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Hello, 

When creating a customer with a zap there is the option to select the customer’s parent customer, which is great! (see below)

Ability to select the parent customer when creating a customer

 

However, when going to then update a customer, the option to change/select the parent customer is no where to be seen.

I have a client who ideally needs to have a customer automatically created when a record is created in their database, but the parent customer won’t be known until later/after they update it manually in the database. 

I could have sworn I saw a post on this a month or two ago where the Zapier dev team was asking the poster about they wanted in order to build this functionality out, but the post seems to have disappeared. 

Does anyone have any ideas for a work around for this, or are there any updates on its being included natively in the “Update a Customer” action for the Quickbooks Online app?

Thank you!

Hey @cptech!

Thanks for letting us know that it would be really helpful for you to have the Parent account field in the Update customer action as well as the Create Customer action. I’ve added you to a feature request asking for that to be added, which means that we’ll send you an email if it gets added. 

In the meantime, I wonder if we can find a workaround for you. How much later will the parent account be known? A day? Or longer? And do your clients need to use the new customer in QuickBooks before they have the Parent customer? I’m wondering if we could use a delay step to pause the Zap until the Parent account is added. 

Hi Danvers - thank you for adding me to the feature request.

Unfortunately the timing won’t be reliable enough to have a set timed pause/delay, but thanks for the idea! I think I may workaround it by not creating the customer until they “review” the application and select whether it will have a parent customer or not, then build out the customer. But from a UX standpoint, it’s a little less than ideal as they will then have to wait until the zap fully runs and updates the database with the customer id before they can move forward with generating an invoice from the database - which sometimes takes a minute or two (which weirdly feels like forever when trying to move through a workflow/application review). 

I am also concerned as things happen where a parent customer may need to be changed (will be rare, but it happens) and ideally a zap would run to do that behind the scenes. Again, I can build a workaround where there’s a prompt that will show in the database with instructions on needing to go into QBO to change the parent customer manually too, but it’s clunky. 

Fortunately make.com has a more robust QBO “Update Customer” action that allows for updating a parent customer when updating the customer and I will discuss using make.com for this capability with my client - Though it would be preferable to only use one integrations platform and hopefully this capability can be native to Zapier soon to keep things simpler.

Hey @cptech just stepping in for Danvers here! I think the workaround you presented is going to be your best bet here but I can completely understand why it’s not the most ideal. I’d also consider a minute or two a long time in automation-land. 

It sounds like Make has solved for this use case well and I know it’s not ideal to split your automation between platforms. I am hoping that we are able to make these improvements soon at Zapier! 🤞 As soon as we have any more updates, we’ll both post on this thread and email you personally. 

Sounds like a plan - Thank you, @jesse!

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