workshop Wednesdays overat schoolbookkeeping.
com.
There's a link there for theFacebook group, which is Closing
in on 20, 000 members.
And yeah, I appreciate everyonethat has been reporting the
(01:19):
posts that are, that have beenspammy in the Facebook group.
It's really hard sometimes tomanage those people from not
getting in.
It's a lot of work of all sorts.
Yeah.
Labor of love over at theFacebook group.
So appreciate any everyone doingthat.
(01:40):
If you do if you want to be amoderator to, so that you can,
you do can ban spammers from theFacebook group, please let me
know.
Matthew.
Matthew Fulton (01:51):
Hello, everybody.
Matthew Fulton here.
My friends call me Spot.
I am the founder of ParkwayBusiness Solutions, also known
as CloudApps, Inc.
One of the creators of theFacebook group, Quby Community
Live.
We are not at the 20, 000 mark.
We actually, it's a smallergroup, but we keep it that way
on purpose because like you'retalking about, it's sometimes
it's difficult to manageeverybody's best intentions
(02:14):
inside there.
Also do blueprints for businessseries and I am a total workflow
nerd which means I like workingwith the API, working with app
companies and trying to helpthem better understand how they
can actually integrate theirproducts to QuickBooks online.
And how did I get the nicknameSpot?
(02:35):
Super fast version of it is Ihave a skin disease called
vitiligo.
It changes the pigment in yourskin and turns it white in
places.
And when I was a freshman inhigh school, I grew up and moved
a lot.
Every place I moved, I alwayshad to re explain it.
When I was a freshman in highschool, I moved to Hemet,
California.
And they said, everybody has anickname.
You have to have a nickname.
And I said, how about Spot?
So it stuck, took it with mealong the way, and it turned
(02:58):
negative into a positive.
So it's a positive thing for me.
Thank you for asking.
Dan DeLong (03:02):
And that, is what we love about you, Spot, is that
you in, in, all things, not justnot just with that, but like
anything Intuit or QuickBooks,you always have a, nice
objectively positive, view ofthings.
So I really appreciate yourperspective as well.
A little bit about the QB PowerHour.
(03:24):
It's every other Tuesday.
12 noon Eastern.
We are eligible for CPE creditsthrough earmark.
So if you didn't catch the introvideo there, there's a QR code
to, to check that out anddownload the app.
Most of our prior QB powerhours, since we've started this
are available for CPE credit.
(03:45):
You can check out the channelon, earmark.
Typically they're five, sevendays after.
The webinar there will be a newlisting there on, on earmark to
get your CPE credit.
We're going to be talking aboutZapier today, so if you have
specific questions about the,about Zapier, and, how it works
(04:10):
and, whatnot please put them inthe Q& A, so it's a lot easier
for us to follow up and keeptrack of those questions,
because as I can see the, chatis going by, I don't get alerts
on those things for, in in thecomments please put those in
there and Matthew and ourhelpers are, trying to make sure
(04:31):
that we, we, get everyoneeveryone's perspective included
so we can put them as in the,you can put that kind of stuff
in the comments, like what doyou eat for for Mardi Gras since
it is fat Tuesday at my MardiGras.
That's what Fat Tuesday is
Matthew Fulton (04:48):
about.
Okay, I thought it was justreally, big tacos.
I didn't know what Fat Tuesdaywas, but anyway.
Dan DeLong (04:54):
Okay.
It's Tuesday and I'm All right.
And we also got the QB power,our story.
You can check that out if youfeel so inclined.
So let's talk about what we'regoing to talk about.
So what's on the agenda today.
So we're going to set the stageon I guess this is a Shakespeare
(05:16):
reference here with, to zap ornot to zap.
That's the question.
So we'll unpack what's the needfor, Zapier.
And then we'll talk about whatZapier actually is.
And just a brief overview ofthe.
Under the hood of, Zapier, andthen we'll talk about some, real
(05:36):
world examples.
So first off, I just wanted totalk about.
Why I wanted to do a webinar on,Zapier because here this is the
QB power hour and we're talkingabout a completely different
application altogether.
I went to into a connect lastyear and Blake, who is did a,
(05:59):
little intro for us over here.
He did a wonderful breakoutsession on how to use or how to
automate.
Advisory types of things using acouple applications.
One was Process Street, which isa workflow automation task
(06:19):
manager practice management typeof thing and ChatGPT and Zapier.
And it was really interesting tome that the it was probably it
was one of the larger breakoutsessions.
So probably about two, 200 orso.
Capacity that was there and alot of the questions that were,
(06:46):
that he was taking people couldsubmit 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 tothat's why we wanted to do this
is, to make sure that peoplehaving a good understanding of
what Zapier can actually do andhow it can enhance some of these
(07:08):
integrations.
Because Matthew you, couldprobably attest to this pretty
well.
When a, when an app company saysworks with QuickBooks, I'm using
air quotes there.
The devil is always in thedetails and it may be not the
kind of integration that youwant it to have working with,
(07:29):
QuickBooks.
And Zapier is a way to be ableto, augment some of those things
when you're dealing with appsthat connect to QuickBooks.
What would you?
What would you say?
We're going to go into what itis and everything, but what are
your thoughts on that?
Matthew Fulton (07:50):
I'd agree.
So I've always felt that Zapieris a great product to help app
companies test out what needs tobe integrated to QuickBooks
Online.
It's a more cost effective wayto connect to multiple different
apps across the app sphere allat once.
And then.
Once you see that there'sengagement, people are actually
(08:10):
trying to use certain parts ofit.
Then maybe you spend the moneythrough development to do a
direct integration.
And we're going to talk verybriefly about the difference
between a direct integration andone way versus two way, some of
that stuff.
We can dive in and show whatthat is,
Dan DeLong (08:27):
let's start off with the first poll question.
I've lost it.
There it is.
So the first one is just to setthe stage of how familiar are
you with, Zapier.
And that's the first thing is,how do you pronounce the word?
Matthew Fulton (08:46):
Zapier.
I always heard Zapier makes youhappier.
Zapier makes you crazier.
Dan DeLong (08:51):
Exactly.
That's their slogan or byline.
It's, Zapier makes you happier.
So we'll talk a little bit aboutthat.
It looks like, looking at peopleanswering.
It looks like never used it is,is 71 percent of the folks that
(09:12):
have, taken taken the
Matthew Fulton (09:16):
Interesting question.
Dan DeLong (09:17):
Wow.
I just brain, no, I haven'tstarted drinking yet.
Matthew Fulton (09:25):
We've had two people mentioned give butter in
the comments, just alreadytalking about nonprofit and
using that.
So I'm going to have to take anote and check out that
application as well.
So
Dan DeLong (09:36):
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 beforeand like a little update and
enough to be dangerous.
I think that's, the troublearea.
(09:56):
I think we're, we could feasiblyget ourselves into.
So hopefully as we unpack thishere today, where did the mouse
go?
There it is.
Okay.
So let's, talk about to zap ornot to zap.
So spot, what would you, howwould 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 toanother?
The ultimate, the best way ofcourse, is a direct integration.
So when one app is partnering upto the other using their APIs,
and you're gonna have either aone way sync or a two way sync,
one way sync is where.
You may connect a different appto QuickBooks Online.
(10:36):
And it gets a little confusinghere because they may go and
suck in certain bits ofinformation initially, like
maybe your vendor list orcustomer list, chart of
accounts.
They will pull that stuff overin certain transaction types.
But then after that initialsync, it will only write data
from the external app.
Two QuickBooks online, only oneway.
It never goes both directions.
(10:58):
Now a two way sync then probablybecomes a little more obvious,
that it's a situation where onceyou'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 youhave to keep in mind, let's say
both programs sent data at theexact same time, which one takes
(11:20):
precedence?
Which one is going to be themost important one if they're
both trying to update somethingat the exact same time?
And how do you track it withautologs, everything else?
If you don't have a directintegration capability, this is
where we start talking aboutdifferent bridge apps such as
Zapier, and there's othercompetitors that are out there
as well which if, anybodywatching has other suggestions,
(11:44):
feel free to put in the chat aswell, make is one IntegraMAT,
Integra, Integrately, Pably,Automate.
io.
There's probably 10 other onesas well.
But Zapier is the Kleenex of allthese, where it came out really
first, and it's got the biggestfollowing of all of them.
And it's, we call it a bridgeapp because it, what they do is
(12:07):
they connect points to thedifferent APIs and allow you a
very easy way, like mind map wayof, Connecting these pieces and
trying to understand how to putthe pieces together and even
cooler is recipes to make ittaste 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 updatingbut Heather Day Saturday she was
very heavily, integrated
Matthew Fulton (12:43):
general course on it all.
Which we all learned from bigtime.
Yeah.
Dan DeLong (12:48):
Intro to zap your you can check that out.
I've got it put on the QB powerhour page so you can watch that
as well.
So if we're.
Maybe talking a little bitdifferently about how, well it
sinks in some of these topicsthat we're talking about here
today.
You can check that out and maybeHeather has a better way to
(13:12):
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 wantto first foundational wise.
It's really just a tool thatconnects cloud based
applications and it, offers alow code or no code way to
connect one app to another.
(13:46):
Would you, say that's a prettygood?
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 itout.
As we get into some of theexamples, you'll see, I use the
term mind mapping because it'sgoing to be graphics where you
can move around and you can seethe pieces, that visually you
can see what you're building.
(14:11):
That's the beauty of this.
Because if you look at the APIdocumentation, Have fun.
There's a lot more involved tothat.
Dan DeLong (14:21):
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes sense to someone, butit's just a question is whether
or not you can actually makesense of it for yourself
because, Accountants,bookkeepers, accounting
professionals, peer advisors,this is probably the last thing
that you wanted to get yourselfinto when it comes to, managing
(14:43):
your clients.
But it's not just as we'retalking about the QB power hour
and how Zapier can help withwith QuickBooks online, it
connects over to over 2000different applications.
And as we'll get.
As we'll unpack not allapplications are the same.
(15:03):
James was saying in the in the Qand A, right?
Like, how do you know if if anapp 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 questionableoptions of how do they get, how
do they get how do theyintegrate with Zapier so that
you can integrate with theseother apps?
It's very powerful in that, itallows you to do more things
(15:39):
with one action.
Now, how much does Zapier cost?
It depends.
That's the answer for in mostcases in our industry.
I think there is a free option.
You can go check it out ontheir, website.
But the their pricing matrix istypically based on the type of
connection whether you're usinga premium app.
(16:02):
Or a regular app connection.
By the way, QuickBooks Online isa premium app, so if you wanna
have anything doing withQuickBooks you're gonna at least
have to go with the professionalmidway option.
You can't use the free option.
Then the other pricingconsideration is the number of
(16:23):
tasks, and we'll talk about whata task.
Is and how do you account forthe number of tasks and then the
number of people on your team,you can have a team team of
people and share, zaps betweenbetween you between your,
between the team members.
So there's a link there in the,slides on the, pricing but the,
(16:45):
smallest or the lowest.
Task option is 750 a month.
And if you chose that with theprofessional, that would be like
20 bucks a month, right?
So it's, not a lot.
And then you figure out how manytasks you're actually needing,
and then you can figure out whatthe pricing would actually be.
(17:07):
Task accounting, I thought thatwas funny that on their website
they have, how do you accountfor tasks, but what is a task?
A task is counted when an actionis successful.
If something fails it doesn'tcount, right?
If there's a problem, right?
And that a successful action iseither a read or write or a
(17:29):
search, right?
So if it's pushing something tothe app of doing something else,
that's considered a task.
If it's reading it pulling inthe information so that it can
do something with it.
Then that's a pull.
And then searching, you're ableto search within the
applications that you'reconnected to now a trigger.
(17:50):
And we'll talk about what atrigger is a little bit triggers
don't count.
So in this example, the triggeris an email coming in through
Gmail.
And then they want to dosomething with that email.
They want to send it to Dropboxand Slack, right?
So if 10 emails were received,the, okay.
(18:12):
Whatever it's doing into Dropboxis 10, 10 tasks and then sending
the next step or whatever thatis after that DM sent to Slack
is also 10.
So one one, one zap can countfor 20 different tasks,
depending on how many how manysteps you have in there.
(18:34):
All right.
So our next poll question is,have you ever been?
Have you ever been disappointedby the limited integrations of
apps to QuickBooks?
Never happened, right?
Every one Matt, right?
Yeah.
All the applications wereexploded.
Matthew Fulton (18:53):
People are taking the poll.
I'm going to go over realquickly, to some of the
questions we had.
So James was asking a question.
So if you send from a CRM to QBO30 customers, that would count
as 30 tasks.
So yes, what it would be thereis because it's, in that
scenario, And we'll, go a littlebit deeper into it.
You're looking at 30 independentrecords, a record being a
(19:15):
customer pushing it over.
So therefore it's going tocomplete 30 different tasks.
Mary asks another question,which will probably go a little
bit deeper into when we.
Show some of the examples, butif she was asking, how does it
work when you have multiple appssyncing, if all would update a
client address, phone number, etcetera, which app takes
(19:36):
precedence, or does the firstone change things?
And then the next one changes itagain, the, way I used to do
something like this, one ofthose apps I used to do back in
the days, I would take an updatefrom my CRM, I would push it
over to, Different CRMs, becausedifferent ones would collect
different places.
But if you, can actually createa multi step action, where it
(20:00):
acts almost as one task withlots of steps or actions within
it.
And that's a way to not use upas many of your tasks at once,
by daisy chaining them.
But if they're not daisychained, then you could run into
different updating issues wherethey're fighting over the stuff.
Dan DeLong (20:20):
Good fielding of questions here, Tomiwa, and in
the poll and to share theresults.
By and large resoundingly 77percent of you said yes, you're
disappointed by some limited,limitation of integrations.
Now, don't get too excited.
There are plenty of limitationswith Zapier as well, sorry, and
(20:41):
we'll unpack some of those as,as, well.
It's not going to be the magicpill, silver bullet for all
things but it certainly could bea way to enhance depending on
what it is that you're, lookingto do.
Spot, you want to take, thesethrough about As we unpack, what
(21:05):
is the overview of Zapier?
Matthew Fulton (21:08):
Yep.
So when we're talking aboutZapier, it all comes down to
triggers versus actions.
So after you connect yourdifferent applications together,
what will happen is Zapier isgoing to watch for a predefined
or defined activity to triggerthe start of your own custom
Zap.
Once a Zap has been triggered,it will follow a series of
(21:31):
actions that were signed as apart of your workflow.
So when you organize themcorrectly, these apps can
replace the need to manuallytransfer data from one program
to another.
Trying to break it down inlittle nuggets to get you really
to what the difference in thevariance is there.
So a trigger leads to theaction.
Dan DeLong (21:52):
Just like in that example of a a firearm, right?
That's going to You know, if youwant to have the action of
firing a firearm, you got topull the trigger.
So you can only do it one at atime.
Matthew Fulton (22:08):
So then there's different types of triggers and
they break it down into whatthey call pulling triggers and
then instant triggers.
The pulling triggers, dependingon the plan that you're on, it's
basically going to do a periodicpoll to see if there is
information that needs to be.
If you need to activate anaction, so your free plan is
(22:30):
going to be every 15 minutes.
It's going to do a searchprofessional is two minutes.
And team and enterprise is oneminute, basically.
The higher up you go, the fasterit would be.
What that really means is, thefree plan, this is one of the
few times where the free plan ofa program, you're not the, as I
(22:51):
say, if it's free, you are theproduct.
Zapier's done a phenomenal job,they're not using you as the
product anymore.
It's a great gateway to get youinto the product, to then get
you to be willing to pay more,and do things even faster.
We'll go through when you'redoing testing the time wise you
can do a manual quick push tomake sure you're testing Your
zap and it's good to go Nowinstant triggers webhooks if
(23:16):
you've heard of webhooks beforebut always wondered what they
are Put a one in the commentsfor me, please what a webhook is
with an application It's whenthey send out a predefined
message on a url and Otherapplications listen and watch
for that web, that, that messageand they're going to hook it and
pull it in and say, okay, weneed this information.
(23:40):
So instead of having to alwaysbe pulling and looking for this
stuff, it just listens for anRSS feed, if you will, an update
from a web hook from somethingelse and grabs it and then takes
that as an action.
Does that make sense, Dan?
Do you have anything to add tothat?
Yeah,
Dan DeLong (23:55):
When people would listen for the train on a
railroad track, hopefully thepoint 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 whenis 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 andwhat app you're actually using,
do they use the webhooks?
(24:28):
But if they're using anapplication, if there's an API
that allows for their webhooks,it doesn't matter what plan
you're on.
It's, constantly listening forsomething to happen.
With anything else there'slimitations.
Matthew Fulton (24:48):
Yeah.
So the limitation wise.
All of this stuff is, it'sbasically determined by the
different applications API.
So in other words, if theapplication doesn't offer access
computer language wise to dosomething Zapier can't make it
happen at all.
So it's only able to do what'savailable there.
And it's only triggered by newdata.
(25:09):
So what this means is if you'retrying to create a zap and then
you want to do your historicalstuff, that's not what it's made
for.
It's future, it's forwardlooking, unless you check out
maybe like their Zapier transferfeature, that's something where
you could try to pull historicalstuff 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 Googlesheets, and, then you export
whatever it is that you'redoing, you have it in the exact
same format as as a spreadsheettrigger, which one of that
triggers could be a new row iscreated.
(25:45):
And you then copy and paste itin bulk into that trigger, then
it's going to go.
Yeah.
Line by line and thenpotentially, 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'renot on plan.
Then there are otherapplications that will probably
do.
Historical uploads and thingslike that, maybe a little better
than, especially if we'retalking QuickBooks here.
(26:21):
Yeah, that that's a great pointthat it's only triggered by new
data.
So this is like the line in thesand, Hey, we're going to take
care of this.
Issue that we're having with,this integration gap.
Let's move it forward from hereand 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 shouldsay again, when you're testing
out, creating your differenceapps, it will.
So in that specific scenario,try to pull the last three
records of information over thatyou can use to try to push over
the data over to a new platform.
Only does that during testing.
(27:04):
And that's important because youwant 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 nextsections guys There's this is
where you really want toprobably download these slides
I'll put the link up again foreverybody because there's a lot
of words on here There's a lotof different types of steps that
can be done within Zapier.
So we're talking about whenyou're trying to figure out
(27:40):
what's going to first liketrigger something.
And then if the action once it'striggered, what's the action
it's going to take within theother app.
So there's like a search step asit says here, it's going to be.
Find your existing data.
So if you've got an existingcustomer, and you don't want to
create a duplicate customer, itcan search for it and then use
(28:01):
that.
You can use filters to createconditional logic type
scenarios.
Formatting, so you can make sureyour time is formatted correct,
maybe your dollars is it,currency versus percentage,
different things of that nature.
Delay.
Delay is an important onebecause sometimes you need to,
if you're doing a multi tieredstep, you need to give time for
(28:24):
something to update and finishbefore you go to the next piece.
And then paths, which is prettycool.
And Dan's got a kind of anexample of one of those towards
the end to blow everybody's mindof conditional logic where you
start to branch things off.
And you can make one crazyinsane zap that does a lot of.
Moves things to a lot ofdifferent places, right?
Dan DeLong (28:45):
Yeah.
So the these are things that youcan 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 fillformat or to, make sure that's
(29:08):
entered in the, right way.
Matthew Fulton (29:13):
And then so fields wise, there again, many
different types of fields thatcould be used.
You've also got your date andtime field.
You've got a dictionary field,which this is something I
haven't used enough of and it'spretty powerful.
You, you can literally create.
Two columns where one value popsup something and you tell it
instead to provide a differentvalue.
(29:36):
So an example of that would belike for Stripe.
If you have a name of a certaintype, a description, an invoice,
it could look for that word andthen switch around to something
you really wanted to triggerinside of QuickBooks Online.
So we've got links back to allthe help guide where this stuff
is coming from as well for you.
(29:56):
Drop down menus.
That's a huge one, of course.
So this is where if you want topredefine select a selected list
of different items, you've gotyour file field.
So this is great.
If you want, let's say you'vegot one app that creates a
downloadable PDF for you, youcould then take it and have that
zap, grab that file and attachit and push it into maybe
(30:19):
QuickBooks online by having itselect 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 ofindividual items One of the
limitations I think we talkedabout a little bit later is in
QuickBooks online, we wereplaying around before this,
trying to see if they'd updatedthe ability, you can't create
(30:42):
multiple line item invoices orsales receipts.
But in other type of programs,there's different line items of
data.
You could use that in thisscenario 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 needto push a password over, you
could do that as well.
Again, download these slides andyou'll be able to go through a
lot of this without having toread all the words right away.
String text.
True false Boolean wise, andthen custom modal fields.
(31:18):
This is where you can basicallycreate your own mapping of
different fields betweendifferent programs and different
answers.
That's something you end upusing quite a bit.
Dan DeLong (31:29):
If you're if you're, Brain's not full yet.
There are other things in Zapieras well that can even augment
this even further.
Like they have their version ofa spreadsheet where you can have
Zap tables.
Where you can store a lot ofthings in, a spreadsheet.
So you don't have tonecessarily, have Google sheets,
(31:53):
for example to, be your sourceof truth for your spreadsheet
and just keep it all in theZapier, there's a chat bot
option.
I haven't really played aroundwith 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 createdcustom little icons so they're
easier to spot and know whatpart of it you're using.
When it says it does not have anicon, that's what that means.
It doesn't show you like alittle icon on the side.
It's not pronounced by thaticon.
Dan DeLong (32:28):
All right, so let's now talk a little bit about how
Zapier can help with QuickBooksOnline.
Here's the tie in to it, to QB,to the QB part of the PowerApp.
So here's a listing of the QBOtriggers, right?
So anything that is an account,product, Customer project
(32:50):
vendor.
You can read these at yourleisure, transactional
information these can betriggered or triggers.
And we'll, talk about that.
One of the simpler ones, becausethere was a Facebook post on
our, group that was, that could,I thought this would be, might
be a good example of using howdo I get alerted when my
(33:14):
customer creates and modifiestheir chart of accounts, right?
Maybe they're handling things inthe bank feed and sometimes they
create new accounts orQuickBooks creates the new
account because they're tryingto type in or find it and then
they add an S or something likethat to the category or the
chart of accounts and then itcreates a new.
(33:36):
chart of accounts, which onlymakes work for you to go back
and figure out how that gotcreated, do it, merge it and
whatnot.
Maybe you want to get alertedwhen a, when an account is made
or when a customer is made youcan, trigger that from.
QBO and correct me if I'm wrong,this is a, this is an active
(33:57):
listening trigger, right?
So it's, immediate.
It's not going to you're notgoing to wait 15 minutes to
alert you with that, right?
Matthew Fulton (34:06):
Yeah.
So QuickBooks online startedusing web hooks about four years
ago, I think is when they reallystarted to initiate them.
So they, you can use the webhook version of it.
You don't have to do anything.
Fancy to do it that way.
I do want to draw attention tothe ones that say new and
update, just in case there's aquestion on it, that means as a
trigger, any of those, socustomer bill, estimate,
(34:26):
invoice, and credit memo, thoseare the only ones that if
there's already somethingcreated, 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 thatyou can do inside of QuickBooks.
As far as an action, this isnot.
Trigger doesn't have to mean theaction, this could be something
else and then something that youwant to, an action that you want
to take inside of QuickBooksquite a few, right?
(34:58):
There's a lot of things thatyou, can do here.
I haven't played around with theAPI requests yet.
Or the get attachments.
I'm, I am intrigued by that, getattachments as well.
Maybe you can, take thatattachment and put it somewhere
else.
If they upload a receipt andmaybe you have a, document
(35:21):
storage that Is not QuickBooks,right?
Matthew Fulton (35:25):
Correct.
As, just again, I thinkeverybody got this, but when
we're talking about the triggerpart, that is, you're using
something in QuickBooks Onlineto trigger another action, which
could be into a differentapplication.
The actions are when some otherprogram triggers something to
happen, and your action willhappen inside of QuickBooks
(35:47):
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 hislimitations.
Transactions, and we mentionedthis earlier, transactions are
created are created to eitherone item or category before you
say, Hey why don't you use abundle?
Bundle items are not supported.
(36:14):
We're very sad to, to find thathas not been.
included in their in theirupdate yet.
So if you wanted to create abundle and then have multiple
line items from that bundlesorry.
It's not an option yet.
So for bills, expenses all thetransactions it's, really only
(36:36):
going to allow you to do oneline item on the, on that, on
that transaction and for fieldsor for list items like customers
and vendors and products andservices, not all fields for
lists are, going to beavailable.
And then of course our.
(36:56):
Custom fields, womp, when itcomes to that's always on the
list of things that it doesn'tintegrate with.
Matthew Fulton (37:07):
That's a good example of API limitations,
right?
Because all the custom fieldsaren't necessarily available,
you can't access all thosedifferent things.
Previously, tags you couldn't.
Now you definitely won't be ableto, of course.
But so if you can't get to someof the, if you can't get to it
through the API, if you everhave a question on that, you can
reach out.
I can tell you.
(37:27):
You won't be able to do with anyof these kind of programs.
And then I see your questions.
We'll get to those here justshortly.
Dan DeLong (37:35):
And then once you set this up, sometimes it will
require some maintenance, right?
The great thing about QuickBooksis it's constantly updated.
The bad thing about QuickBooksis it's constantly updated,
right?
That could have an impact on on,a zap that you might have set
(37:56):
up.
In which case you may need toupdate your connection to the
zap.
It may break, an update to to,to QuickBooks may hinder the
zaps inability ability to dosomething.
And so if you've got this reallylong multi step zap created and
(38:21):
any one of those gets updated,that could.
Potentially cause a challenge inthat, zap running, error free
when there is an error you'llget an email alert, say, Hey, we
can't run this.
And, at, best the layman's termsof how they, can help you.
(38:47):
I don't know if you've gottensome of those errors Matthew,
you know what it is by lookingat 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 toshow this image right now, Dan
and I, before this, we gottogether and we were meeting and
we're just.
Brainstorming different conceptsof things we could try to show.
And we found as we were doing iton a lot of my older ones, I had
to update my QuickBooks onlineconnection.
And it's because the API hadchanged.
(39:25):
I hadn't been really usingZapier as much to push stuff in
and out of QuickBooks online.
So I had to go in and update itand it does a good job on
existing zaps of giving you likea warning.
And walking you through clickthis, to reupdate it.
So you're not going crazy, butthe key takeaway from this is
Zapier is amazing, but you doneed to maintain it.
(39:48):
So you're, if you're reallyleaning heavily into this any
platform like this, you need toput it on your counter to just
do regular maintenance, makesure things are connected,
correct.
It'll make your life a lotbetter 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 fromrunning.
When you fix it, you can't rerunthat zap on that that, new
iteration, because it recordsjust Just Google Sheets, there's
always this version history, of,things that you're anytime that
(40:25):
a change is made it assigns theversion that was used to that
ZAP run in that history.
So even if you fix it, you can'trerun it unless You start the
trigger again, right?
So once whatever caused the zapto run in the first place, if
you do it again, then it willtake the new, version of your
(40:48):
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 getto go back two months and start
to rerun those that, you knowbecause again, no historical
from the point you fix it, itwill 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 toinvestigate how to, do that.
So I may be probably a monthfrom now, this is already going
to be outdated with that and youmight be able to use a new
version, but that's probably.
(41:30):
Some in a future state.
So let's talk about someexamples.
So we'll go with a simple oneand then go into a little bit
more immediate and then moreadvanced.
A simple, simple zap would be aa trigger to a single action,
right?
So one action creates oneresult.
(41:51):
This would be a good exampleused in the in the free plan
that they have because you can'tdo anything more than just have
one action, right?
But you can't use premium appswith with the free one.
So this will be something,where, you would be.
The apps that do connect andwe'll share some links of how do
(42:13):
you, tell what apps do, inZapier.
Let me links for that on the,website as well.
But here's an example of the proadvisor who wants to be alerted
when a new account is created onthe chart of accounts.
And you have some other simpleexamples, Matthew.
What so in this particular caseof multi factor security tokens.
Matthew Fulton (42:38):
In my practice, we've been using Dialpad for our
phone system for a very longtime.
And we've always set up aseparate phone line we call our
security line.
And we needed a way to make surethat whoever's requesting the
token could get that tokenincluding my global team In
india because I don't want toanswer those questions at two
three o'clock in the morning Sowith dialpad we have the ability
(43:00):
be that it because it wouldintegrate to slack We could take
and set up to where the textmessage went straight to slack
But because we were more of amicrosoft teams family I needed
to get it from Slack over toTeams, and I was able to set up
just a quick zap and be able topush it from Slack over to
Microsoft Teams, sending themessage right over to a certain
(43:23):
channel, and only the person whorequested 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 ofaugmenting, limitations.
So you don't have to, you didn'thave to search for another
(43:52):
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 fortime tracking and it's more of
just quick, easy reports.
And when I'm working onsomething, I can put it at
beginning time, any time, tag itto a customer, that kind of
stuff, because I'm not using itfrom my, actual.
Time tracking for payrollmyself.
(44:22):
So what I did back in the day isI'd always have it set up that
when I add a new customer andQuickBooks online, it would
automatically create a newclient for me and toggle.
So I didn't have to go and setthat specifically up each time.
I could just go log in andchoose the client and start
putting my time in to createwhatever 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'sbusiness, right?
There's the three P's ofprograms product processes and
people, right?
And if people are doingprocesses that can be easily
(45:03):
done, this is a great.
This is a great use case forsomething like that.
Allowing you to automate what's,possible to automate and then
humanize that relations thatdoesn't need, a human clicker to
(45:25):
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 toactually answer Lynette's as
well.
Full disclosure, both of thoseexamples I gave, those were
examples where certainintegrations didn't already
exist.
Since creating those back in theday, Now Dialpad has integration
to Teams, and that's going to bemore, it's going to be a direct
integration, more solid.
(45:47):
I don't have to manage it allthe time.
And Toggle has one to QBO.
So this allowed me to plan andmake it work to begin with.
But now I would move over to thedirect integration most likely.
So I don't have to manage someof that stuff.
And Lynette's question was, sowould Zapier be a good choice to
integrate Salesforce?
Used as CRM for proposalsinvoicing center with QBO.
(46:10):
Lynette, I'm pretty certainthere's, I thought there's
already a direct integration toQBO.
I know there's third party appsthat can do some of it, but you
could do that.
I'd have to double check what'savailable through Salesforce.
Yes, you would be able to dothat kind of a connection to
push stuff in.
I've done that a long time agoin 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 areavailable for each app?
Zapier has a really nice pagefor, all of that to search that
out.
But you can find the app thatyou're looking at and, see what
triggers are available for thatapp and what actions are
available and then determine ifthis is even a good way to go.
(46:52):
So here's, an example of anintermediate.
So you have that single trigger,but you have multiple actions
that are taken.
That's global keeping.
We use Kajabi and Kajabi is likeAmerican Express.
It does things on its own.
Maybe it doesn't play well withothers, right?
It wants to be a, it wants to bea QuickBooks of of the online
(47:18):
learning, right?
So all these things that theysay they do, they want to have
it all in one, place.
But, trying to get Kajabi tointegrate with QuickBooks?
No, not gonna happen, right?
So this is where, I can't Zapiercame in to to, help me out.
(47:38):
First thing was a new purchasewould happen.
Then I would add.
A filter.
So a filter then is, for acertain 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 alltriggers to to create this,
(48:00):
action so you can filter thatout.
I wanted a certain certain typesof sales to to have this to run
this app.
Yeah.
Just those two things the, saleand the filter doesn't cost me
any tasks, right?
So, there's no, no task usagewhen it's filtered, right?
(48:21):
So putting those filters so bestpractice, put the filters up
first so that you don't have atask usage.
So what would happen if thefilter was successful passed
through then what it would do isit would find the customer, in
my, QuickBooks.
And then the nice part aboutThese this app connection with
(48:45):
Zapier is that there's reallyjust a checkbox to say, if it's
not found, create the customer.
So rather than creating twoadditional steps it allows you
to search for it first.
And then if it's not found, itwill find it.
And this is where the doublesided sword is here.
There's only a few things thatyou can actually search on.
(49:08):
And it's either going to be thedisplay name.
Or the display name, I thinkit's the display name and the
email maybe those two things.
So it's not necessarily, lookfor this phone number or look
for this.
This is where some of thoselimitations then come in, as
long as you then you have yourworkflow laid out there.
(49:32):
It will find the customer orcreate and create it if it's not
found.
And then after that, it willcreate a sales receipt in
QuickBooks.
Another thing that we use it foris also because it's an online
company shipping addresses isvery necessary for economic
(49:53):
nexus.
So we want to make sure that theaddress.
Even though it's a billingaddress that is also copied over
into the shipping address, whichQuickBooks doesn't do that
automatically.
So you can have that Zapier dothat, right?
So it's make sure that yourshipping address and your
billing address are in alignmentso that you the sales tax is
(50:14):
going to be utilized properly.
It's going to create that salesreceipt.
And then after that, itcalculates some transaction
expenses, right?
So I'm, automatic I'm going tobe charged by by Kajabi payments
or Stripe or whatever thepayment processor is.
I know what that is, as long asthat's consistent, based off of
(50:35):
the sale, I can figure out whatthe expense would be and
formatting of dates and thosetypes of things.
And then it creates.
An expense for me as well.
So one action of a sale beingmade on my website is then now
either adding the customer,adding a sales receipt and
creating an expense.
(50:55):
So I've created basically threetransactions 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 ifthere's a limit of how many
steps that you could actuallyhave.
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 stepzap one time.
And I don't even think thatmaxed it out, but obviously the
larger you go, the more complexit's going to be, the more
management that's involved toit.
So you can get pretty creative.
I think that's just where someof using the branches and such,
(51:39):
you evolve into the advancedclass for sure.
That's right.
Jan was asking, would there be away 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 thatgives us some, if we have time
we might.
Might go into that.
All right.
So here's an example of anadvanced one where you have one
trigger and then multipleactions with potential multiple
outcomes, right?
So this is where we talk aboutwhere Matt was talking about
(52:16):
the, conditional logic stuff.
Yeah.
So this, is what.
Zapier looks graphically in, asyou're creating it, right?
So you can see where it startsto branch out where there's one,
two, two, seven, seven differentpotential outcomes, right?
So it is going to result in the.
(52:40):
Wherever this ends up, whateverpath this, chooses, it can't
choose multiple paths, right?
That, that's one thing to, pointout here is that, you, typically
want to have your paths at theend of your of your zap based on
that conditional logic, becausethen you can't.
(53:01):
rerun it to have it go throughthe second one.
But you can have multiple zapswith multiple paths.
Your end result here could betrigger the next step and then
we'll run through that again,that does break things up for
you so that you don't have thishuge monster zap that you have
(53:26):
to man.
But that's, one of the, oneexample of.
In this case it was, filteringfor a certain, field, or it was
a big form on, a website thatpeople were filtering or filling
out.
And then depending on whichoption they selected for certain
(53:50):
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 doingcomplex setups like this, do it
to a test company.
So this is where you, it'salways good to have your own
paid playground, because onceyou get it set up the way you
want it you can then always turnaround and change a company
connects to, and this is anothergreat piece here.
(54:15):
There's sometimes.
You can make zaps that fail.
You need to have better forwardthinking of this.
An example being, I'm not a bigfan of Twitter X or spending all
much of time there, but I gotthis great idea Hey, I'm going
to create this image.
And every time somebody wouldfollow me, it would zap and post
this image up on my Twitterfeed.
If you don't go in and postanything else on there, it just
(54:36):
became a wall of just thispicture over and over and over
and over again with nothingelse.
That was a really bad example ofa zap because I didn't think
about.
Future wise, what it would looklike, and was it really helping
or not?
Dan DeLong (54:52):
All right.
So let's let's launch the lastpoll question.
Was this information useful?
Did you learn something new ormaybe you'd some help with with,
Zapier?
So let me go into, so here'sour, here's, this is my Zapier.
And this is a great place.
So zapier.
com slash apps is a great placeto go to evaluate whether this
(55:16):
is going to help you or not.
So what was the one that wentthat 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, thereit is.
Let's take a look at so you'dsearch for any app here and then
you'd go down to here.
Oh, this is one other thing thatwe didn't even talk about was
templates, right?
So there's already there's, tonsof templates in there.
(55:52):
So you can just.
Find if a template in this stateupdate subscribers and MailChimp
for new give give buttertransactions, you can just start
with this template that'salready there.
And then you don't necessarilyhave to build it from scratch
but down here,
Matthew Fulton (56:09):
right there, if they add new, give better
transactions as payments andQuickBooks online.
Dan DeLong (56:14):
Yeah.
So you can just.
If they, if give butter doesn'tautomatically do it you can you
can use this app to do that.
Down at the bottom here is whereyou really want to go into
investigating what, whether itdoes this or not.
So you can filter for just thetriggers, right?
(56:35):
These are the things in givebutter that will spawn a
trigger, right?
So a new campaign, a newtransaction, a new ticket.
And updated campaign.
It'll tell you if this isinstant or not.
So now you know that they haveprobably a webhooks, here at the
railroad track.
And then you can see what theaction is.
(56:57):
This would be if it's some othertrigger from another app, what
could you do?
Inside of get butter.
Exactly.
Create a contact.
And then yeah, so I was justlooking and then you just look
at them same time, right?
So that you can see it all inone place.
So, you can create a contact.
(57:20):
Notice that creating a contactis not a trigger, right?
If you're that's like the end ofthe 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 atthe different apps that are
coming out on the market andwhat they're available to do.
It's going to be.
I think it's this one.
Yeah.
See, newly new records talkingabout estimates and such.
Dan DeLong (57:57):
So let's just look at the triggers here.
So it's case attachment, newfields, new lead, new record
updating a record, updating afield on a record, new outbound
message.
So these are all the things thatcan be triggered, by Salesforce.
And then here's all the actionsthat 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 buildthose integrations between,
Salesforce and QuickBooks, forexample.
But if QuickBooks online is notyour final destination or your
integration between these twothis can do all sorts of things
(58:41):
elsewhere or back intoSalesforce.
It's another one that was, lookat.
Matthew Fulton (58:50):
The only other question that was right off the
bat was asking about trying toadd attachments on in QuickBooks
Online.
But it was get attachments, if Iremember correctly, it wasn't
add an attachment on.
QuickBooks.
It's not liking it today.
(59:14):
Okay.
Dan DeLong (59:15):
Where'd it go?
And you can filter these too,right?
So if you're just looking at thepremium ones, there's QuickBooks
Online here.
There's a will, there's aworkaround.
Action.
That was an action.
That was an action, right?
Yep.
And then to get attached,there's a lot of them.
(59:35):
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 itthough.
Now, if you go to create a salesreceipt or update sales receipt,
and maybe like two up, there yougo.
And in here, Do,
Dan DeLong (01:00:05):
These are all, what we're looking at here is, these
are all the things that can doon a sales receipt.
Good point.
What is not on here is.
Make add an attachment, right?
So this tells us that it wouldnot allow us to attach a
transaction inside of QuickBooksif the attachment is already in
(01:00:27):
QuickBooks, you can get it.
But you're not going to be ableto do anything with it back in
QuickBooks once you've got it.
Matthew Fulton (01:00:33):
Yeah.
Is that an attachment?
If let us know what you findout, you said you can play
around with it, or if you getstuck on it, reach out.
Best thing you can do is if youget me excited with a very
difficult challenge, you'regoing to get my attention big
time.
Be like, Ooh, let me try tofigure out how we can solve it.
So send me down a rabbit hole.
I love it.
So Dan, look at that.
(01:00:55):
We were pretty close to timethis time.
Dan DeLong (01:00:57):
Yeah, we we crammed all that in into, one hour.
We really appreciate you joiningus here today.
Next and that's what we spot andI are, looking to focus the QB
power hour moving forward is.
(01:01:18):
Really uncovering and unpackingthe data getting into or out of
QuickBooks, because that'sreally where the QuickBooks
ecosystem, especially online is,that there is a shallow under
the pool of the, all the thingsthat you can do inside of
QuickBooks but that doesn't meanthere's not neighboring swimming
(01:01:40):
pools that we can, steal somewater from, right?
And then it all boils down tohow that data is, moved.
So we're going to start lookinginto, and, unpacking some of
these apps that do integrateinto, QuickBooks and what
(01:02:01):
they're, what they do well, whatthey maybe need some help with
and so we wanted to start withthis as more of a way of, Hey,
there's another choice, even youdon't have to abandon your app
if it doesn't, there is there'sa way to augment that closing
thoughts.
Matthew Fulton (01:02:21):
Yeah.
If you guys have other topicsthat you are interested to learn
more about, reach out to eitherone of us.
We would love to hear yoursuggestions so we can, our goal
is to help however we can to thecommunity.
So thank you for taking the timeto be a part of this and joining
us every other Tuesday and,appreciate it.
Dan DeLong (01:02:40):
All right.
Y'all have a great Mardi Gras.
Enjoy your Ash Wednesdaytomorrow, but that Tuesday
today, have a great day,everyone.
We'll see you next time on theQB power hour.
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