Automate Accounting Reports 2025 (Quickbooks, Zapier)

Hey, this is Isaac from Upstart.co, and in this video, I'll share how to get any QuickBooks report automatically using Zapier, show you some use cases we've actually implemented in our agency with these QuickBooks automatic reports, and how the process changes if you're an accounting firm and you want to do this for multiple clients at a time. Without further ado, let's get into it. So here we are in Zapier. Because you literally typed in or clicked on this video, I'm assuming you know what it is already, but it's effectively an automation platform. I'm not going to go into the details of that in this particular video as I usually do. But if I go here and create Zaps, I am able to create what really Zapier has been known for, which is their automated visual workflows in this vertical editor. And as you can see, I simply have a trigger. When do I want this to start and what do I want it to do? In this particular instance, let's just say I just want a monthly report, which is a very simple basic example. And because it's time-based, I'm probably going to want to use this schedule feature within Zapier and choose that frequency. For example, every month I get to select the date as well. Let's just say it's every 15th. Let's say that that's when you have the books ready for yourself or for your clients and select any timeframe it might be. For example, 1:00 PM. It's really about what you would need for this in this case, in this trigger. And every 15th of the month, this automation would run. Now, the important part, how to actually go ahead and get those QuickBooks reports. If you've ever used or connected QuickBooks Online to Zapier before, you probably know that when you actually do it, there's no— within actions, there's really no a get report feature. You can create bills, customers, employees, estimates, expenses, invoices, all of that. You can send them to customers, you can update them, you can try to find them as well to avoid duplicates, which is one of the most important things when you are working with automations. But in this particular instance, we don't have reports. So what do we do? For that, we need what are called API calls. And what an API call is, it's essentially like telling Zapier to go to this link where they'll find the information we want. That's effectively it. Just like a human visits a page, an automation can visit a page to get specific information. Now, this gets a little technical, but fundamentally, you only need 2 things to do an API call. at its core. And because you're using the API call from Zapier, you don't need to worry about authentication, authorization, and other things you might actually need if you were in other environments. But here you just need 2 things. One, it's a method, and 2, it's a URL. And the beautiful thing is like ChatGPT exists these days. And if you pop it in and say, hey, what are the 3 most common QuickBooks reports and what are their API endpoints? If you specify that API endpoints, it will tell you the method and the end of the URL that you have to use. In this case, actually, I'm noticing it didn't give me the base of the URL. So, if I tell it, just give me the full URL for a production script, it should give me the full URL starting like HTTPS, right? There you go. So, this is how you want to do it. And you can see that here, just here, like an example where you have the company ID. So, effectively, to get a P&L, As an example, I'll just need this URL, this GET method, and change that particular piece there with a company ID that I want the report from. And that's something you would have to find separately, usually within QuickBooks documentation. There's areas for you to find it. I think it's subscription billing settings. I don't want to get into the details of that, but I'm just going to find mine to come back and show you the result. Alright, so if you are a regular QuickBooks user, you have to go to Settings and Subscription Billing. If you're an accountant, you have to go into Settings and actually Additional Info. Something worth noting that the process is slightly different. But with that, you'll have your ID, and with that ID placed here, you'll be able to do what it is that you want to do. So, if I use this as an example and I click on Test Step, you'll see that this runs. And as long as I get a, you know, green checkmark and I get a 200, which is kind of like code for success, then I'm good. I'll get a lot of other things. Like, I get this massive text which represents the entire report. But if I keep scrolling down, I'll see some of those in a more readable format. So, you can see profit and loss last month, accrual, currency, and then you get to see the different columns. Like, what are the different accounts and columns that this report has? And then you have the figures of rows, which in this case, would be the different rows within it, like services, income, this $350,000, which is actually what I have here in this test account. So, you can see that I was able effectively to get the P&L. Of course, just because this is a demo account, there's not a lot of data, but you would get all the data in each, every single line that that QuickBooks account has as a result of doing this API call. It's worth noting, as I said, that if you asked, you know, ChatGPT to tell you, hey, I want this specific thing, you might be able to get closer at least to what you want. Maybe not, won't give you exactly what you want. Oftentimes there's hallucinates and other things, but you can get a balance sheet, you can get general ledgers, you want all the transactions and many other reports that are available. It'll at least point you in the right direction. Now, what do you do next? So with that giant block of text you're provided with, you can actually use even AI itself, right? For example, you can add another AI by Zapier step, give it the entire response and have you, for example, QuickBooks response. Sorry about that. Actually, this is where you give it the response. And here, like if you wanted to, like give me the net income, the net income value of the report, it usually does a good job. It's not like 100% reliable, maybe 90% reliable, and it will depend on what you want. But that can kind of at least get you started. If you want a more reliable option, usually what we do is literally map it out. Usually either using code or finding this specific line, as long as that's going to be standardized across clients, which net income usually is. But if I look for, let's see, net income, so I have a line and you can see the value for, in this case, says net earnings. It looks like that's what it's called. And I can make sure that as long as, you know, different clients, different accounts have that same name, I can find a way with code or with other Zapier tools to get specifically that value as opposed to relying on AI. AI, which again can be— can do the job 90-95% of the time, but sometimes can, uh, you know, be a little bit unreliable, uh, in that respect. Now let's talk about a couple of other use cases. Of course, this is the most obvious one of like just getting a report and potentially analyzing it. There are actually a lot of other tools if you wanted to provide that report to a client. Technically, with Zapier, you could take that data, turn it into some sort of either Excel or PDF, and share that with the client. Although there are other apps that exist in the market to bring data from QuickBooks into a spreadsheet that might be worth exploring as well. 2 other use cases that we've done in our agency. One, it's financial signals to upsell customers. This is for a firm based out of Florida that it's, I think they do about $1 million in turnover and they wanted specifically to know when their clients surpass $75,000 in income, because if they're small business, that might mean that they're now eligible for tax planning strategy and tax planning services. And they also wanted to know if their cash balance drops below $5,000, because when that's the case, that might be the firm I help them look for financings if they believe there are still some opportunities for the business to grow, or potentially look into their dissolution services and make sure that that client's taken care of if they have to go out of business and make sure they do it the right way. Another use case we worked on is effectively a monthly financial reviewer similar to what we've done here, but that not only is— can I build to catch issues from a P&L, from the balance sheet, and potentially from You've given them all the reports together, but also create tasks from those issues for your team to look into. And you can even get more specific with the prompt and tell them, hey, make sure all assets accounts are positive. Make sure that the net difference in depreciation expenses equals the net change in the balance sheet for those assets. You can get more specific and make sure it kind of catches specific issues. And as I said, create tasks for them, create tasks for your team, or potentially for you to look into, whether that is creating the task in Teamwork, in Carbon, in ClickUp, or any other practice management tool that you use. Last but not least, I want to talk about like what if you're a QuickBooks Online accountant and that's the platform that you're using. As I shared already, the process slightly changes for you to get the company ID. I'll say the process is slightly different as well for you to connect it and to make sure that you have or get access to all of your client accounts. So let me walk you through how that's slightly different. When you are connecting QuickBooks, I'll just reconnect my account here for demonstration purposes. What you'll see is first an option to select either sandbox or production. This is If you wanted to like test in a sandbox environment without affecting changes in your client's account, which can be recommended if you don't know what you're doing or you're just testing. Otherwise, production is the right way to go. And when you go here, what will happen is that if you're a QuickBooks Online accountant and that's the account you have, you'll see an option here to select like install for my firm if you want to just get access to your firm. But otherwise you get a list of the clients you have access to. So there might be 30, 50, 100 clients you have access to and you you'll be able to connect each one of them to Zapier to then be able to do whatever it is that you want. Now, this enables you effectively to run roster-wide automations, which effectively means I can say every month, get the P&L of all of my clients, analyze all of them. And although it's a little bit arduous to do this within Zapier itself and its native editor, just because it's a different connection and you have to have a separate step for each client, there are actually ways around it. And we are currently exploring some options with Zapier Functions. It's a beta feature and it's kind of like a more code-based workflow environment. So this is Zapier Functions, just to give you like a super brief overview. Similar to how you have triggers and actions, you would have that exact same thing. And guess what? Zapier.trigger. And you'll have all the options of apps and the various events available. And this is where it gets a little bit more easier. To work with because here I could say sapier.action. And then I would find for QuickBooks, and then I can do similar to what I had, all those different actions, including a raw request. And here's where it gets fun because now I have the option of having the ID as a variable, right? For example, if I connect my account, I'll see the account ID that I have, and I could make this into a variable. Before, using Python in this case, And such that I can kind of replicate this for all clients without having to have like 50 different steps. That said, there's a lot more use cases with Zapier that would benefit accounting firms. So I recorded another video with 7 examples that you can watch by clicking the video on the screen, and I'll see you in the next one. Until then, stay efficient.