Creating Google Drive folders for clients automatically with Zapier

g'day guys i'm jimmy from jimmyrose.me and content snare and in this video you are going to learn how to automatically create folders for your clients in google drive now this is really handy when you have clients signing up for whatever you do like whatever service you give them and you don't want to have to manually create a folder or folder structure in google drive now this same process works with most cloud storage tools like dropbox or whatever one you're using and we're going to start with a really basic example and build on it so you can see what kind of cool stuff you can do here some examples of where you might use this are like when a client signs off on a proposal you might want to automatically create their folder structure in google drive maybe when you add them to your project management system or crm you want to just automatically create all these folders so it's a pretty cool workflow for a lot of professional services businesses if you'd like to learn other cool ways to automate your business and get more productive to get more done in less time and basically just do less work in general hit that red subscribe button below for regular videos and if you are new to zapier if you've never used zapier before i'm going to link below to my zapier tutorial it'll also show above at the top of this video as a card click that because i will jump through like i'm not going to explain every little piece of zapier in this so if you've never used zapier before i'd recommend you go check that one out that's it now let's dig into creating folders automatically for your clients okay so over at zapier i have already created a zap set up a trigger using content snare and renamed it to create client folder in google drive now content snare is a tool that helps collect files and information from your clients so let's say you start a job with a client you need a whole bunch of information and files before you can really start work so you send out what's called a request and then they can upload and add information to that which comes back to you and we're going to trigger this workflow when we actually send out that request for information and files and then we're going to create a folder for that client this trigger could be any event in your client onboarding so like if your proposal had just been accepted you could have a trigger here from say better proposals to say when a client has signed their proposal create the folder it might be when you create a client in your project management system just this is just an example using content snare so i'm just going to go ahead now and create the action so i'm going to search for google drive and you'll see the very first action we've got there is create folder so let's go ahead and do that select your account and now we have to choose where that folder is going to get created so you have a look at the first one here these are different drives so this is my personal one and these are shared drives that are created within google drive i'm just going to go with my personal one for now and i'm just going to quickly show you here so i've got my drive and i've created a folder within that called client folders you know this is going to be whatever folder structure you like but that's the one we're going to try and find here so the folder we're going to create it in is the parent folder we'll try and find that client folders one now if you have to go deep into side several folders here like if i wanted to put it inside that template folder you first click client folders and then you click this again and it should reload and bring up the folders within that one right so that's how you go inside multiple levels of folder there is another trick here if you want to bypass doing that you can just get this id out of the url of the folder you want to put it in so i'm just going to control c on that go back into parent folder choose custom value here and paste that directly in there that's another way to do it if you don't want to step through it manually you can switch back to the other system here but i'm just going to leave that as our client folders selected there and now we have to give the folder a name now this is completely up to you how you want to name your folders but typically it's probably going to be the name of the company which comes through from content snare here now if you are using a proposal tool as your trigger you're probably going to have the company name in there as well it really depends what you're using as your trigger what you're going to call it but generally it's going to be the client company name right so i'm going to go to continue and test this if we jump back over here we should see that folder show up there's our new client and there it is and that's really all there is to it for the simple version at this point you could go ahead and turn your zap on and now every time you publish a request in content snare then you're going to have that folder created there is a bit of a problem with this though right if you send two requests to one client or if you are using a proposal tool and you have two different proposals out for one client you're going to create a second version of that folder like if i retest this it's gone and created that exact same folder again and we don't want that like if we have other files and stuff already in this one for that client we don't want to go and duplicate that entire folder because then we're going to have two places to put things and it's going to become a bit of a mess so to prevent that before we go and create this folder we're going to see if one already exists with the same name but we're going to create a step in the middle here using google drive again and this time we're going to find a folder so click that and continue again choose your accounts and the folder name we're going to search for is whatever we plan on setting it as in the next step so again it's just going to be client company name in this one and we're going to search within the exact same location right because otherwise it's going to search through our whole drive and we don't want that so we're going to look inside that exact same folder and you'll notice here we've got an extra little checkbox that's actually going to make the rest of this zap a bit redundant right so we're gonna try and find the folder named acme corp and there's a box here that says create the folder if it doesn't exist yet so that is actually super handy right so you tick that guy and now we actually do not need this step anymore so you can go ahead and delete that i'm going to go back here and delete this folder and test this uh action in zapier right so it's going to try and find acme corp but because of that checkbox it's gone and created the folder and if we retest it it has not gone and created a new one it's actually going to just give us the name of this folder back from this action so now we can go on with making this a little bit more advanced and now at this point you have a zap that will prevent the same folder being created twice but if we want to take this a step further now let's say you want to create multiple folders within this client folder so maybe in here you want a folder for deliverables and you'd like a folder for uploaded client files for example so we're just going to create two more folders in here so jumping back into zapier these are going to be extra steps so i'm going to hit plus look for google drive again and we're going to create a folder within that same spot as before and we're going to want to create a folder within this client folder right so we we don't really want to select acme core from here right like we could select client folders and then that'll reload to acme core but that means it's going to create that new folder in acme corp every time instead we actually want to create this folder inside whatever folder we just created so here you're going to have to choose custom and then you can see we've got data that comes from the previous steps in this zap so we're going to open that up and choose the id so this is the id of the folder for some reason it's brought in that old data from the pre what i had selected before so i'm just going to delete that and close that silly sidebar just to quickly go over that again we had to switch to custom and choose the id from the previous step so the one where we find or create the folder now if it created a new folder or if it found an existing folder it doesn't matter that will still come into the same field there id which you can now see is mapped in there and so we're going to create a new folder called deliverables and continue on run that test just double check that's worked yep and then we're going to do the same thing again but this time we're going to create a folder for uploaded files i'll just do it again so you can see exactly how it's done choose your account i'm actually skipping over selecting the drive because it's using my personal drive that's the default anyway so again the parent folder switch over to custom open that second step and map in the id and this one might be uploaded files run the test double check it worked and we're good now at this point you might want to rename these to be like create deliverables folder just so you know which one is which i think and now we have a workflow that when a request is published we're going to find or create that folder for the client and then create two folders within that client folder there is one more step to getting this right and the first time i recorded this video i forgot to add it in so we're going to add a little step in here and then for the rest of the video you're not going to see it in any of the recordings so that just letting you know how to preempt when you see it disappear you might be wondering what's going on but there is a little problem here because right now we have the when the request is published we're going to create the client folder and then these two folders right let's say this is the second time we've published a request for the same client so now we're going to find the existing folder but then it's going to go ahead and duplicate the deliverables and files folder because it's still going to run these two steps and we do not want to run these two steps or anything that we're about to create in the rest of this video so i'm going to add what's called a filter in here and a filter stops the workflow running under certain conditions right so you can see here it says only continue if and we only want to create these folders if it's the first time we've created this folder right and that's actually really easy to do if you have a look in here open this step and there's some data called zap data was found so and notice that was true what this is saying is step two found an existing folder if that's true then it found an existing folder and if that is the case then we don't want to create these folders again because we know that we created them last time when it was the first time this folder was created so if it has found it it means this is the second time it's run so we only want to run these steps if it didn't find the folder so we're going to say zapdata was found exactly matches false and in this case it's saying the zap would not have continued which is okay because the last time we ran this test it found the folder rather than created it so that's exactly what we want so again just to summarize the first time it's going to create a folder in here in this client folders and because it's created it that zap data was found will be false and it will continue with the rest of the workflow the second time zap data was found will be true because it found the existing folder and it will not continue with the rest of the workflow okay so let's continue on with making this workflow more advanced remember this filter is going to disappear from the video from now on because i screwed up the first time i recorded now let's take this another step maybe the deliverables folder you actually want to share that with your client so they have access at any time so i'm going to add another step of google drive of course and we're going to find the add file sharing preference action here now just one note before i move on if you are using shared drives with google drive you unfortunately can't share entire folders now to me this is a massive problem with google drive with shared drive specifically and i hate it um but if you are using just normal google drive this is possible it's going to go ahead choose that account you'll notice here it says file id and we actually want to do this with a folder so it might look like it's not going to work but it actually does so i'm going to go ahead and same thing as before but this time we want to do it with the deliverables folder right so change over to custom find the deliverables folder id and now we're going to choose a sharing preference of anyone on the internet who has the link can view that folder and continue i'm going to run that test so if i jump back over to google drive here is the two folders we created oh and it looks like that icon has changed but you can verify that by right clicking and going to share and it looks like it's changed to anyone on the internet with this link can view so that is exactly what we're trying to achieve now you could actually inside your zap you can see it's returned to the shareable link here so we could actually create an email step to email that link to our client i'm not going to go into detail on how to do that in this video but if you would like to learn more about zapier head over to jimmyrose.me zapier and check out my course there we go into all kinds of stuff around how you can use zapier in all kinds of different ways in your business there's just one more thing i'd like to show you let's say back over in our client folder we have this file here a client info sheet that we want to copy into every single new client so let's jump back over to zapier and what we're going to do is just copy that file into each new folder so we're going to add one more step here again of course using google drive open this guy up and we're going to use the copy file action and the first thing it wants is the file that we're going to copy now this could be any file right it doesn't have to be a google sheet it's just the one i'm using in this example i've opened this up and it's just showing me a list of like random stuff it's finding in my google drive we're going to use the custom option again so go ahead and open up that file we're going to need the id and that is everything after the d slash in the url there so i'm just going to copy that out before the slash edit right so you don't want the slash there and you don't want the slash there you want everything in between i'll go ahead and copy that go back to zapier choose the custom tab again and paste in the id there we actually do want to give it a file name because you can see there it's going to default to copy of original file name so we don't want that we actually just want client info sheet i mean you might want to change this to client info sheet dash client name for example totally up to you and the folder we're going to put this in is the one we created here this is the client folder step that we did earlier i probably should have renamed that so we so it was a bit more easy to distinguish between the others but if we click here go across to custom open that step up and put the id in here continue and test and have a look inside acme corp there it is there we go client info sheet acne corp perfect so now we have a pretty long zap here six step where when a file request was sent in content snare we're creating that client folder we're creating two folders called deliverables and files within that client folder we're sharing the deliverables folder with a link and then we're copying that client info sheet into there so all automatically we've created these two folders shared this one and put this file in here ready to go all without having to touch anything every time we send a request in content snare and there you have it we've walked through setting up folders for new clients but also preventing duplicates creating multiple folders if you have a full folder structure and even creating initial files for clients if you need that kind of thing in the next video we'll look at automatically uploading files into this folder structure when clients upload files in content snare or another system check out the link either showing as a card at the top of this video or in the description below for part two of this that's it again if you want any more help automating your business and getting more productive to basically do less work please hit that red subscribe button below otherwise i'll see you in the next video

Channel: JimmyRose - Automation & Productivity

Views: 9,905

Keywords: zapier google drive, create folders in google drive with zapier, client folders, zapier, google drive, jimmyrose986

Id: BC774ocJIGo

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020