Post to Slack when new Xero expense claim submitted - trouble getting test data

Hi @cb_etch - welcome to community! 

I’m not overly familiar with Xero but I wonder if you could try the “New Bill” Trigger since it relates to Accounts Payable and see if that pulls through your test data. 

If that doesn’t help, can you share some screenshots of your set up with us (void of personal info) so we can take a closer look? 

Thanks Liz. I tried out your suggestion and it works great when the trigger is set as a New Bill. However, our internal process dictates that expenses don’t get converted in to a ‘Bill’ until they are approved. The purpose of this Zap is to allow us to manage expense approvals in a different way. i.e. We’d get a Slack notification when a new request has been submitted so that our commercial team can mark it with a checkmark emoji when approved, which in turn indicates to our finance person that they can go ahead and generate a new Bill in Xero ready for payment. 
Therefore, ideally I’d need to use the New Expense Claim trigger, but it doesn’t work.

Hi there @cb_etch,

I appreciate the detailed explanation of the issue.

The trigger "New Expense Claim Receipt," is triggering on the "Receipt" portion. In Xero, You have the Expense Claim and then you have the associated Receipts attached to it - it's the Receipt portion that is being used for this trigger. So if you create an expense claim, but if there aren't any Receipts associated to it, it wouldn't trigger the Zap.

So just to double-check — are you trying to trigger when a new Expense Claim is added or if a new (Expense Claim) Receipt is added? This will help with determining which trigger might work best. For instance, Xero deprecated the Expense API in 2018, and now instead use "Account Payable" Bills/Invoices for Expenses. So the "New Bill" trigger might work better when coupled with a filter step it only run on specific types of Bills (aka Expenses).

Thanks! 😊

Hi, Thanks so much for your reply. This is useful info and it’s a shame that the original expense API is no longer available for use via Zapier.   
Not all of the expenses submitted to Xero by our staff have receipts attached, e.g. milage claims, so it doesn’t sound like the New Expense Claim Receipt trigger will be a reliable solution for us. 
I like your suggestion of filtering bills by type=expenses, but will need to see if we can adjust our internal process to work with this. 
Thanks again.

@cb_etch If you have any additional questions after working on your internal process, please don’t hesitate to reach back out! 😃

Hi team.

Thanks so much for this discussion. I have tried both methods, but they don’t seem to work. XERO, annoyingly, doesn’t send out emails to notify me (as the business owner) when an expense claim has been submitted by a staff member for me to review. 

I’m trying to work around this by building a zap that will send me an SMS or email when an expense claim has been submitted by staff members. For some reason, this is not triggering, even when a receipt is attached.

I have also tried the “Bills” method described above, to no avail. When a new “expense” is submitted. It is not a “bill” and is not getting picked up by Zapier. 

Has anyone ever successfully make this work?

Thank you. 

Hi @ckur001,

You might be running into a bug here. I suggest contacting our Support Team so they can investigate this issue further. They have the necessary tools to examine the Zap and its logs more closely.

You can contact our Support Team here: https://zapier.com/app/get-help

Hopefully, this helps.