Dropdown menus provide a list of values you can send to other apps in your Zap. If you want to send a value that's not available in a dropdown menu, you can map a field from a previous step as a custom value in the dropdown menu.
In the QuickBooks app, the Customer field in the Create Invoice action is a dropdown menu. It lists all the customers in your QuickBooks account. When you select a customer from the dropdown menu, your Zap will enter the same customer in every invoice. You may want to use a custom value instead so the Zap enters a different customer each time it runs.
Set up a custom value
- Click the field dropdown menu.
- Click the Custom tab.
- Click the step you want to take a custom value from, then select the custom value.
- You can only use custom values in action steps.
- If you're mapping a custom value from a value you've created in a previous step, it may not exist yet. Add a delay step in between to give your connected app time to create the new value.
What can I use as a custom value?
The values shown in a dropdown menu have two parts:
- The name of the value. It’s shown as bold, black text and represents what you see in the app.
- The ID of the value. It’s shown as gray text below the value name and the app uses it on the backend to identify the value.
- Sometimes, it's the same as the name of the value.
- Other times, it may be a numeric or alphanumeric string.
When using custom values, you must:
- Enter the ID of the value, not the name of the value (if they differ).
- Enter a value that already exists in the app or the step will error.
In QuickBooks’ Customer field, the customer name is the value name. The number below it is the value ID.
Sometimes, the value from a previous step doesn’t have a value ID. For example, a previous step may return a customer name instead of their QuickBooks ID. You can use a lookup table to or search action to return an ID instead.