QuickBooks Online Integration for CiviCRM

Stop re-keying your CiviCRM money into your accounts. Let it flow.

CiviQuickBooks connects CiviCRM to QuickBooks Online so that the donations, membership dues and event fees you record in CiviCRM appear in QuickBooks as properly coded Invoices and Payments, and the status of those Invoices flows back into CiviCRM. Your fundraisers keep working in CiviCRM. Your finance team keeps working in QuickBooks. Nobody copies numbers between the two.

What it makes possible

• Your books stay in step with your database. A Contribution saved in CiviCRM becomes a QuickBooks Invoice, and a Contact becomes a QuickBooks Customer, without anyone touching a spreadsheet.
• Your members and donors see the truth. When an Invoice is paid, voided or cancelled in QuickBooks, the matching Contribution in CiviCRM updates to Completed or Cancelled, so staff do not have to ask finance what has been paid.
• Your finance team gets clean, coded data. Each line item lands on the QuickBooks Product/Service and tax code you chose, so income is reported the way your accountant expects.
• Your backlog is not stranded. Bringing years of existing Contributions across is a single tick box and a progress bar, not a data-migration project.

Highlights

• Two-way sync. Contacts and Contributions are pushed to QuickBooks. Customers and Invoice statuses are pulled back.
• Contacts to Customers, Contributions to Invoices. Paid Contributions get a Payment recorded against the Invoice too, with the transaction ID as the reference.
• Matches existing Customers. If a QuickBooks Customer already has the same name as a CiviCRM Contact, they are linked rather than duplicated.
• Account-code driven. The Acctg Code on your CiviCRM Financial Accounts decides which QuickBooks Product/Service and tax code each line item uses.
• Works in four QuickBooks regions. Developed and tested with QuickBooks Online Australia, United States, United Kingdom and Canada. The company's country is detected automatically.
• Production or sandbox. Rehearse against a QuickBooks Development company, then flip one setting to go live.
• Runs unattended. Four Scheduled Jobs do the work on your site's cron, and the extension backs off by itself if QuickBooks rate limits are reached.
• Visible and recoverable. Each Contact shows its sync status and any error from QuickBooks. Failures are listed in one place and can be retried with a click.
• Modern authentication. OAuth 2.0, with a CiviCRM System Status warning when the connection needs to be re-authorised.

Make it yours

Most behaviour is a setting on the QuickBooks Online Settings page, not a code change.

• What gets synced. Choose the Contribution statuses to push (for example Completed and Pending), skip whole payment processors, and set a "Day zero" so older records are never sent.
• How Invoices look. Generate invoice numbers in CiviCRM with your own prefix (INV_%d, Civi-%07d) or let QuickBooks number them. Set a Customer Memo, and allow online card or ACH payment from the QuickBooks Invoice.
• Who gets emailed. Have QuickBooks email customers never, only for unpaid Invoices, or always.
• How taxes are applied. Map your own GST or sales tax codes onto CiviCRM Financial Accounts.
• When it runs. Run each Scheduled Job as often as suits you, or run it by hand.

Real-world uses

• A membership organisation invoices annual dues through CiviCRM. Each renewal appears in QuickBooks as an Invoice coded to the right income account. When the treasurer receives payment there, the membership's Contribution is marked Completed in CiviCRM.
• A charity taking online donations has every donation, from every payment processor except the ones it chooses to skip, arrive in QuickBooks with its Payment recorded and the processor's transaction ID as the reference, ready for reconciliation.
• An association running paid events codes registrations to different QuickBooks Products/Services using different Financial Types, with the right tax treatment on each line.
• A team moving onto CiviCRM with years of history queues all Contributions since a chosen date in one step, and rehearses first against a QuickBooks sandbox company.
• A bookkeeper gets a clear list of anything that failed to sync, and why, instead of discovering gaps at month end.

How it works, in brief

The Account Sync extension notices when a Contribution is saved and queues it, together with its Contact. CiviQuickBooks then sends queued Contacts first, then Invoices (and Payments), and reads changes back from QuickBooks. Nothing is sent until it has been queued, which is why the initial sync guide includes a step to queue existing Contributions. See How it works for the details.

Quick start

1. Install Account Sync and QuickBooks Online Integration. See Installation.
2. Create an Intuit app, complete Intuit's App assessment questionnaire, enter the app's keys and click Authorize. See Configuration.
3. Map your Financial Accounts to QuickBooks Products/Services and tax codes. See Mapping financial accounts.
4. Follow the initial sync guide to bring your existing Contributions across safely, trying a few records first.

Requirements

• CiviCRM 6.11 or later
• The Account Sync extension
• A QuickBooks Online company (AU, US, UK or CA)
• An Intuit Developer Account, sign up at https://developer.intuit.com/. This account must be added as a user of Admin user type to the QuickBooks Online company being integrated.
• An Intuit App, created in that Intuit Developer Account, to provide the OAuth 2.0 Client ID and Client Secret. See Configuration.
• A completed Intuit App assessment questionnaire, which Intuit requires before it issues the app's Production keys. See the App assessment questionnaire.
• CiviCRM Scheduled Jobs (cron) running on your site

CiviQuickBooks version 2 uses OAuth 2.0. If you are upgrading from version 1 you need to generate new keys, as described in Configuration.

Documentation

Page	What it covers
How it works	The queueing model, and exactly what is sent to QuickBooks for each Contact, Contribution and Payment
Installation	Requirements and installing the extension
Configuration	Connecting to QuickBooks, Production vs Development, all settings, and queueing existing Contributions
App assessment questionnaire	The questionnaire Intuit requires before issuing Production keys, with suggested answers for CiviQuickBooks
Mapping financial accounts	Matching Financial Accounts to QuickBooks Products/Services and tax codes (AU and US)
Initial sync: step by step	A safe, ordered walkthrough from fresh install to your first synced Invoices
Usage	Scheduled Jobs, the sync status on the Contact page, System Status checks and API rate limits
Troubleshooting	What common error messages mean, and special notes on mapping behaviour
Changes in this version	What changed in the current release
Contributing	Versioning and release process

Support and licence

The extension is licensed under the terms in LICENSE.txt. For help, see the Troubleshooting page, or contact Agileware.

Funding for this CiviCRM extension

Development and support for this Extension is funded solely by Agileware and CiviCRM community contributions. Agileware does not receive any funding at all for this Extension from the CiviCRM Partner program or CiviCRM LLC. Agileware welcome any funding to help continue paying Agileware staff to continue contributing to the CiviCRM community and Extensions.

:heart: Donate to Agileware to tell us how much you appreciate Agileware's CiviCRM open source work and community contributions.

About the Authors

This CiviCRM extension was developed by the team at Agileware.

Agileware provide a range of CiviCRM services including:

• CiviCRM migration
• CiviCRM integration
• CiviCRM extension development
• CiviCRM support
• CiviCRM hosting
• CiviCRM remote training services

Support your Australian CiviCRM developers, contact Agileware today!