🤖 7 Zapier Automation Examples for Accounting Firms

In this video, I'll share with you 7 Zapier automation examples you can implement in your firm to save time and increase productivity. And mind you, I didn't come up with these examples out of thin air. These are actual automations we've implemented for accounting firms we've worked with. So with that said, let's get to it. All right, so let's get into it. I'll mention a few software tools as examples while I share some of these automation examples, but just know I'm not necessarily endorsing all of them. I believe technology selection is one size fits all. So what may be good for other people and for other firms we work with might not be the best thing for you. That said, let's get into it. Automation number 1, document collection. You need certain documents to start doing your work, and it's very common. It's sort of like a joke at times where clients always give you the documents at the last minute and you have to chase after them for a long time in order for them to give you what you need. So here's— that's the problem we're solving with this automation. Some of the tools you'll need for this are a form tool and a document storage tool, something like Paperform and Terrafile. Those are ones we've seen some of the people in the accounting firm space use, or you could actually use a practice management tool that has document management already built into it, something like a TaxDome or a Canopy. So what are the steps? Pretty simple. It's when the form is submitted, which will include the documents you need. You will save those submitted documents in the cloud, whether it's in the particular storage tool that you're using or your practice management software. And what I would suggest you also do is you email the client confirming them, and you also email the team member so that they can take the next steps. Some related automations that go either after or before this process is sending the form to the client in the first place. So that's something that you can do as soon as they sign up. We're going to talk about some of those automations as well. Also the email reminders if the client doesn't submit that. And this is the one that's really valuable because now you can say, hey, Mr. Client, you're going to receive an email for you to submit your documents. But now you can send them constant reminders on following up with them if they haven't submitted that yet, which is something that typically you have to do manually, but you can use automation to save you that time. Alternatively, this is something that some of the clients we work with do. That you might want to explore. Yeah, it's actually filling out that form with them. So if you're priced on the lower end, maybe you cannot afford to do this, but depending on the resources you have, you might actually either book some sort of onboarding call as soon as they become a client. And in that onboarding call, they have to like come ready. They feel a little bit more accountable for it if it's like specific time and they'll more than likely be ready by then. Or you can even in your sales process at the end of your sales process, as soon as they confirm that. They're ready, you can ask them, hey, do you have this document ready? Can you— let's open up this link and let's submit these documents right now. Again, depending on how exactly you serve your clients and how much personal time you dedicate to them. Going to automation number 2 here, it's proposals, billing, and invoicing. So the problem that really we're trying to solve with this automation is that you don't get paid right away. I've had clients in the accounting firm space that they start working for the clients without having them pay, and then maybe the client backs off, and then you've already incurred costs without receiving that revenue. And what some of these tools allow you to do is to charge our way, as I'm going to share in a second. But again, the point is not to spend time billing, invoicing, reconciling transactions, and be able to have consistency between what you have in the proposal, what you have in the invoice, whether that's QuickBooks or any other tool you use for the purposes, and also the payment when that whenever that comes. Related to the proposal software specifically, Ignition is one that has been like a favorite in the accounting firm space. It's actually one that we've used with several clients and is usually one of our recommendations. Here, the step-by-step process you would have on the backend when the automation is like when the proposal is accepted, client has to pay right away. So those two steps happen. Simultaneously, meaning the client has to pay in order to accept. And then the system automatically creates the invoice in QuickBooks or in Xero. The client is created automatically as well, or matched if it already exists, and each service line in the proposal, it's mapped to a line item in the invoice without you having to do that manual work. Also, once the client accepts, the invoice is marked as paid whenever they make that payment. And what you could also do is set up automation so that you notify the team that there's A new client that just came in, in case there are any further steps that they need to do. And you can also create all the related tasks in your project or practice management system so that everyone in the team knows what comes next and what it is that they need to do next. You can assign it to specific members and put a due date on it so everyone knows what they need to do. Automation number 3, it's lead qualification. You know, it's not rare for the accounting firm owners we talked spend a lot of time just talking to vastly unqualified leads that they shouldn't be talking to. And you should be able to set up like a simple process of having forms and having scheduling software so that people can kind of like qualify themselves. And you only allow the people that match your criteria and match your— the profile of clients you work with to actually book a call with you and move forward. Uh, so how this would look like in a— within an automation would be when the prospect fills out a form. If they match your qualification criteria, for example, you might want to filter out people by team size, by revenue, by access. So if you ask in advance, are you willing to give us access for this? What's the revenue range of your company? What's your team size? And if you know that below some certain revenue threshold, or if people are unwilling to give access to certain information, you just won't be able to work together and have a good relationship and a good working relationship. Then you can say, hey, if If those things are not true, you just move forward. But if those things are true, then you add them to your lead tracking software, which hopefully you're using. I hope you're not tracking leads on a piece of paper or in a spreadsheet. You also notify your team and allow the prospects to now move forward and book the call. This also will depend on how early on you are in business, how many leads you're getting, because maybe you may not want to— you may want to lower that threshold if you don't have that much demand. But if you're been in business for a long time and you actually don't have a problem generating leads, you might actually cut your flow just to make sure you have more qualified leads coming in. Something else, if the lead is not a fit, you may actually add them to a newsletter or some sort of other nurture system because the fact that they are not in that revenue range or they're not in that team size or they're not willing to share access or whatever qualification criteria you have makes them not a fit now. Doesn't mean that they're not going to be a fit in the future so you can nurture that relationship in case they ever become a fit later on. Automation number 4, it's lead nurturing. The problem we're trying to fix here is that if you don't follow up with leads, or if you follow up with leads and they ghost you, you usually spend a lot of time, which is something that you can actually partially automate if desired. So tools you'll need for this are email and text message marketing tools like ActiveCampaign, which is a good starting point, and it's actually one of the tools that several of the clients use. And here what you would do is that when a prospect is shown to be qualified, similar to, you know, going back to that qualification criteria we just talked about, you can have one of two options. Well, you can literally have a path that if they didn't book a call, you follow up with them and you say, hey, we noticed you fill out this form. You seem to be a great fit for our services, but you didn't book a call. You know, you can follow up that way. And have multiple emails, multiple text messages to make sure that they get back to you. Maybe they were busy or something else. And I have like analogy, an analogy here that, because maybe you've visited some websites in the past where you actually add something to the shopping cart and then you leave and then they email you back again trying to remind you that, that's, it's a very similar concept. But also the other path is if they do book a call, then you also have a series of emails. Congratulating them, sharing the next steps, letting them know, hey, make sure to show up, have this information available for us. Make sure to bring in decision makers if that's needed to make sure we can actually, you know, move the sale forward. And some related automations here. This is something that most scheduling software tools have by default, and it's reminding people of the appointment. And that's just making sure that they actually show up. Automation number 5. 5, project management automations. The problem we're trying to solve here is that projects are delayed if there's a lot of back and forth between team members. And actually, you might want to ask the owner oversee the whole process and know the status of a specific project, which is sometimes very hard to do if you don't have any tool helping you with that, or just, you just have to rely on what people tell you, right? So for this, you would need a project management software. A couple of clients use ClickUp, other great software for that as well. Or you could actually use a practice management tool that has the workflow functionality built in. We've mentioned a couple earlier in this video, like Tasm and Canopy. Both of them have that functionality as well, although not both have the automation functionality to do that automatically, but it's something you can work around. So here the idea would be when a client signs up, you would create a task that based on the services they purchase. So if they purchase a tax plan and monthly books, you would automatically create those tasks, assign them to their corresponding team members, and you would also make sure to have automations in place so that as tasks are completed, you notify the next team member that needs to do their own part. So for example, if Susie has to complete the— file the tax return and John has to review it before sharing with the client, You would make sure that whenever Susie finishes this, then John is notified. And that way you're able to better communicate between team members and move things a lot faster. Automation number 6, it's client updates automation, very similar to the one that you— we just talked about, but rather imagine now that rather than emailing your team internally or messaging your team internally so that they know the progress of the project, you are messaging the client. Clients externally. And this would help you avoid them having to reactively come to you asking for what's the status of the specific project you're working on. And this would improve the client experience so that they stay with you longer. Tools we'll need here, it's email and project— and project management or practice management software. And again, very simple. As certain milestones are completed, as certain tasks are completed in your practice or project management software, you would send a message to the client letting them know, hey, Mr. Client, we just finished this phase of the project. We'll move on to this next and just wanted to keep you in the loop. That's something that most clients, I would say all clients, will appreciate. Another related automation is that imagine that that's specific milestones of the project. Well, once you finish the complete project, what you could do is also have automations where you encourage people to leave you reviews. And if they were happy with the service, something that we actually did recently with the client is they have— we send an email automatically as soon as a project was completed. And we just asked if they were happy or not with the service. If they clicked yes, we actually redirect them to the Google reviews page. If they say no, we link them to an internal form so we could gather feedback from them on what it is that maybe they weren't happy with and follow up from there. Last but not least, automation number 7. Tax prep automation. Getting data from the IRS is very time-consuming. You have to log into the web portal and takes a long time, and so is preparing the return once you got that data. Both of those processes can be automated to an extent. And going into first getting the data, unfortunately the IRS doesn't have any plans to have an API available or something where you can easily integrate with Zapier or anything like that, but there are RPA tools or robotic process automation tools that allow you to simulate a user. Literally imagine simulating someone logging in, clicking here and there, and getting the data as if a human was doing it. And one of the tools that we've actually used a lot internally is Action.ai because it natively integrates with Zapier, unlike some of the other more, more popular ones like UiPath and others that have been in the market for a long time. That said, On the preparing side, there's a lot of tax prep tools. Some of them are legacy solutions like Drake and others, but some are like cloud-based. ProConnect is one of the most popular ones, is actually from Intuit, the same company that owns QuickBooks. So it's something that can easily be integrated as well if QuickBooks is one of the tools that you use. From steps within the workflow, we have when triggered via Zapier, log into the RS, we'll find an insert of 2-factor authentic code— 2-factor authentication code when required. Again, simulating that kind of like a user behavior, and you'll pull the needed data from there. And then again, once you have that data, you can insert a— introduce it or insert it in your tax prep tool if you use the CloudPix tool, or if you use some sort of legacy solution for it, and speed up your tax prep process. So yep, this is what I just described— another bot that could file the tax returns for you, and then your job is pretty much ensuring the data quality and reviewing the final result. If you want to dive deeper into Zapier and a lot of the tools you have available within that platform that allow you to automate more processes, we have a very in-depth training that took me weeks to put together. It's It's like almost 2 hours long and it's deep dive from zero to hero as the name suggests. So I encourage you to click on the card in the description, on the card in the screen right now and check that out. And if you want to talk to a tech strategist to make the most out of Zapier to automate your firm to the greatest extent, this is what we do every day here at Opsurge. We'll be more than happy to have a discussion to see if there's a fit. And if not, we'll let you know respectfully. So feel free to visit opser.co/accounting. That's opser.co/accounting. And feel free to, you know, get to know a little bit more about us and we'd be more than happy to chat. That said, I want to thank you for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one.