One connection to your own QuickBooks company. Send an invoice and it lands in your books. Countersign a contract and the job lands there too, ready for job costing. A payment your bookkeeper records comes back and marks the invoice paid here. And QuickBooks being down never blocks you — every step is best-effort. Everything else about the post-frame business runs in one place; your bookkeeper keeps the books where she already keeps them.
Also called: quickbooks · QBO · connect my accounting · sync with my bookkeeper · accounting software
Your bookkeeper never has to open this software
One connection, made once, to your own QuickBooks company — and after that the invoices, the customers and the jobs arrive in the books without anybody typing them again. QuickBooks sits on the same tab as your CRM, your estimating tool and your card processor, and the tab, the stored keys and the PIN on them are covered on the integrations tab.
You bought field software and the bookkeeper still wants it her way, so the last Friday of every month somebody sits re-typing eleven invoices into QuickBooks off a printout.
Your bookkeeper is not switching — and shouldn't have to. So the accounting side is an extra on top of a system that already works without it: connect it and the typing stops; leave it off and nothing is missing.
Sending an invoice puts it in your QuickBooks company, once
The invoice is copied into your own QuickBooks file with the same number, due date, memo and total, posted against the item and income account you mapped. It records that it has been pushed, so it never happens twice, however many times a send gets retried. Building the bill off the estimate and the draw schedule, picking the lines, and fixing a wrong one all happen on the invoicing screen — this page picks up from where you press send.
A send times out, somebody presses it again, and the customer gets a second copy of a $51,000 draw invoice — then rings to ask which one he owes.
A customer should never get two copies of a $51,000 draw because a send timed out. The QuickBooks id is stamped on the invoice the moment it lands and every later push checks it first — the copy in the books is the invoice as it was sent.
Your lines here, one total line in the books
The invoice carries its own lines here — draw, change order, services. QuickBooks receives one line for the total, described by the invoice title and posted against the item and income account you picked in the mapping panel. Until an item is mapped, the push refuses and says so by name rather than guessing.
An import writes eleven made-up income accounts into the books, and the accountant spends the close unpicking your naming out of a P&L he has to file.
The chart of accounts belongs to your bookkeeper, and she will thank you for not filling it with ours. One item and one income account is a decision she makes once and can check in a minute; per-line categories stay where your cost coding already lives.
A payment your bookkeeper records in QuickBooks marks the invoice paid here
Try itQuickBooks tells us the moment an invoice or a payment changes, the balance is copied onto the matching invoice — part paid, or paid in full — and the job moves with it. The figure is set outright, never added to, so a repeated message cannot apply twice.
The cheque is deposited and posted on Tuesday, and on Thursday somebody rings the customer about an invoice he has already paid.
Nobody should ring a customer about a bill he paid on Tuesday. Once the invoice is in the books, the books are the authority on money — the balance is read whole from QuickBooks, so a repeated message can never apply twice.
A message that never arrives is not how you find out you were paid
Try itAlongside the live notification, every invoice carrying a QuickBooks id has its balance re-read on a schedule — paid ones included, because a refund or a deleted payment puts a balance back. An invoice you recorded by hand is never touched.
One notification is lost during a deploy, the invoice sits at 'sent' for a month, and the collections call goes to the man who paid in full three weeks ago.
You should never find out you were paid by noticing a message didn't arrive. Alongside the live notice, every invoice with a QuickBooks id is re-read on a schedule, so a lost notification can't leave a paid bill reading unpaid.
You can see whether a job actually reached QuickBooks, and retry it
A chip on the job reads Synced, Syncing, or Sync failed — with a Retry beside it — and names what was made in the books: a project, a sub-customer, or the customer alone. A scheduled sweep re-drives anything that errored, was never synced, or was left half-done by a process that died.
A worker dies mid-sync, the job never reaches the books, and nobody finds out until the accountant asks in January where the Route 372 shop went.
The office wants to know, without asking, whether a job made it into the books. The state is written on the record — Synced, Syncing or Sync failed — with Retry beside it and an automatic re-drive for anything stuck.
QuickBooks being down costs you a warning, not a blocked invoice
Every QuickBooks step is best-effort. If the push fails, your send to the customer has already succeeded, the reason is stored on the invoice, and you get a warning rather than a failure. The platform runs with or without QuickBooks connected — which is also what makes it safe to be halfway through switching.
Intuit has an outage on the 30th, and the delivery draw that pays for next week's steel cannot leave the building.
A customer waiting on a bill should never wait on your accounting software. The customer-facing send runs first and the books second; if QuickBooks is down you get a warning beside the invoice, not a blocked send.
Customers get matched before they get created
Try itIt checks what it already knows first — no call at all — then the email address, then the display name, which is what catches customers your bookkeeper created directly in QuickBooks. Only then is a new one made. It works off the billing block on the invoice, so a customer with no contact record of their own still matches.
The books grow three Brad Garbers, and the aged receivables report splits one man's money across all of them.
Duplicate customers in the books are a bookkeeper's nightmare. Matching runs on what we already know, then email, then name — because the bookkeeper types customers straight into QuickBooks and always will.
Countersigning a contract puts the job into QuickBooks for job costing
Where your plan allows it, the job becomes a real QuickBooks project whose status moves when the build is started. Where it does not, it becomes a sub-customer — and failing that, the customer alone. Counter-signing itself belongs to the contract engine; this page picks it up at the moment the document goes fully executed and the job lands in your books.
The lumber bills for the Route 372 shop land in the books with nothing to code them against, and job costing for that build becomes a spreadsheet somebody builds in March from memory.
Job costing starts when the job is real — the moment you countersign. The job lands in QuickBooks then, so the bookkeeper can code costs to it from day one without asking you to set it up.
Your plan decides how much of it QuickBooks will hold
The card reads back the company you are attached to, the plan it detected, and when it last moved anything. On a Simple Start or Essentials file it says plainly what that plan will not carry — class tracking for per-job profitability, native change orders — instead of offering a feature that quietly does nothing.
A feature that fails silently on your plan is worse than one that says so: you find out in the reports, in a quarter you cannot go back and re-run.
You shouldn't have to know which QuickBooks plan you're on for this to work. The plan is inferred and treated as a floor, never a reason to switch something off — the better option is tried first, and QuickBooks is allowed to say no.
They pay through your books without leaving your page
Try itThe Pay button sits on your own branded invoice page, and the money runs through your QuickBooks. You choose bank transfer only or bank transfer and card, because card is a percentage of the whole invoice. QuickBooks emailing its own copy is off unless you switch it on, so the customer gets one bill from you rather than two within a minute of each other.
The customer presses Pay on a $51,000 invoice and lands on a page that does not exist, and now your bill looks broken.
A customer who can pay the moment he reads the bill usually does. The pay button only shows when QuickBooks has a real payments account behind it — checked when the link is stored and again when it's shown — so nobody presses a dead link.
Outstanding here means outstanding there
Outstanding, overdue and paid on this screen are built from balances QuickBooks set, not from a status somebody remembered to change. The draw schedule decides what gets billed; the books decide what has been collected.
The receivables number on your screen and the one your accountant reads out on the phone are four thousand dollars apart, and neither of you can say which is wrong.
Two systems that each keep their own opinion of who has paid will disagree within a month. Once an invoice is in the books this side stops keeping an opinion, so what's outstanding here is what's outstanding there.
- 1Connect your QuickBooks company once, from settings.
- 2Map the item and income account your invoices should post against.
- 3Send an invoice and it appears in your books, same number, same total.
- 4Your bookkeeper records a payment there, and it marks paid here.
- 5A chip on the job reads Synced, Syncing or Sync failed — with Retry beside it.
Builders already run their books in QuickBooks, and their bookkeeper is not switching. But a platform that demands it locks out everyone who does not use it. So everything works with or without it connected — and when it is connected, a QuickBooks problem shows up as a warning, not a failed send: the invoice still reaches your customer. It is also pinned to one published version of the QuickBooks interface, because otherwise behaviour changes without warning on somebody else's release schedule.
- Double data entry between the field system and the books.
- Customer records diverging between two systems.
- An accounting outage blocking day-to-day work.
Connect and disconnect QuickBooks
The standard QuickBooks sign-in. Your company name and plan come back with it. Disconnect revokes at Intuit first, then clears everything on our side. Project tracking is asked for separately, on purpose.
QuickBooks emails the invoice with its own pay link
A follow-up send from inside QuickBooks. If you have QuickBooks Payments turned on, that email carries their pay button — bank debit or card — alongside your own invoice link. If the email hiccups, the invoice still exists in your books; only the email is retried.
Sync status, retry, and an automatic re-drive
Two halves. The chip turns an otherwise silent background job into something you can see, with a manual retry sitting on it. The sweep independently picks up anything that errored, never synced, or was left half-done by a process that died.
