Auto-file your monthly Craigslist bill in QuickBooks

On the first business day of every month at 8am ET, close out my prior month's Craigslist bulk-posting spend by filing it as an accounts payable bill in QuickBooks Online, so my AP team doesn't have to wait on the emailed Craigslist invoice or hand-key the line items.

Trigger: a cron that fires on the first business day of every month at 8am ET. (Skip weekends and US federal holidays so it actually lands on a business day.)

Step 1. Call Craigslist's Generate Early Invoice operation for the prior billing cycle and read every line item back, including area, category, description, and amount. Note the money envelope: Craigslist returns each amount as a fixed-point object shaped { amount, currency, exponent }. For USD with exponent 2, divide the integer amount by 100 to get the dollar value. Do this conversion before passing anything to QuickBooks, which expects decimal dollars, not cents.

Step 2. Look up the Craigslist vendor in QuickBooks Online using Query Entities (search Vendor by DisplayName = 'Craigslist'). If no vendor comes back, call Create Vendor to make one with DisplayName 'Craigslist', then use the returned id. If a vendor already exists, hold onto the vendor id so the bill has somewhere to land.

Step 3. Call Create Bill against that vendor with one line item per Craigslist charge. Use the converted dollar amount as the line Amount, and put the Craigslist area plus category plus description into the line memo (or Description) so AP can see exactly what they paid for. Set the bill TxnDate to today and DueDate to today plus 30 days. Include a private note on the bill linking back to the Craigslist billing cycle range (start and end dates) for traceability.

Step 4. Post a Slack message to my finance channel using Send a Message. The recap should include: the Craigslist billing cycle range, the total dollars, the number of line items, and the new QuickBooks bill id (or a deep link to it), so the controller can open it in QuickBooks and approve payment.

Guard rail: if Generate Early Invoice returns an empty set, or the Craigslist response contains any error code in its errors array (even on a 200), skip the QuickBooks bill entirely and instead post a Slack warning to the same finance channel describing what Craigslist returned. Never write a zero-dollar bill, and never partially write a bill when the invoice data is incomplete.