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Hi everyone,

I’m new to Zapier and currently working on improving some internal processes within our finance and sales teams. I'm trying to automate a few workflows and would really appreciate your suggestions or guidance on the best approach.

Here’s what I’m working on:

  1. Purchase Invoice – Payment Confirmation & Remittance Advice 
    When a purchase invoice is marked as "paid," I’d like to automatically send the supplier a remittance advice. Ideally, it should show all invoices paid in a particular payment batch (e.g., if 3 invoices are paid at once, the remittance should summarize them all). I also want to include a PDF copy of the paid invoice.

  2. Sales Invoices – Draft Email Creation & Internal CC
    When a sales invoice is created and approved, I want Zapier to:

    • Generate a draft email in Gmail addressed to the customer (to be reviewed before sending).

    • CC an internal department (so they stay in the loop).

    • Automatically apply a label to the email and save it to a specific folder.

  3. Sales Invoice – Payment Confirmation Email
    Once a sales invoice is marked as paid, I’d like a payment confirmation email to be drafted. It should:

    • Highlight the invoice details, how it was paid (e.g., credit note, bank account), and be saved in a designated folder for review before sending.

  4. Improve Communication Between Finance and Sales
    I’m exploring ways to improve visibility and communication. For example:

    • Can invoice updates (e.g. created or paid) be automatically posted in a specific Slack channel, so the sales team can review, approve, or comment?

    • Is it possible for invoices to be searchable within Slack and tagged by the sales team when there's a query or issue?

    • Can we link customer records using their unique Xero customer number—so sales or finance can quickly identify and reference the correct contact when needed?

If anyone has set up something similar or has advice on how best to structure these Zaps, I’d love to hear your insights!

Just to mention I've started experimenting with some workflows and was able to get a few Zaps set up. However, they only seem to work when a new event is triggered after the Zap is created. For example, nothing has happened in Slack or Gmail for existing events in Xero—only for new ones created after the Zap is set up.
Any advice on how to handle or test existing data would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Hi ​@Pat019, the Xero integration has lots of different triggers available, including New Invoice and Updated Sales Invoice, the latter of which can be used together with a Filter step so that the Zap only runs if the status is updated to Paid. 

As for batching invoices, you could try the Digest by Zapier app to group together multiple invoices with, say, the same supplier, and then schedule the digest to release (and then send out the remittance advice) only at the end of the day or after some pre-defined delay period. 

Invoice updates can definitely be sent in Slack - that could be as simple as a two-step Zap, using the Updated Sales Invoice trigger, but you probably want a filter step in between to control what types of updates warrant sending out a Slack alert. Otherwise, they get annoying and people tend to just tune them out altogether. 
In general, when you create a Zap, it only runs for *new* trigger events that occur after the Zap is published, but in some cases, like if the Zap is primarily copying data from one system to another, after publishing it will display a pop-up asking if you want to transfer existing (historical) data. Just be careful when choosing this option, because depending on how much historical data you have, turning it on can quickly eat up a huge volume of tasks  

Lastly, trying to make a searchable database of Xero invoices from within Slack would not be very user-friendly from a UX standpoint. I’d suggest syncing your invoices to a Zapier Table and then creating a simple UI with Zapier Interfaces if you want to give colleagues a way to view and search for invoices without having direct access to Xero. 
Hope this helps!

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