Set up a Zapier workflow to get instant email alerts whenever a client adds a new GL account in QuickBooks. The Zap watches for the "New Account" trigger and emails you the account name, type, classification, and balance. Useful for catching unauthorized accounts or starting conversations about client bookkeeping changes.
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If you're an accountant or a fractional CFO, you might have experienced clients adding a new general ledger account without your consent or without you actually knowing. And wouldn't it be helpful if you could get at least a notification when they do so, so that you could at the very least start a conversation around that and have that trigger to reach out and potentially engage in a meaningful interaction? So in this video, I want to walk you through how to create a notification so that when clients create a new general ledger account, whether it is a bank account or an expense account, whatever it might be, you are notified accordingly. And you can use that as a way to start kickstarting meaningful conversations. So let's get into the screen and build it in public for you. Okay. So I'm going— I'm currently in Zapier. This is one of the tools we love and prefer to use typically for these kinds of things where it's relatively simple and cross-platform, right? When something happens in QuickBooks, we want to receive some sort of notification, whether it's an email, maybe a Slack message, depending on the communication channels you use most. This is kind of our preferred platform. So I'm going to go ahead and create a Zap. And we'll take it from there. So the trigger here, it's the account in QuickBooks that we want to notify about. So I'm just going to look for QuickBooks in the search bar, and I'm going to click here in event. And you can see literally the first one is new account. Seems to be the right one. So I'm going to go ahead and move forward with this one. It's going to ask me to sign in. This is where you should connect the account of your client or potentially your QuickBooks accountant account directly that may have access already to a variety or a number of clients so that you can set this up for those clients accordingly. This is going to take a few seconds to connect. Okay. So here it connected successfully and we're going to go ahead and continue and test this trigger as a way to find out if it actually pulls up the right data. So this is for our specific account because I'm not testing with a client account. I'm testing with ours internally. You can see here professional fees, sales and marketing software, and a Wise account, um, in euros as examples. You can also see that you have a variety of different data points like the classification, the account type, that should allow you to either share this in that notification so you're aware of what exactly is the nature of the account, or you could potentially filter the notification so that you're only receiving And that notification with a specific type of account, for example, an expense account, if that's kind of what you want. In this case, I'm just going to assume I want to be notified about any account. And just for the sake of this example, I'm just going to create an email. So I'm going to send an email to myself. I already have a couple of accounts connected, but similar to how we connect to Google, just simply connect a new account and it's relatively straightforward. I'm going to use my personal one in this particular case. Now let's just say here I'm gonna send it to my, my business email address. This is something you could even, you know, send from yourself to yourself if you wanted. From name, let's just say Zapier notification, and subject, new GL account. So this is where you can go in a little bit more detail and lay out potentially some specifics or some details about that account that was created. So you could say, let's just add the name. We could add account type. I think I saw what that was called, like classification. Add that in as well. And this may vary— classification— this may vary, but it might be helpful to even have the balance in case that the moment they create it, it has a pending balance that you might want to see as well. So I'm just going to be skipping this step. This is a simple 2-step SAP, a little more simple than the ones we've created so far. So I'm gonna simply be publishing this And tested it live for you. So I already have a QuickBooks account open and here I'm creating a new account. If we wanted to create any of these account types that are available, let's just say it's an expense account. And I'm going to assume it's, let's just use that advertising and promotional. I'm going to go ahead and save and close. And I'm going to go to my email account now. And we're going to wait for it. Oops, I should not have opened that. That's fine. Let's look into the Zap itself because we should be able to see it run. It has not yet. Sometimes some of these things can take up to 15 minutes depending on the plan you're on. That's something I was not— I did not confirm. So I'll pause for a bit and come back and see when it— I'll show you when it goes through. Okay. Just as a way to confirm and take this opportunity to teach a little bit within Zapier, you'll always see scheduled or instant type of triggers. In this case, we have scheduled and you can see here that on the free plan. And I believe that also on that first tier plan that we are currently on, it will check for data every 15 minutes. So that's the reason why it was not instant. So just wait for a couple of more minutes and until it goes through. So just, I can kind of show you. Oh, looks like it went through already, so we should be able to go to my email account, refresh it. Let's see, it's telling me here that it went through successfully. Oh right, I'd send it to my business email address from my personal one, so this is the one it should actually be checking. And you can see here, new GL account. I simply see the name, the account type, the classification And the balance. So it's a very simple automation just for you to be aware of the the new accounts your clients open. I hope that was useful. As usual, feel free to check the links in the description below if you wish to schedule a call and for us to automate some processes for your accounting firm or simply request a process for us to automate in public. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
