r/quickbooksonline

What's up colleagues?

I’m a bookkeeper for a retail business that uses Square and QBO, and we’ve hit a workflow roadblock that I need advice on.

My client wants to maintain absolute control over their AR, so they’ve decided against any automated integrations (like Synder, LinkMyBooks, etc.) and they don’t want monthly aggregate journal entries (based on the Square summary report). This is because it skews theire reports. They already enter AP, which mostly hits COGS, so their revenue is understated when using Square summary journals and integrations which do not sync revenue earned, but not yet paid out.

Instead, they want me to manually mirror every Square invoice inside QBO to keep them perfectly synced because they want to be able to reflect proper AR balances in the books, which the two latter options do not cover.

While I can handle the data entry, I’m concerned about maintaining an accurate accrual-based set of books regarding Square processing fees, sales tax nuances, and deferred revenue (like gift cards or deposits) that aren’t explicitly detailed when just copying an invoice over. Does anyone have a streamlined SOP or a specific Clearing account workflow that ensures these transaction costs and liabilities are captured accurately at month-end without losing the granular AR detail the client is looking for?

Right now, we are utilizing a hybrid approach.

1. They enter AP directly into QBO to capture COGS
2. We make weekly Square JEs to capture gross sales and all relevant items from the Square summary report.
3. We post all Square deposits to a clearing account.

To summarize I need to:

1. Manually enter each invoice from Square to QBO. The invoices must include products/services, tax calculations, discounts, and any other similar elements.
2. I want to maintain the workflow through a Square clearing account.
3. I need deferred sales, fees, liabilities and any other line items typical for Square to fit into this workflow.
4. I need to set a cutoff date for switching to this approach. My idea is to pick a date and make a single journal entry to capture the outstanding ARs at that moment. I am still not sure what the journal would exactly look like, since it would probably include recognizing a lot of revenue at once, so I am not sure about that. After the journal entry is made, we'd continue entering invoices normally and any adjusting JEs that might be required.

Has anybody had a similar challenge before. Am I the only one who finds this a bit confusing. I don't have a ton of experience, but still.... Open to any suggestions.

Thanks!

SOLVED

Hi all - a little confused on how best to handle this one.

We had a client pay an open invoice using credit card through the paynow link on our invoice. The amount was $70k and for some reason, it was paid in several chunks in a single day, 5 payments totalling $70k. Not sure if they processed it that way or if QB had a limit on how much they could make in a single payment or what.

Regardless, it marked the invoice paid based on those card payments. Separately, when the payment hit our bank, it was as a single entry for the full $70k (not the 5 small payments) and now the invoice is cleared from AR, and QB recorded those incoming 5 payments, but I still have the $70k bank deposit to record, but no open AR to book it to. It defaulted to undeposited funds and is showing as a ($70k) on AR.

How do I best clean this up?

I always find the QB autopayments cause weird issues like this. Have had other ones in the past, but for a former client, so I don't recall what the fix was and can't look at history to follow the same method.

Would appreciate some advice here. Thanks!

EDIT -

Thanks all for the replies, I was able to sort it. I applied the incoming bank transaction to the Undep funds entries, and treated that extra $70k payment as a duplicate. I zeroed it out and all ties out now. The issue is when QB autobooks CC payments, you don't need to manually create an Accept Payment against an invoice. We've never used the QB autopay features before, so was just unfamiliar.

Thanks again for the replies.

My client is still on quickbooks desktop and the bank will not do direct feeds. I get a pdf statement monthly and spend 3 hours typing 200 transactions. I know QBO has bank rules and imports, but moving them to Online is not an option this year. I tried converting the pdf to CSV but the formatting breaks and I spend more time fixing it than typing. Is there any reliable way to get pdf transactions into desktop without rekeying everything?

We run a small truck repair business, so I get invoices from multiple suppliers to complete repairs. As I enter the invoices I mark the parts as billable and apply that part to the customer. Worked smoothly in the old layout. New layout is a different story!

Contacted support and the gist of their answer is that you have to go into the customer hub, select the customer, select the item you want to bill and click on create invoice - that is great, but ... i will have 20+ billable parts to add to the invoice and this new way of billing does not allow you to combine billable items (so I'm going to bill the customer $1.12 for a seal on one invoice and $140 for a sensor on another invoice? - how does that make sense?)

Bring back the drop down menu that list the billable items associated with that customer so we can add as many or as little items we need to on one invoice

I tried sending a customer a statement today and instead of the standard, time tested lines which only include either the invoice # and amount or the check number and amount with a running tally and total which is easy to follow and easily understandable...

Now every invoice on the statement also brings in a bunch of line items completely confusing the shit out of everyone.

This has to be a bug right? This can't be by design.

Trying to understand what causes the most long-term cleanup work in QuickBooks setups.

Note: I got an alert to add flair but Reddit is only showing me the option to add "Tags" and not the Flair one, so I cannot add Flair at all. Sorry.

My company uses Quickbooks Online for accounting and Quickbooks Time for tracking, due to grant timekeeping requirements. We have 25 employees. I go into QBT to approval timesheets by pay period and see the 25 employees. All of a sudden today, I open it and see 75 unsubmitted timesheets instead of just the 6 that are actually outstanding. The extra "Workers" are vendors, that are now ported over from Quickbooks. Supposedly this is because 1099 tracking is on for these vendors. Our controller says we can't uncheck that box (even though these companies, not individuals) but for whatever reason they've now been assigned the "Worker" role and are showing in QBT when they never did before.

If I "archive" them in QBT, will that affect them showing in Quickbooks Online at all? Is there a way to avoid this without unchecking the 1099 tracking box? Any idea why this would happen all of a sudden when they never showed in QBT before?

Any help/advice would be appreciated so I don't have to slog through 70 vendors that never have and never will, submit timesheets!

1-888-394-9046 For any technical issues like payroll not updating, file corruption, or login errors in QuickBooks Desktop, you can contact support at 1-888-394-9046 to get reliable help and smooth restoration of your accounting workflow. 1-888-394-9046

We use QBO solely as our general ledger so we only have to interact with it minimally. As such, We generate our invoices outside of QBO and email them as pdfs to our customers. I need to enter them into QBO to track revenue and AR and want to do it programmatically. I don't need product tracking or inventory although I will need to keep customers in QBO. I wrote a quick program to take our standard pdfs and convert them in batch format to a csv file but QBO is super picky and keeps rejecting the format. I'm fed up with troubleshooting and even Claude Code has thrown up its hands. I see there are some paid third-party solutions that have good integration with QBO for this very purpose. Any recommendations from the group?

One thing I keep noticing with construction/QBO setups:

QuickBooks works fine until the reporting side gets more complicated. Then suddenly everyone has their own spreadsheet system running beside it.

Exporting reports into Excel.
Manually updating WIP schedules.
Tracking retainage separately.
Rebuilding over/under billings every month.
Trying to piece together actual job profitability.

Feels like eventually the spreadsheet becomes the thing everyone actually trusts.

Curious how other people are handling this once projects start getting larger/more active.

My Credit card account keeps adding random “Opening Balance Equity” line items with random numbers and adding an R for reconciled. I literally just reconciled on April 11. Came in to do May’s reconciliation and a bunch more of these are now in there. Does anyone keep the card out of the bank feed and manually add transactions in? I am SO frustrated! Haven’t had one clean month yet since signing up for QBO in January. 😡

I'm currently working on migrating a new customer with multiple businesses from Desktop to Online. I started with the smallest entity which is a small family trust, and we set it up on Ledger since it has only minimal transactions. Everything went smoothly aside from some small discrepancies in AR which has led me to finding a list of open items on the open invoices report. (I know, I feel stupid for not having checked this before migrating.) Turns out that the previous bookkeeper was not clearing open invoices properly, so even though notes (mostly family loans) were being paid, she was creating JEs which were not actually clearing the receivables.

But because I set up the entity on Ledger (we will not be needing AR going forward), I'm unable to create a credit memo or receive payment to clear the receivables. Does anyone know a way to clear these open items that doesn't involve me having to start the migration over again, or have to briefly bump up to Simple Start until I get it cleaned up?

I run a small SaaS company out of Austin, four person team, been on QuickBooks Online since we launched in 2021, over the first two years I did what everyone said to do, connected Stripe for payments. Hooked up our expense management tool. Linked our payroll processor. Set up the native integrations and let everything sync automatically, on paper it looked like a modern efficient financial stack. Everything talking to everything. No manual data entry. Just clean automated books.

But that was the story I was telling myself

So, last spring my co-founder asked me how long I actually spent on the books every month. Not the bookkeeper, me personally reviewing and cleaning things up after all the integrations had done their thing

And I had never actually counted so I started tracking it for one month

The number was eleven hours ( : 

Eleven hours of my time in a single month going behind integrations that were supposed to be automatic and fixing what they had gotten wrong and stripe was the biggest problem, every payout hitting our bank account was a net amount after fees but QuickBooks was seeing the deposit and booking it as gross revenue, so our P&L was consistently understating income and our processing fees were completely invisible, I had been manually adjusting this every single month for two years and had just accepted it as part of the process without ever questioning why it was still happening….

The expense management tool was creating duplicate entries about thirty percent of the time so it would sync a transaction and then QuickBooks would also pick it up from the bank feed and suddenly we had two entries for the same thing and finding and deleting duplicates had become a routine part of my month end process and again I had just accepted it as normal

The payroll integration was posting journal entries to the wrong accounts intermittently, not every month, just often enough that I had to go through the payroll entries manually every single month to verify they had landed correctly rather than just trusting them

None of these problems were dramatic on their own, each one seemed like a minor inconvenience, together across a month they were eating eleven hours of founder time on cleanup that was supposed to have been automated, the thing that really got me was when I calculated what eleven hours of my time was actually worth to the business and compared it against what I was theoretically saving by having the integrations in the first place

The integrations were not saving time, they were shifting where the time went. Instead of manual data entry upfront I was doing manual cleanup on the back end and the cleanup was actually less predictable and more frustrating than just doing it properly in the first place would have been

I spent a couple of weeks properly investigating each integration to understand exactly where the failures were coming from and fixing them at the source rather than just cleaning up the output every month for the Stripe issue the fix was building a proper clearing account setup so gross revenue and fees were handled correctly before anything hit the books

For the duplicate entries I found a setting in the expense tool that I had never configured properly that was causing the double sync, for the payroll mapping I spent an afternoon with my accountant rebuilding the account mapping from scratch to match our actual chart of accounts

going from eleven hours to two and a half hours was not about finding better tools or switching platforms, it was about actually understanding what each integration was doing to the books and fixing the underlying problems instead of living with the symptoms

If you are running multiple integrations into QuickBooks and you have never actually timed how long you spend cleaning up after them every month, do that this month before you add anything new or switch anything out, the number might surprise you

Happy to go into detail on the Stripe clearing account fix specifically if anyone wants it because that one alone was probably four of the eleven hours every month

I am at the end of my rope with QBO. Used desktop for 17 years, very little problems.

A new problem this week- the Gopayments app on my tablet will no longer rotate and when you click on a customer to see their invoices, they're on the right side of the screen and you can't scroll down and see them anymore. Arrrrgh! Not sure if anyone else has encountered this problem or anyone knows a solution to this. I can't show payment to a particular invoice without being able to see/ click on it!!

Thank you for any help

Full disclosure, looking for confirmation as to if this is just a bug or a real issue with QBO.

Working with a client on building an automation, and every time we reopen a bill, the tax rate does something odd. It either changes, or it recalculates incorrectly. Is this a bug or is this a real thing people deal with?

I think I can solve it, but I'm not crazy am I?

Is this happening to others?

I need a separate AR account for Grant's Receivable to track state and county grant amounts. QBO let's me create multiple AR account types, but there is no way to choose which one to use on invoicing or received payments.

I know QBDT lets you do it, as I have it for another non profit I work for, but is there any option in QBO to do this?

TIA!

I saw on here a while back that people were getting pop up adds on their QuickBooks dashboard, etc. for other Intuit products or driving people towards upgrading their subscriptions. Since I have an accountant account, I hadn't seen this happening, but now I'm starting to watch it roll through.

I already have a crisis of confidence in working with QuickBooks/Intuit every year when their price increases roll out. When you look at the numbers on an annual, this is a really costly software for business owners to use and now you're going to beat people over the head with advertisements because they haven't purchased your most expensive widget? I don't exclusively work in QuickBooks, but most of the CPAs/EAs I work with prefer it for their client and so it feels like being between a rock and a hard place. Intuit already has crazy market share and record profits. Can't they just calm down?

okay so i have been running my shopify store for about 14 months now and my books are honestly embarrassing at this point. i need some real advice from people who have actually figured this out.

here is what is happening:

every time shopify sends a payout to my bank it is always a different number than what my quickbooks shows as revenue for that period. i know shopify batches orders and deducts fees before depositing but i have no idea how to map that correctly in qbo. right now i have a mix of some transactions recorded as sales receipts and some as deposits and nothing matches anything.

the second problem is my products. i have about 200 skus and when i look at quickbooks the product names are either wrong or completely missing. so my cogs is basically useless. i cannot tell which products are actually profitable.

third thing. shopify payments fees, refunds, chargebacks. i have no idea where these are going in my chart of accounts. my accountant asked me about it last month and i just sent her a blank stare.

i tried using the native qbo shopify connector and it made things worse. it started creating duplicate entries and my bank reconciliation is now off by thousands of dollars.

i am not against paying for a proper integration tool. i just need to know what actually works for someone in my situation. does anyone have a workflow they use that actually keeps qbo clean and reconciles properly every month?

small store, around 400 orders a month, shopify payments, no amazon or other channels. just shopify to qbo.

Bank feed search defaults to “related results” instead of exact results.

Is this a new thing? Is there a way to turn off or change this setting so the search results are “exact” instead of “related”?

In the bank feed, I search for a word to pull up the relevant transactions, but there appears to be a new setting or automation that default the search results to be “related” instead of “exact results”. And it does me no good because it usually misses a bunch of relevant transactions! It’s happened multiple times now.

There is a green tag that pops up, just to the right, saying “Show exact results only” which I can toggle to show exact instead of related results, but it’s annoying to do every time! And heaven forbid I miss it and forget (it’s petty tiny) because all of a sudden I’m thinking my bank feed glitched and didn’t download like a year’s worth of transactions….

Shouldn’t the default in a bank feed search be to exact results? Couldn’t the green toggle/tag to the right instead say “Show related results”? Seems like it would be more user friendly… Am I wrong?

In any event, does anyone know if it’s possible to change this default setting for search results so I get “exact results” instead of “related results” when I type a word into the search box and hit enter?

https://preview.redd.it/40unc7xmtz0h1.png?width=1270&format=png&auto=webp&s=dd9256b74b2dbe056d6d24e0ab24fe4402d485cd

I received this pop up when logging into a client account this afternoon. I very much do NOT want this to happen with our current workflow, but when I clicked the link "Manage Settings," it took me to the payment options section of settings - and nothing was remotely related.

Web search didn't pull up anything.

Did anyone else get this? And, more importantly, does anyone know how to turn this off? TIA