QuickBooks

The QuickBooks integration keeps one customer record shared between Temponia and your books, and lets you push a finished invoice across instead of retyping it. Time itself never leaves Temponia. What crosses is the invoice you built from it.

QuickBooks is the narrowest of the three accounting integrations: customers come in, invoices go out, statuses come back. There is no user import and no project import.

Before you start

• A QuickBooks login for the company you bill from, with rights to authorise apps.
• Temponia owner or admin rights. Integrations sit under the Account menu.
• The Invoicing module switched on, if you intend to export invoices.
• No other accounting integration connected. Starting the QuickBooks authorisation while one is active stops with "Only one integration can be active at a time".

1. Connect QuickBooks

QuickBooks does not use Temponia's own Add integration button. Intuit requires its own.

1. Open Integrations from the Account menu.
2. Under Add an integration, pick QuickBooks. The Add integration button is replaced by Intuit's blue connect button.
3. Select the Intuit button. Authorisation opens in a separate window. Sign in, choose the QuickBooks company and approve.
4. The window closes on its own and the integrations page reloads with QuickBooks listed.

If the button never appears. It is loaded from Intuit rather than from Temponia. When it does not arrive within a few seconds, Temponia replaces it with "There was a problem communicating with QuickBooks. The service may be down or in heavy use. Try again later." Nothing is broken at your end; reload the page and try again.

2. Choose the tax system

Open the QuickBooks row for editing. Select a tax system lists the tax rates defined in your QuickBooks company. Temponia uses it to build the tax detail on exported invoices, so the VAT your Temponia invoice calculated is the VAT QuickBooks records.

Until a tax system is chosen, saving returns you to the same page instead of the integrations list.

There is no organisation picker here. The QuickBooks company is fixed by whichever one you approved during authorisation. To bill from a different company, delete the integration and connect again.

Importing customers

The QuickBooks row shows a single Clients button, which opens Map existing clients to QuickBooks. Each Temponia client gets a dropdown of QuickBooks customers, starting at Unmapped. Changes save as you make them, and a customer already claimed by another client is refused rather than moved.

Map what already exists, then select Synchronise clients. Active QuickBooks customers that are mapped have their name refreshed; ones with no match are created as new Temponia clients, named after the QuickBooks display name.

Addresses are not read from QuickBooks. Fill in client addresses in Temponia, and be aware that running the client synchronisation clears the free text address field on the clients it touches. The structured street, postal code and city fields are left alone, so use those if you invoice from Temponia.

QuickBooks employees are not imported. Add your team with invitations instead.

Invoicing with QuickBooks connected

On New invoice, the client panel gains Select a corresponding client and a Create client in QuickBooks checkbox. One of the two has to happen before the invoice can be exported.

From the invoice overview:

If your Temponia invoice already has a number, it is sent as the QuickBooks document number. Whatever QuickBooks ends up using is written back, so the two systems agree afterwards. An invoice with no tax on it is marked in QuickBooks as tax not applicable rather than being taxed at zero.

Status sync reads each exported invoice and translates it: printed or emailed becomes sent, a part paid balance becomes partial, a zero balance becomes paid, and an outstanding balance past its due date becomes overdue. The Exported column shows which invoices have made the trip, and an exported invoice loses its Temponia edit button because QuickBooks now owns it.

Keeping the connection alive

The access QuickBooks grants lasts six months. Temponia renews it automatically once it is five months old, the next time the integration is used. An integration that sits completely untouched for six months therefore expires, and reconnecting is the fix: delete the row and run through the Intuit authorisation again.

Disconnecting

Select the delete icon on the QuickBooks row. Temponia tells Intuit to drop the connection and then removes it locally, so access stops on both sides.

Invoices and customers already created in QuickBooks stay there, and Temponia invoices keep the document numbers they were given. The accounting slot is freed, so Xero or Zoho become available in the Add an integration list.