It takes many tools to operate your business. Farmbrite plays a key role in those operations, but we know that you'll still use other systems and programs to accomplish things outside of it as well. You might use an email campaign tool like Mailchimp to send out newsletters and promotional offers to your customers and contacts, or a messaging app like Slack to help your employees communicate. Maybe you track your financials and accounting information in QuickBooks, or take orders for your products through a Shopify store. You probably interact with customers and fans on social apps like Facebook or Instagram too. But what if you wanted these apps to work together with Farmbrite, or each other? In the past you would have needed programming know-how to create an API integration. But now you can take advantage of Zapier, a tool designed to make integrating web apps easier, with no-code integrations between thousands of apps.
Using the Farmbrite API and integrating with Zapier requires either a Performance, Plus, or Premium Farmbrite subscription.
Your first step in this integration process is to check out Farmbrite's Zapier Integration page. You'll find a section here to search for available apps to integrate with Farmbrite. Use this to search for what you want to integrate; the image below gives you a few examples. With over 5,000 available connections, you'll likely find what you're looking for!
You can also get to a similar experience directly in your Farmbrite account by navigating to Account, and choosing Integrations. You can also sign up for Zapier directly through that Farmbrite page as well.
Once you've verified the app(s) you want to connect are available, you can then sign up for a Zapier account. They offer different subscription levels with different features; we encourage you to browse what they offer and decide what is right for your business. They'll likely start you on a free plan, and you can upgrade if you need more connections and data sent.
Once you have a Zapier account, you then authorize and authenticate it to connect with Farmbrite by using an API key. You'll need to request this from us, so check out this article for more information on how that works. If you don't have a API Key yet, you can click to "Request API Key" from the link on the page to send us a support ticket to enable this for you. Once you have the key, you can then make the connection. This image below shows you an example of making this connection; you'll see where to add it in Zapier and how to get it from Farmbrite. Note that the API Key is different for each one of your Farmbrite users, to help support accountability/auditability and permissions based actions.
Once connected and authorized, you can then create a Zap. This is what Zapier calls the connection that sends data between Farmbrite and another app. This is a two-way connection; you can send data to Farmbrite when something happens in the other app, or data to the other app when something happens in Farmbrite. These are initiated by Triggers, and result in Actions.
Here are a few examples of Zaps you might create:
- When a new market order is submitted in Farmbrite (trigger), invoice the customer in Quickbooks. Check out this example from the Zapier help center for a full walkthrough of this Zap.
- When a new transaction is created in Farmbrite (trigger), add an accounting journal entry to QuickBooks (action).
- When a new order is processed in Shopify (trigger), remove an item from your Farmbrite Inventory (action).
There are nearly unlimited Zaps you could make, the ones above are just a few examples. For a walkthrough on how to use the Zapier system to make these Zaps, check out this video from their site, and this article from their help center about creating Zaps.
Some things to be aware of:
- The actions and triggers are unique per app integration, and are specific to the capabilities of that app. Something like "create a journal entry" in our QuickBooks example above wouldn't be available in MailChimp, just like "start an email campaign" wouldn't be available in QuickBooks. The actions and triggers available in the third party app are controlled by that apps developers.
- Some actions or triggers might require an ID to be passed so the app knows what animal record to associate with the Zap. The animal ID can be found in the URL displayed when viewing that animal record in Farmbrite. The image below shows you where to find that.
- You can create Zaps that go from Farmbrite to Farmbrite as well. Maybe you want Farmbrite to automatically create a task (action) when a new order is submitted or a new crop harvest is recorded (triggers).
We also realize that this process of setting up Zapier and these Zaps can be a bit technical, and maybe isn't for everyone. If you need additional help, we do offer professional services to help configure this for you. Feel free to reach out to proservices@farmbrite.com to inquire about scheduling and cost for these services.
We think there is unlimited potential in what you can do with these integrations, and are very curious to see how you use it. Reach out to us and let us know what you've created, or let us know if you're looking for additional fields for triggers and actions from the integration!