Bank Balance Inquiry Automation — Implementation Guide

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Prerequisites

• A WhatsApp number connected to ChatSyncs — see Connect WhatsApp.
• Read Keyword Replies first to understand how the whole flow builder works — this guide only covers what’s specific to this project, not Keyword Replies itself.
• Read HTTP API first — this project’s core mechanic is exactly that page’s Order API example, with a bank balance lookup in place of an order lookup.
• A Service Request Custom Field must exist first — create it under Subscriber Manager. The customer’s phone number and name don’t need a Custom Field — they’re already built-in subscriber values.
• An n8n workflow, published and reachable at a Webhook URL, containing: a Webhook trigger node, a Google Sheets node, an IF node, a Switch node, and a Respond to Webhook node. Building and hosting this n8n workflow is outside ChatSyncs — this guide covers the ChatSyncs side and how the two systems hand off data to each other.
• A Google Sheet connected to that n8n workflow (not to ChatSyncs directly) with columns: Account Holder, Account Number, Bank, Account Type, Available Balance, Phone Number.

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Implementation Guide

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Step 1 — Create the Keyword Replies flow and welcome menu

Objective: Greet the customer and offer a simple choice of service. Explanation: Keyword Replies is the flow builder this entire project runs on. An Interactive Message with Reply Buttons gives the customer a menu instead of requiring them to type a request in their own words. Actions to perform:

• Open Keyword Replies and click Create.
• Set the Trigger Keywords to Bank, with Exact keyword match.
• Drag an Interactive Message block onto the canvas with a bank header image and body text, e.g. Welcome to SBM WhatsApp Banking. Access your banking services securely through WhatsApp. Please choose an option below to continue.
• Add three Reply Buttons: Check Balance, Mini Statement, KYC Update — the first two set Save to Custom Field to Service Request, so whichever one is tapped is recorded as that subscriber’s requested service.

Expected result: Messaging “Bank” returns the welcome message with all three buttons visible, exactly as a real customer sees it:

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Step 2 — Configure the HTTP API call

Objective: Send the customer’s identifying details to the bank’s backend the moment they tap either Check Balance or Mini Statement. Explanation: HTTP API connects a flow to any external REST endpoint — here, that endpoint is the n8n workflow’s Webhook trigger URL. The request body uses dynamic variables so the actual values sent depend on who’s asking. Actions to perform:

• After the buttons, connect an HTTP API step (named e.g. Bank HTTP Use Case).
• Method: POST. API Endpoint URL: the n8n workflow’s Webhook URL, e.g. https://<your-n8n-host>/webhook/Bankhttp.
• Body Data (Default key/value format — no need for raw JSON here): add three rows —

  Key	Type	Value
  Phone number	Dynamic Value	Phone Number
  Service Request	Dynamic Value	Service Request
  Name	Dynamic Value	Full Name

  Phone Number and Full Name are the subscriber’s built-in values; Service Request is the Custom Field the two Reply Buttons just saved into.

Expected result: Tapping either button sends a POST request carrying the customer’s phone number, name, and requested service to n8n. Notes: Use Send Test Request with sample data before wiring this to the live button — see the Warning on the HTTP API page.

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Step 3 — n8n receives the request and looks up the customer

Objective: Find the customer’s account record from their phone number. Explanation: This part runs entirely inside n8n, outside ChatSyncs. The Webhook node is the entry point that receives ChatSyncs’s POST request; the Google Sheets node then searches for a row whose Phone Number column matches the incoming value. Here’s the complete n8n workflow canvas — Webhook → Get row(s) in sheet → If → Switch → three Respond to Webhook branches (found + Check Balance, found + Mini Statement, not found): Actions to perform (in n8n):

• Webhook node: receives the body sent by ChatSyncs’s HTTP API step.
• Google Sheets node: looks up a row in the connected sheet where the phone number column equals the incoming Phone number value.

The sheet itself needs one row per customer, with columns: Account Holder, Account Number, Bank, Account Type, Available Balance, and a phone number column: Expected result: The workflow either finds exactly one matching row, or finds none. Notes: Store phone numbers as text, not a number format, in the sheet — the same scientific-notation risk that affects Subscriber Manager CSV imports applies here too, and a reformatted phone number won’t match the incoming value.

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Step 4 — Validate the record and branch by service

Objective: Handle “customer not found” separately from a successful lookup, and route to the right response for the requested service. Explanation: An IF node checks whether the Google Sheets lookup returned a row. A Switch node then checks the Service Request value — Check Balance or Mini Statement — so one workflow already serves both services from the same welcome menu, instead of needing a separate webhook per button. Actions to perform (in n8n):

• IF node: record found? → true continues, false branches to an error response.
• Switch node (true branch only): route on Service Request — one branch for Check Balance, one for Mini Statement.

Expected result: A found record continues down whichever branch matches the button the customer tapped; a missing record skips straight to the error JSON in Step 5. Notes: The Google Sheet shown in Step 3 only stores account-level fields (holder, account number, bank, type, balance) — it doesn’t have transaction-level rows. The live bot does return real transaction lines on the Mini Statement branch, so a second data source (another sheet, a table, or a separate API) must be wired into that branch of the Switch node to produce them — that second source isn’t part of the supplied screenshots, so its exact shape isn’t covered here.

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Step 5 — Respond to ChatSyncs with one pre-formatted field

Objective: Send the result back to ChatSyncs as a single ready-to-display string, not several separate values. Explanation: The Respond to Webhook node is what makes this call synchronous — the customer’s ChatSyncs flow is paused, waiting on this exact response, since HTTP API in ChatSyncs is a request/response call, not fire-and-forget. In the actual built flow, n8n does all of the branching and text formatting itself — success vs. not-found, Check Balance vs. Mini Statement — and hands ChatSyncs back one field, status, already containing the exact lines the customer should see. ChatSyncs doesn’t branch on anything; it just drops that one field into a fixed reply template. Actions to perform (in n8n):

• On the Check Balance branch, Respond to Webhook with:
  {
    "status": "Hey Kiran Kumar\n\nhere your bank balance details\n\nAccount Type : Current\n\nAccount Balance : 145980.9"
  }
  
• On the Mini Statement branch, build the same account lines plus the transaction history into that same field:
  {
    "status": "Hey Kiran Kumar\n\nhere your bank balance details\n\nAccount Type : Current\n\nAccount Balance : 145980.9\n\n29/07/2026 - 12:01 - 100 Rupees\n29/07/2026 - 12:10 - 120 Rupees\n29/07/2026 - 12:20 - 140 Rupees"
  }
  
• On no match, put the error message in that same field instead: { "status": "We couldn't find an account linked to this number." }.

Expected result: ChatSyncs’s HTTP API step receives one JSON object back with a single status field — already fully worded for whichever case applies. Notes: Building the full message text in n8n instead of ChatSyncs means every future change to the wording (a new line, a different greeting) only touches the n8n workflow — the ChatSyncs flow and its template never need editing.

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Step 6 — Drop the response into the reply template

Objective: Turn that one status field into the message the customer sees. Explanation: No Condition block is needed on the ChatSyncs side — n8n already decided what the text should say. ChatSyncs’s job is just to map the response and insert it into a fixed Text Message template. Actions to perform:

• Under Response Mapping, map the response’s status field to a variable.
• Add a Text Message step with a fixed wrapper and the mapped variable inserted where the content goes, e.g.:
  SBM Bank
  
  #status# ,
  
  Thank You
  

Expected result: A valid customer receives the reply matching whichever button they tapped; an unrecognized number receives the same fixed template with the not-found message n8n substituted in — one Text Message block handles every case. Notes: The balance comes back as a plain number (e.g. 145980.9), not the $145,980.90-formatted string shown in the Google Sheet cell — reading a sheet through an API returns the cell’s raw value, not its display formatting. Format currency inside n8n’s status string if the reply should show ₹ or thousands separators.

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Download & test this flow

The exact flow used throughout this guide — Start Bot Flow, the Interactive Message, all three Reply Buttons, the HTTP API step, and the final Text reply — is available as a real exported flow file: Download bank-balance-inquiry-flow.txt Keyword Replies’ flow list has an Export Flow Data action (see Keyword Replies) that produces this exact file format. Use the matching import option in your own Keyword Replies list to load it in and test it against your own HTTP API / n8n setup, instead of rebuilding every block from these steps by hand.

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Features Used

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Expected Result

• A customer taps Check Balance and receives their real account number, account type, and available balance within the same conversation, with no staff involved.
• A customer taps Mini Statement instead and gets routed through the same flow’s second branch, with no separate bot or webhook needed.
• A phone number with no matching bank record gets a clear “account not found” message instead of a silent failure or a generic bot error, regardless of which button was tapped.
• The same pattern is ready to extend to a third service (loan status, card status, etc.) by adding another Reply Button and another Switch branch in n8n formatting its own status text — the ChatSyncs side needs no changes at all, since every branch reuses the same Response Mapping and the same fixed Text Message template.

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FAQs

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Related Documentation

• Keyword Replies — the flow builder this project runs on.
• HTTP API — the outbound, synchronous integration this entire project is built around.
• Subscriber Manager — Custom Fields used in the request payload.
• Webhook Workflow — the inbound counterpart, for when an external system should trigger ChatSyncs instead of the other way around.
• Message Templates — for sending the balance reply as an approved template if the conversation is outside the 24-hour window.