Optimizing Zapier tasks for course completion data integration with Salesforce

Hi ​@Danny93 

For us to have more context, post screenshots showing how your Zap steps are outlined to see if we can offer suggestions for how to optimize.

Don’t forget about the ROI of automation: 

Good call ​@Troy Tessalone! Here is a screenshot of that flow. I tried to label each step as best I could!

To cut down on the number of records I got back I created a zapier table to get the unix value of the last time this process was run, use that as a parameter for my rest call in Step 3. I use a code snippet to find the largest value then update the table with that value for the next run (Step 6). The filter step in Step 5 is used to make sure that I am not updating the table with a 0 value incase no results are returned.

The looping seems to be where most the tasks are used but open to feedback!

​@Danny93 

You could combine steps 3-4 into 1 code step, since the code can make the API request and handle the response.

 

You can combine steps 9-10 into 1 code step to do the API request/response.

zapier looping through each record like that is gonna burn through tasks fast, especially with 60 daily completions. the non-obvious risk here is hitting zapier's task limits before you even get the data right, and then paying for overage or having it just stop mid-run.

honestly, i'd flip the approach. instead of fetching course name and username per loop, batch that data upstream. if your lms can dump a daily csv or a single api call with all 60 completions at once, you can use zapier's code step to parse it in one shot. then do a single bulk upsert to salesforce. that kills the per-record loops.

it depends on whether your lms has a "get all completions since yesterday" endpoint or a webhook that sends a batch. if not, you're stuck with the loop but you could cache the course names in a lookup table inside zapier to save one api call per record.

what does your lms actually support for bulk export?

Hey ​@Danny93 👋 How did you get on with Troy and Fabi.SPL’s suggestions?

Let us know if you got it sorted or if you could do with some more help reducing your task usage!

One more lever on top of consolidating those API calls into Code steps: the course name lookup is almost certainly repeating. Sixty completions a day across a much smaller set of courses means you are fetching the same course names over and over.

Pull the course list once at the top of the run into a dictionary inside a Code step, then resolve names from memory during the loop. Same idea on the Salesforce side, one SOQL query with an IN clause over all the usernames returns every contact id in a single call instead of one search per record.

That turns a per record fan out into roughly two reads plus the writes, which is where your task count actually lives. The loop then only does work that genuinely differs per record.