r/QuickBooks

I recently spent seven days locked out of two QuickBooks accounts. One that I use to access client accounts, and a second legacy account that holds my own books, which used to be on QuickBooks Desktop.

Both are back now, so I thought I’d leave some tips for the next poor bastard who wanders over here in a state of panic.

First, only call through the official QuickBooks website. Google is full of fake support numbers.

To get past the AI gatekeeper, say: “Existing account reactivation case. Identity verification failed. I need a representative.” If all else fails, start swearing. They'll put you on hold to talk to a real person.

Once you get a human on the line:

• Give them your case number immediately (or establish one if this is the first call)
• Write down every new case number, representative’s name, date, and promise.
• Take screenshots of everything.
• Assume nobody has read the prior notes.
• Assume any promised callback is bullshit.
• They have no direct line to the security team. 
• If you have multiple Intuit user IDs, make sure they open a separate reactivation request for each one. This is actually what took the longest...they only did one at a time under separate case numbers. Consecutively.
• If they say your account doesn’t exist, ask them to search deactivated users, legacy accounts, and CAMPs/product-registration records, not just the current QBO directory.
• Once they find the company, ask for its Company ID and save it somewhere. If you actually know your Company ID, that will save you time. Offer that at the beginning of the call.

At one point Intuit emailed me that it hadn’t received my photo ID. When I tried submitting it again, Intuit told me I couldn’t because it had already received my photo ID. This doom loop was apparently not considered contradictory within the Intuit ecosystem.

One account came back after a few days. The second (legacy account) took a full week, several calls, three identity verification submissions, multiple case numbers, and a representative finally searching the correct system.

The data was still there. The account was still there. Intuit couldn’t find it.

Mainly, don't freak out. It's pretty unlikely you were actually hacked or your account permanently disappeared.

You will never hear directly from the security team. 

You will never know exactly what happened.

You will get your account back. Eventually.

Hey everyone,

I'm an accountant (public and construction industry) in Alberta , Canada, and my partner is a physio who opened her clinic about 2 years ago. It has grown pretty quickly — what started as a single-practitioner clinic is now a multidisciplinary clinic with Physios, Kinesiologists, OTs, Speech, etc.

Right now, they use a third-party bookkeeper who handles the bookkeeping through QBO. We recently hired a receptionist, and the goal is to eventually move most of the day-to-day bookkeeping/admin work in-house, with me overseeing the accounting and reporting while not giving up my job.

The issue we're running into is that all of the practitioners use Jane for appointments, billing, payments, and tracking outstanding balances. There isn't currently a direct connection/automation between Jane and QBO, so the QBO reconciliations aren't particularly meaningful. There's a lot of manual work involved in trying to tie everything together.

As the clinic continues to grow, I'd like to set things up properly rather than just keep adding more manual processes.

The main things I'm hoping to figure out are:

1. How to build some basic policies/procedures so reception can handle the day-to-day transactions consistently.
2. The best way to get the relevant information from Jane into QBO without creating a ton of unnecessary manual work.
3. How other clinics/accountants structure the monthly reconciliation between Jane, the bank, and QBO.
4. Eventually, I'd like to have the bookkeeping/accounting done mostly in-house, with me doing the oversight and more complex accounting.

For anyone who has worked with clinics using Jane + QBO, how have you structured this?

Do you import individual transactions/invoices into QBO, use summary journal entries, or have another workflow that works well?

Also interested in any good resources, SOPs, or general advice for setting this up properly from the beginning.

Thanks!

There are a ton of third party apps that claim to do imports. And I really don't need anything complicated. Mainly just the ability to import multiple invoices at a time. Because our sales come from another system.

But there are so many options, I don't know where to start, and don't want to sink more money into it than I have to. So any suggestions????? Please!

Just launched a way to read your QuickBooks Online data using SQL. This lets you connect to your QBO data using any tool that can talk to postgres (psql, postico, dbeaver, python, ruby, jupyter).

Coolest two use cases we've found: instantly updating QBO data in Excel AND Claude/Codex/LLMs are WAY WAY better at reporting using SQL than using the QBO API or MCP.

It's really fast so even complex queries can come back instantaneously. Companies with 100K transactions can run year-over-year comparisons in milliseconds.

https://instabooks.io/docs/db

Would love any feedback and cool usage examples!

If so, what was your experience or which did you go with?

A few weeks ago, I got this message whenever I tried to pull data from our Scotiabank accounts:

"To keep all your data on track, a better connection is available here. Since the current one is going away, we recommend you update it now."

When I attempt to update it, or redo the link, or anything, it refuses the connection and gives me an error. I've attempted this on both mobile and browser apps with zero difference.

Anyone have a solution for this? I'm behind on sales tax filings now and QB support is nonexistent. Scotiabank just says it's QB's problem, which I believe.

10 years ago, QuickBooks felt almost like the default choice for a small company or startup.

If you were starting a business and needed accounting software, you basically picked Quickbooks and moved on.

But I'm wondering if that's still true in 2026.

I'm helping with a relatively new company right now and we're at the point where we need to choose the accounting stack we want to use long term. QuickBooks is obviously one of the first names that comes up, but I keep seeing people complain about pricing, support, integrations, payroll, and the product getting more complicated over time (especially in this subreddit, 90% of the messages are complaints about the software).

At the same time, switching accounting software once a company has grown sounds like a massive pain, so I'd rather choose the right thing from the beginning.

For people who actually use QuickBbooks today: if you were starting again today, would you go with something else like Xero, Wave, Zoho, etc.?

It’s a very known issue that emails to live/outlook/hotmail are never received. I’ve contacted support and they sent me a list of things to do on the recipient end to update. Friends using hotmail have used this technique and still emails not received.

But finding other recipients are now not receiving invoices. Not sure what wider I can do on my end. But paying for a service and without the invoices going through I’m not getting paid.

We've used QBD for at least 28 years. It still works perfectly for our very small business. 2 years ago, got scared into paying an annual subscription for Quickbooks Online Essentials for about $400. Went up to @$800 last year and this year over $900, due end of September. Finally called QB to see what we are getting for this $$. Are they backing up online for us? No, that would require Advanced, and more $. We have a call with QB in a week, where they will try to convince us to pay more, I am sure. Strangely, they seemed ready today to cancel the Essentials sub and let us fly free, when I suggested it. I still want to use the desktop version as it works perfectly for us, but would pay modestly for an online backup, even though I have been doing local backup with a USB fob for decades with no problem. We still plan to run this business for another 5-10 years as we have and am hoping I can still use QBD as we have been. What's my play here?

Hi everyone,

I need some advice from anyone who has done a QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop migration.

We are doing this migration because we are moving to a completely different accounting software. Right now, we are in a testing phase to build an archive of QBO. We want to keep our historical US data safe and ready in case of an IRS audit. We are using a QBDT 2021 trial version on a local VM because the limit is higher than on the QBDT 2024 trial version. We will not use this file for daily accounting anymore, but our users still need to be able to open it and look into the specific transaction details.

I checked the numbers after the migration using QB migration tool and found a huge data loss. The Intuit migration tool dropped a lot of transactions. There are 1,500 missing lines on one specific account alone, and there are many more differences on other accounts. The total number of missing lines is massive.

Typing everything by hand is impossible, but since our users need to be able to search and view the actual history inside QBDT, simply doing a journal entry to fix the balances won't work for us. We need the actual lines.

I am thinking about using an app like Transaction Pro to push the missing data from my QBO Excel exports directly into QBDT. 

Has anyone dealt with this kind of massive data loss going from QBO to Desktop? Is there a way to do a better export in the first place without losing all this data? Maybe I did something wrong during the migration process?

If the data loss is unavoidable, what is the most reliable way to inject thousands of missing lines back into QBDT so the transaction details are actually there for our users to see?
Thanks in advance !

So, let’s say I install a minisplit, and I’m an electrician,

I buy parts in bulk for electrical so my inventory is important, and I install the parts and send the customer a bill for labor and materials, no break down. Just match the signed bid amount.

Once the job is paid I will just delete the labor and materials lines and add the actual labor costs and actual materials used and then a line that shows my profit, but the customer can see the invoice once I edit it? So I usually just end up making a new one

Anyways, this is annoying because so many of my customers and filing rebates for these mini splits and they want a copy of the invoice, but I have already voided the thing and replaced it with one that tracks my inventory and breaks down the actual costs.

How do I do this better?

I’m hoping someone familiar with both QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online can tell me if I’m missing something.
We have customers with multiple service locations. For example:
ABC Company (parent customer)
↳ Location A (sub-customer/service location)
↳ Location B
↳ Location C
I want to create the invoice under Location A so that the invoice remains in that location’s transaction history. That way I can open Location A years from now and see all of the invoices for that specific location. Since Location A is a sub-customer, those transactions also roll up under ABC Company, which is exactly what I want.
The problem is the Bill To on the actual invoice.
If I create the invoice under Location A, QBO puts Location A in the Bill To field. What I want is:
Bill To: ABC Company
Ship To/Service Location: Location A
while still keeping the invoice itself associated with Location A.
I’ve tried the Bill parent customer setting. From what I can tell, that doesn’t change the Bill To when creating an invoice directly under the sub-customer. I also tested the delayed-charge workflow: create a delayed charge under the sub-customer, then create an invoice under the parent and pull in the charge. That works, but the location ends up with the charge in its transaction history while the actual invoice is under the parent. It also adds an extra step to every invoice.
I also tried changing the sub-customer’s billing address to the parent’s billing information while keeping the location as the shipping address, but QBO still displays the sub-customer’s name at the top of the Bill To section.
I used QuickBooks Desktop previously, and I’m used to being able to maintain the individual location/job history while billing the parent customer. I’m trying to figure out whether there’s an equivalent workflow in QBO.
Is there any way in QBO to have all three of these at once?
Invoice is associated with the sub-customer/location and appears in its invoice history.
Transaction also rolls up under the parent customer.
The printed invoice shows the parent customer as Bill To and the sub-customer/location as Ship To, without having to use delayed charges.
Or is this simply a limitation/difference in QuickBooks Online compared with Desktop?

Hey guys, I'm wondering if someone can help me here. I have a bunch of "cost of goods sold" expenses that I have been categorizing for the past few months under a specific customer (under the customer/porject tab), and just realized now that I should have been checking the "billable" box so that I can invoice for all of these. But there seems to be no way to just go to the customer page and find all those expenses. all I can find is the previous invoices, payments and deposits. no expenses. can anyone help me with this?

I’m trying to choose between the QuickBooks and TurboTax certification paths on Intuit Academy, as from what I understand you have to pick one/can’t work for QuickBooks Live and TurboTax Live simultaneously. 

So, does anyone know which of these options is more likely to hire someone with no relevant experience (beyond completing their certification program)? And are there any other factors I should consider when making this decision? Any help would be much appreciated

Client's credit union connection to QBO has been posting checking account transactions into the credit card account (but not vice versa), corrupting both feeds and making the bank feed useless for either account.

My plan:

1. Disconnect the credit union connection in QBO immediately to stop further bad postings.
2. Pull manual statements for both the checking and credit card accounts for the affected period.
3. Have the client go through the statements and tag each transaction with category, class, and project in a spreadsheet.
4. Manually enter/upload the reviewed transactions into QBO.
5. Client is looking into switching to a different bank/card provider going forward.

Any comments or does anyone see anything I missed?

Update: Someone pointed out that I could download the CSV file from the financial institution and upload to QBO in place of the interface between QBO and the Credit Union. We tried that with the Credit card and it worked flawlessly. Next up is the checking account. Not perfect but an acceptable work around. Thanks for the help.

Hey all, one of my client's uses US bank and for the past 2 weeks we have been unable to get the US bank account re connected. It's worked fine for months and months but now any time I or my client try to reconnect the account, we get this warning. Is anyone else running into issues with US bank and QBO connections?

https://preview.redd.it/4aminpwsimih1.png?width=791&format=png&auto=webp&s=e41be3161d33ab0bb76498d8281bd0991752f19c

Why would there not be an option to customize what I want an employee to have access to? Instead, I need to use the QBO pre-defined users. This seems so odd and frustrating .