Automate Quickbooks Invoices in 1 Minute using Zapier

Hey, I'm Isaac from UpSell.co, and in this video, I'll show you how to create invoices in QuickBooks automagically from other systems. We'll be showing how to use Zapier, an automation tool, to automate this process, how you can add multiple line items to those invoices based on the products you actually sold to that customer, and how to email that invoice as soon as you win the deal. With that said, let's get into it. All right, so in this case, we'll be using the trigger, the first step that will trigger everything, the tool called Pipedrive. It's a CRM that helps you track your sales, and when you mark this as won, this is what we'll use essentially actually as a way to tell the system, hey, we've gotten a new customer, create an invoice and send it their way. Okay. So as pre-work, the only thing I need is a simple pipeline like this. I'll be creating a sample person. So it says John Smith Live, because I've created a couple of them already as a new contact and I'll create Smith CPAs as the organization name. I'll be adding John's quote unquote John's email. Actually, I'll add my email, but I'll just put John Smith Live so that actually I receive this invoice at the end of the day. I'll go ahead and save that. I'll open up that deal. And the only thing you should know about this is that, okay, there's the information lives here and I can add the different products that I can kind of sell. The idea here is that a salesperson, for example, could come here and say, hey, we've sold this particular product, we sold this other product, and it might be just one, it might be 3, depending on what it is that you're selling, or you could have bundles, other things. We have to kind of list out the products on Pipedrive so that you're the person making the sale can actually select them. So I'll go ahead and click on save. And the whole idea here is that the moment I click on won, the deal comes through, the invoice goes through with all of those details. So just for demonstration purposes, let's go ahead and mark this deal as won. Then we are going to wait for a few minutes to see if the automation we have built before, to see if the automation we built Actually goes ahead and find that customer, find those products, and create those invoices and send it through. So I should effectively receive in my inbox within the next 2 to 3 minutes an invoice with those specific details that I had in the deal. All right, so a few minutes later, I can see here that the automation on the background ran. This is the interface of a tool called Zapier, which we use a lot in our agency to help our clients automate processes. And if I check my inbox, look at that invoice 1003 has been sent my way. I can see that I have 3 products of sample A and 1 product of sample B as expected, as well as a PDF attached with those specific details. Of course, this could be beautified if you like within the system. And you can here see that, you know, this was sent to quote unquote John Smith, like as expected. Now, what I want to do is just quickly walk you through what you should do and put in place To make this happen for yourself. Number one, as we said, we have effectively a sample pipeline within a CRM. You could have other tools where your data is stored and then sent to other systems, but you kind of need that repository of information that's going to allow you to trigger the automation. And you want to make sure that you have the products included there, as well as the products included in your QuickBooks instance, and you'll see why in a second. So if I go to products here within my demo QuickBooks account, I'll see that there's a Sample A and a Sample B product that already exist. Now let's go into Zapier and talk about in detail how to actually make this happen. The first step, as expected, it's effectively getting notified, getting triggered when a deal is won, okay? And if I look at the sample data that this particular step provides, I can see that I have who created a deal, who's currently owning that deal, who's the person. In other words, who's the person, who's the customer this is associated with. I also have the organization and a series of other things. If I keep scrolling down, I should also see very importantly, the products included in that particular deal, which is, which means we have the information we need to make this happen. A mistake might be actually, hey, let's just create the invoice straight away. But one of the challenges of that is that you'll realize that you need certain things before you get there. For example, in this case, you need a customer to make that happen. And if you scroll down, you also need products to make that happen. And that's why before we get there, we need to find or sometimes create those assets that step needs for you to actually make that happen. In other words, to create an invoice, I need products and customers. It's a required field. So I'm going to make sure that I have product and customer steps before that step to be able to make that happen. If I go to the find customer step here and go to configure to see some of the details, you'll see that in this case, I'm actually trying to find the person by email. Should probably be Ming Fei. And it asked me, do you want to create the customer if it doesn't exist yet? And the answer is yes, because maybe I'm winning this person for the first time and I don't have that customer in QuickBooks. I don't want to have to go there and actually create it. And as you can see here, I also have a full name. Populated, the email and the phone as well populated such that I have that information as soon as this automation runs. That should just simply give me the result of creating that customer, which I'm going to use as we saw in step number 4. In the find products step, if I go to the configured list, you'll see that what I have here is the product names that are coming from the Pythor products. And what this does is that this actually returns the products within QuickBooks that match that. So you can see here, I have product sample A and product sample B. And at least the way I built it for this simple demonstration in this video, you have to actually make sure that those products exist on both platforms. So that might be like a one-off work that might be manual for you to create that. There are ways to actually say, Similar to how we did with the customer, find the products. And if you don't find it, actually go ahead and create it so that those 2 systems can be sort of like in sync at all times. But for the sake of this part, for the purpose of this video, I created products manually on both systems and make sure that the name was the same between both of them. Then I create the invoice. If I go into the details, I will take what the ID of the customer we found in step 2 that we found or created, the email address. The invoice date and due date, I just put the date of when we won the deal from step 1. Here, it's where we put the result that came out of step 3, which is giving us what? The IDs of the products that I shared that came from step 1, right? Then I have the names, I have the quantities, which is available in step 1, as well as the amounts. Beyond that, I don't think we need to do, add anything else. That's enough. And in step 5, I effectively simply send that invoice by taking the ID from that step number 4. And just in case I have the email that came from this particular one, technically if the customer already has new, this should be like a redundancy, but rather be safe than sorry. And as you saw with the example that we had here, In step 1, we saw that John Smith Life example ran. Here you see that the customer was created. Now, and when it asks you or tells you, the system tells you whether we found that customer, it tells you that we didn't, it means that we created it at that point. You can see the products that were found, in this case, both Sample A and Sample B, and you can see again, in this case, we actually found 2 products. Here's where the invoice is created. In this case, invoice ID number 11, and you can see some of the line items that we have in this particular instance of sample A, in this case, $300 because we have 3 units, 3 quantities, and sample B, $50 only because we have 1 quantity. And from there, I simply send that invoice through, and as we saw, Already this finishes off in the— where is it? In the invoice being created in our systems and being sent to the customer straight away. You can see the invoice state, the due date was populated. We could actually have, if desired, other terms, right? Net 15, net 30, and change the due date accordingly as well. That could be an addition. You could also come and program it. Program into the automation itself. And that should do it essentially. Now, invoicing is not the only thing you can automate with Zapier. There are many other QuickBooks automation use cases, and I actually have a video that talks about how to automatically categorize transactions and pull uncategorized transactions from your QuickBooks instance. So feel free to watch that video next. I'll see you on the next one. And until then, stay efficient.