Clio Trust & IOLTA Balance Alerts via Email (n8n Workflow)

Get Daily Clio Trust & IOLTA Low/Negative Balance Alerts—Automatically

This n8n workflow monitors your Clio trust and IOLTA balances and emails alerts for low or negative balances every day—plus a weekly trust health summary to accounting.

What this workflow does

• Runs daily at 7:00am using a schedule trigger.
• Fetches all open matters and their trust balances from the Clio API.
• Calculates a balance tier (healthy / low / negative) and applies a cooldown so the same unresolved issue doesn’t trigger repeated alerts every day.
• Sends an individual email per alert-worthy matter with guardrails applied via a compliance/audit sub-workflow (approved sends only).
• Escalates negative balances: for any negative-balance matter, it generates an urgent partner escalation email, logs it through the guardrail/audit sub-workflow, and sends via SMTP.
• Runs weekly on Monday at 8:00am: retrieves open matters again, computes a trust health rollup, and emails a weekly summary to accounting via SMTP.

Use cases

• Proactively notify partners or staff when a trust or IOLTA matter drops below your LOW_BALANCE_THRESHOLD.
• Escalate negative-balance situations immediately with an auditable guardrail step.
• Provide accounting with a consistent weekly trust health report without manual exports from Clio.

Technical details

• Schedule Trigger: daily 7am + weekly Monday 8am.
• Clio integration: OAuth2 credential and CLIO_BASE_URL used by HTTP requests.
• Nodes used: if, code, no op, http request, email send, sticky note.
• Guardrails/compliance: configure GUARDRAIL_WORKFLOW_ID for the sub-workflow used before sending alerts.
• SMTP email delivery: configure SMTP credentials plus FIRM_FROM_EMAIL, FIRM_TRUST_ACCOUNTING_EMAIL, FIRM_PARTNER_EMAIL, and/or FIRM_EMAIL.
• Optional tuning: set LOW_BALANCE_THRESHOLD and ALERT_COOLDOWN_DAYS to match your firm’s policy.