Forwarding email with attachment to QBO

Hi @ZapPaint, hope you’re doing well!

I suggest creating a Zap using Gmail and Email by Zapier using the following steps:

• Trigger: Gmail ‘New Email Matching Search’
• Action: Email by Zapier ‘Send Outbound Email’

With that Zap, the email together with the attachment can be sent to QBO’s email address as a new email. Here’s a template to help you get started: https://zapier.com/apps/email/integrations/gmail/10000/get-emails-from-zapier-for-new-emails-that-match-search-terms-on-gmail

Hope that helps!

Hey Paolo,

Thank you for this. Any email forwarded to quickbooks needs to be verified by them. In other words they send me a 6 digit confirmation code to any email used that forwards receipts with. I wont be able to confirm this if the email used to send these attachments is “no-reply.xxxxx@zapiermail.com”. Does this make sense?

Hi @ZapPaint!

Can I check that I’ve understood the process here? If you were doing this manually, you would forward the email from Gmail to QuickBooks and Quickbooks send you a confirmation code. How do you then send the confirmation code to Quickbooks usually? Do you reply to the QuickB ooks email? Enter it in the QuickBooks app, etc? 

If we know how that side of things works we’ll be able to see if it’s possible to do with a Zap. 

Thanks!

Kind of! When signed into quickbooks for the first time doing this process I created a custom forwarding email in QBO, it ends in @qbodocs.com

Then in settings there’s a toggle to switch on or off users that are allowed to forward expenses. You can only forward receipts if you’re one of the approved users on the account. Here’s a link to the process described by QBO. 
 

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-ca/help-article/accounts-payable/email-receipts-bills-quickbooks-online/L7r2LAQ7C_CA_en_CA

if I were to do it manually, currently when I’m in gmail I just forward any expense as an attachment to the email address xxxx@qbodocs.com and that’s it.

Thanks for that extra information @ZapPaint :)

So, my understanding here is that when you forward an email from Gmail manually, you don’t need to enter a confirmation code, is that right? 

I think that you can do this without using Zapier, by using Gmail’s built in forward function. To find forwarding, go to the settings in Gmail and click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP

There you can add a forwarding email address (your xxx@qbodocs.com) one and create a filter so that only emails that meet the criteria will be forwarded. If you haven’t set up a filter in Gmail before, here’s there help guide on that: Create rules to filter emails.

One thing to mention is that if your gmail account is managed by an administrator then they may have removed the option to forward emails, you’ll know if that’s the case because you wont see it in the settings tabs. 

If you don’t have forwarding in your Gmail account, could you let us know if you tried setting up a Zap that uses the Gmail Send Email action? ie 

• Trigger: Gmail ‘New Email Matching Search’
• Action: Gmail ‘Send Email’

From your first message it sounds like that’s what you started with but I want to make sure we’re covering all the bases. If that is what you tried and it didn’t work, is it because QuickBooks will only not ask for confirmation if the email is forwarded rather than sent? 

I hope that’s all clear!

Hey @Danvers, thank you for the reply. This is where I face the issue of requiring a confirmation code. When I add the QBO forwarding address, gmail indicates a confirmation code has been sent to the forwarding email (xxx@qbodocs.com). The issue is I don’t have access to this email, it is in control by the Quickbooks team, and therefore the address cannot be added as a forwarding address. It’s strictly an email they create to allow forwarding of expenses (and the forwarded expenses must come from a registered QBO account user, specific to my account).

Ah, thanks for clarifying that @ZapPaint! 🙂

I’d recommend reaching out to QuickBooks directly to see if they can add a way to disable the verification code for Gmail emails. It seems like it’ll be a feature request for QuickBooks itself rather than the QuickBooks app integration with Zapier.

That said, I’ve done some searching online and found an article online that appears to have a solution for handling the forwarding directly in Gmail (Auto-forward recurring receipts to QuickBooks Online using Gmail). I’ve not tested the steps outlined in that article myself, but hopefully it will help you to get the receipts forwarding to QuickBooks! 🤞

Thank you @SamB,

To clarify for my own understanding. Let’s say I wanted to do a similar transaction unrelated to QBO.

Is there a way within Zapier to automatically forward a new, incoming email w attachment, that matches certain search criteria using my email address as the forwarding email address?

i.e email arrives in my inbox for a paint expense from a supplier (from: suplplier@gmail.com, to: me@gmail.com, expense pdf attached), Zapier auto forwards this email to my business partner using my email address (fwd:me@gmail.com, to:partner@gmail.com, expense pdf attached).

Thank you all for your feedback.

Yes that’s totally possible, @ZapPaint! 

You’d need a Zap that uses the the New Email Matching Search trigger and Send Email action events:

Trigger: New Email Matching Search (Gmail

This would run whenever an email with a specific keyword/phrase arrives in Gmail. By default it will look at emails in all folders. So you’d need to make sure the search string includes in:inbox otherwise it would run for sent emails as well! For example if you wanted the Zap to pick up emails with the Subject “Expense” you’d set up the trigger like so:

You can find out more about the different Search operators you can use in the Search String field here: Search operators you can use

Action: Send Email (Gmail)

Then in this action you’d put your business partner’s email into the To field. For the From field you’d select your email address from the dropdown menu that appears when you click into that field. Fill out the rest of the the fields as desired by typing in or select the relevant fields from the previous step. For the attachment field you’d select the All Attachments field from the previous step as that should contain the attachment file objects. For example:

That Zap would then pick up any emails with a subject of “Expense” and automatically forward them to your business partner’s email address along with the attachment. 

Hope that helps to clarify! 🙂