QuickBooks Online integration

What goes to QuickBooks Online

The connection pushes the records your bookkeeper needs from the front counter: customers, items, invoices for each sale, credit memos for refunds, payments received and expenses entered in the back office. Each sale becomes its own invoice in QuickBooks Online, with the tax code and income account you mapped, and the payment is recorded against it so the invoice shows as paid.

The sync is one way. SeroPOS is where the sale happens, and QuickBooks Online receives it. If someone deletes or changes a record on the QuickBooks side, SeroPOS notices and marks its link as out of date, but it does not pull data back into the till. That keeps the flow simple: change prices and products in SeroPOS, and let QuickBooks follow.

• Customers and items
• Invoices, one per sale
• Credit memos for refunds
• Payments received
• Expenses by category

Built and tested for Canada

The QuickBooks Online connection is set up and tested for Canadian businesses. Tax mapping works rate by rate, so a combined GST and PST rate, or HST in the Atlantic provinces and Ontario, can each point at the QuickBooks tax code that matches it. If you are outside Canada, talk to us before you connect, because other countries' QuickBooks Online editions have not been tested.

If your business runs QuickBooks Desktop instead, use the Desktop integration. It is the fuller of the two: it also sends supplier bills, vendor credits, supplier payments and day-end summary invoices, and it can reconcile stock counts between the two systems. The Online connection is the lighter of the two and suits a business that wants its sales, payments and expenses in QuickBooks without the purchase side.

Setting it up

Open QuickBooks in the back office sidebar and press Connect on the Online card. You sign in to Intuit and approve the connection, then land back on the dashboard. Sync stays paused until the first-time setup wizard is finished, so nothing is sent before your accounts and taxes are in place.

The wizard asks how your data starts out. Choose push if QuickBooks Online is new, pull if QuickBooks already holds your customers and items, or match if both sides have data. On the review screen you can unlink a wrong match, create records that exist only in QuickBooks, or ignore them, then approve in bulk.

• Connect on the QuickBooks dashboard
• Run the setup wizard and set a cutover date
• Map tax rates to tax codes
• Map income, cost, inventory, deposit and discount accounts
• Map expense categories to accounts
• Turn on sync and watch sync health

When something does not go through

Most failed records come down to a missing mapping, such as a new tax rate or a deleted account in QuickBooks. The sync health panel lists the last ten failures with the error QuickBooks returned. Fix the mapping and the record goes again on the next run, without you hunting for it.

There are also careful reset tools for a fresh start. You can resend customers, products or invoices for a date range in bulk. To deactivate customers or products, you type RESET, and to remove invoices SeroPOS created for a date range, you type DELETE. Both actions are logged. Typing the word makes sure nobody runs a reset by accident.

Working with your accountant

Because each sale arrives as its own invoice with its payment, your accountant sees the same detail in QuickBooks Online that you see on the till: the customer, the items, the tax and how it was paid. Expenses arrive under the accounts you chose for each expense category, so month-end coding is mostly done already.

Admins can also press Invite Accountant on the QuickBooks dashboard to give an accounting practice its own access to the SeroPOS back office. They can check a sale at the source instead of asking you to look it up, and you can withdraw that access at any time. Every time they open your books, the visit is recorded in a log you can see.