{"id":30253,"date":"2019-06-24T15:19:41","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T14:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=30253"},"modified":"2019-06-24T15:19:45","modified_gmt":"2019-06-24T14:19:45","slug":"automating-wave-accounting-mail-and-calendar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2019\/06\/automating-wave-accounting-mail-and-calendar\/","title":{"rendered":"Automating Wave Accounting, Mail and Calendar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Time for a bit of a technology related, geeky post about how I’ve recently automated part of my workflow thanks to Mail Rules, Folder Actions, Automator and AppleScript. As you might know from a previous post, I’m in the process of transferring to a new accounting solution called Wave<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of the transition I thought I’d try to streamline my workflow a little by automating some of the processes. Afterall, if I can save some time when sending invoices, processing payments and recording receipts then I can spend more time actually working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My previous workflow was:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Workflow<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Invoicing<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
  1. Create an invoice in my accounting software<\/li>
  2. Save the invoice as a PDF file<\/li>
  3. Email the PDF file to my client<\/li>
  4. Add a Calendar event to say that I’d sent the PDF<\/li>
  5. Add alarms to the Calendar Event to remind me that I’d sent it 30 days later<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Payment<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

    When I received payment I would<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    1. Record the payment in my accounting software<\/li>
    2. Create a Receipt<\/li>
    3. Save the Receipt as a PDF file<\/li>
    4. Email the PDF file to my client<\/li>
    5. Find the Calendar event<\/li>
    6. Remove the alarms from the calendar<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      Late Payment<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

      If the client hadn’t paid I would get a Calendar alarm and email 30 days after sending the invoice. At this stage I would<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      1. Create an reminder invoice in my accounting software<\/li>
      2. Save the reminder invoice as a PDF file<\/li>
      3. Email the PDF file to my client<\/li>
      4. Add a Calendar event to say that I’d sent the PDF<\/li>
      5. Add alarms to the Calendar Event to remind me that I’d sent it 15 days later<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

        and the process would start again. It was fairly simple, it worked but when doing it over and over again it dod become a little tiresome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Enter Wave<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

        Wave itself streamlined this process a little as I could create the invoice and send it directly from within Wave. I could then set an automatic reminder to be sent on the due date. That helped a little but I wasn’t entirely happy leaving it all to a third part app on the Internet. I wanted some control and I wanted to keep records of invoices and payments locally as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

        I wanted to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

        1. Store the PDF files locally as well as within Wave<\/li>
        2. Add reminders via calendar alarms so that I could check the status of an invoice before an automatic reminder was sent.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

          With a little bit of integration between Wave, some Mail Rules and some AppleScript I was able to do all of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Processing Emails<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

          The secret to this was processing the emails I get from Wave. When sending an invoice from Wave it’s possible to attach a pdf of the invoice to the email and also send a copy of that to yourself as well as sending it to the client. This email always comes from the same address and has a similar subject line:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          “Invoice #XX from Company Name”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          where XX is the number of the invoice and Company Name is the name of your company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Mail Rules<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

          Knowing this information makes it easy to set up a Rule within Apple Mail. You do this by going to Preferences from the menu and selecting the Rules tab. Here you can add a new rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I set up a rule that is triggering when certain conditions are met. Now, whenever an email containing an invoice from Wave is received this mail Rule will be triggered. The rule itself performs several actions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          1. It Moves the email to a ‘Sent Invoices’ mailbox (so that I don’t even have to see it).<\/li>
          2. It marks the message as read<\/li>
          3. It runs an AppleScript that creates a Calendar event for me.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
            \"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

            That was all pretty simple and straight forward. The real automation takes place within the AppleScript.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            AppleScripting Calendar Events from Mail Messages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

            This was the fun part. I wanted to build an AppleScript that would extract some information from the email that had triggered it. Add this information to a Calendar Event and create Alarms on the Calendar Event. I was fairly new to AppleScript so it took some trial and error, but I think I have it sorted now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Here’s the AppleScript that is triggered by the Mail Rule<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            -- Triggered by Mail rule.\nusing terms from application \"Mail\"\n\ton perform mail action with messages msgs for rule theRule\n\t\ttell application \"Mail\"\n\t\t\trepeat with msg in msgs\n\t\t\t\ttry\n\t\t\t\t\tset msgsubject to subject of msg\n\t\t\t\t\tset msgcontent to content of msg\n\t\t\t\t\tset msgid to message id of msg\n\t\t\t\t\tset {amount, dueon} to my parseMsg(msgcontent)\n\t\t\t\t\tmy createEvent(msgsubject, msgid, amount, dueon)\n\t\t\t\tend try\n\t\t\tend repeat\n\t\tend tell\n\tend perform mail action with messages\nend using terms from<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
            It’s fairly simple. <\/p>\n\n\n\n