Xero-Zapier-monday.com Inquiry
To anyone using monday.com, Zapier and Xero: Have you been able to grab the invoice # from Xero and add it to a column in monday.com?
We’re currently set up with companies as items, and the clients from each company as subitems.
Looking to approve the invoice in Xero, then send that invoice # back to the subitem in monday.com
my brain is fried and cannot figure this one out.
Also is it possible to just run this automation with dynamic information? The workflow demands the specific item from monday.com to function. How do you get it this to work? Will post in Zapier as well
Thanks in advance!!!!.
The short answer is:
Yes, you absolutely can grab the Xero invoice number and add it to a monday.com subitem using Zapier, but it requires a few specific steps in your Zap to handle the item and subitem IDs.
The main roadblock is that Zapier needs the specific monday.com item and subitem IDs to update, and the initial trigger (Xero invoice approval) doesn’t inherently provide them.
You’ll likely need a “Search” step in your Zap to find the correct item/subitem on monday.com using a unique identifier that exists in both Xero and monday.com (like the client’s name or a dedicated client ID).
If Zapier is proving too complex for this lookup, an alternative is to bypass Zapier for this part and use monday.com’s Platform API or webhooks combined with a custom solution like a simple script running on a cloud function or a tool like Stape or Google Tag Manager to coordinate the data flow, which offers more dynamic control over the API calls.
The long answer is:
The reason your brain is fried is that the default Zapier action usually struggles with dynamic linking between two systems when the trigger system (Xero) only has part of the information (the invoice number and client details) and the target system (monday.com) requires specific IDs (the item ID and subitem ID).
The simplest Zapier solution is to use a three-step Zap: first, your trigger is the “New Approved Invoice” in Xero.
This gives you the invoice number and the client’s name or ID.
Second, you must use a “Search Item” action on monday.com.
You’ll search for the main item (the company) using a unique value from the Xero invoice, such as the Xero contact name, which must exactly match the company name in your monday.com item.
This search step will return the necessary monday.com Item ID.
Third, once you have the Item ID, you will need another search, or if you can uniquely identify the subitem, a subsequent action to update the subitem.
If the client name in Xero is unique to the subitem, you might search for the subitem using that client name within the main item ID found in step two.
Once the Subitem ID is found, the final step is an “Update Subitem Column Values” action, using the found Item ID and Subitem ID to post the Xero invoice number into the relevant column on monday.com.
This is where the workflow demands the specific item ID and subitem ID, and the “Search” steps are how you dynamically retrieve them.
A better, cheaper, and more robust long-term solution that handles this dynamic linking more efficiently involves using webhooks and custom code.
Xero’s API and webhooks allow you to set up a subscription so that when an invoice is approved, Xero sends a payload to a specific URL.
You could use monday.com’s Platform API or webhooks, combined with a simple custom script running on an extremely cheap or free service like Google Cloud Platform or within a server-side tagging environment like Stape or even a well-configured Google Tag Manager server container.
The Xero webhook payload is sent to your custom service.
That service then uses the client’s unique identifier from the Xero data to query the monday.com API and find the corresponding Item and Subitem IDs, and then it makes a final call to the monday.com API to update the subitem with the invoice number.
This bypasses the costs and complexity of Zapier’s multi-step logic and search actions, making it more scalable and less prone to breaking if your data structure is complex.
The cost of running this script is minimal, often falling within the free tier of most cloud providers.
Using Google Tag Manager or Stape just acts as a reliable, cost-effective server-side intermediary to process the webhook and execute the lookup/update logic.
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