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Connect QuickBooks Online

Enter the credentials of your Intuit app, connect to the QuickBooks Online company of your organization with your own Intuit login, pull its chart of accounts and classes, disconnect, and change the company by unconfiguring the ERP.

Where to find it:your-organization.conta.financeERPRules

Conta Finance sends your ledger to your accounting system as journal entriesThe record of a transaction in the accounting system: a debit and a credit for each movement.. An organization works with one ERP at a time. Conta connects to QuickBooks Online and to Holded. For any other ERP, use Universal ERP, which works with files. The connection is the first step. After it, you map categories to ledger accounts, then you send a date range.

Before you start

  • You need Read and edit access to the organization. With Read only access, you can open the ERP page, but you cannot connect, refresh or disconnect. See Roles and access levels.
  • To change the company, you need Full access. See Change the company.
  • Only one ERP can be set up. When Holded or Universal ERP is already set up, QuickBooks Online refuses to connect until a person with Full access unconfigures the ERP.
  • You need a QuickBooks Online user who can give an app access to the company.
  • You need an app of your own at Intuit, in the developer portal at developer.intuit.com. Conta Finance connects through that app, so you enter its client ID and its client secret once. See Enter the app credentials.
  • An organization sends to one QuickBooks Online company. The first person who connects picks it. Every other person connects to the same company.
  • Each person connects with their own Intuit login. Conta sends every document with the connection of the person who selects Send to QuickBooks Online, never with the connection of someone else.

Enter the app credentials

Conta Finance connects to QuickBooks Online through an app that your organization registers at Intuit. The credentials of that app belong to the whole organization: one person enters them once, and every person connects through them. Conta does not read them from a setting of the service. If your organization connected QuickBooks Online before, and the Rules tab now asks for the credentials, enter them once. If you enter the same client ID as before, the people who were connected stay connected.

  1. At developer.intuit.com, create an app for QuickBooks Online accounting, or open the one you have.
  2. On the Rules tab, copy the Redirect URI with Copy. In the app at Intuit, add that address as a redirect URI. Write it exactly as Conta shows it. Intuit refuses the sign-in when the address differs by one character.
  3. At Intuit, copy the client ID and the client secret of the keys that match the environment you want: the sandbox keys for a sandbox company, the production keys for a real company.
  4. In Conta, enter the Client ID and the Client secret. In Environment, pick Sandbox or Production.
  5. Select Save credentials.

Conta stores the secret encrypted, and it never shows it again. After you save, the section shows the client ID, the environment, and that the secret is saved. Connect QuickBooks Online is off until you save the credentials.

To change them, select Replace credentials and enter the client ID and the secret again. A new client ID ends every connection made through the old one: each person connects again. A new secret for the same client ID changes nothing for them. While a company is connected, you cannot change the environment, because a sandbox company and a real company are different companies. To use the other environment, unconfigure the ERP and set it up again. See Change the company.

Connect the company

The steps are the same for the first person and for everyone after. The first person picks the company for the whole organization. The others must pick that same company.

  1. Open ERP in the sidebar. The page opens on the Rules tab.
  2. Select Connect QuickBooks Online. You are sent to Intuit, the company that runs QuickBooks.
  3. Sign in to Intuit if it asks you to.
  4. Pick the company to connect, and allow Conta Finance to read and write its books. If the organization already has a company, pick that one.
  5. Intuit sends you back to the ERP page.

When the connection works, a message says the company is connected. If it fails, the message says why, and nothing is connected. Fix the cause and select Connect QuickBooks Online again.

If you pick another company than the one of the organization, Conta refuses. The message names the company of the organization and the id of the one you picked, and nothing is stored. Conta also asks Intuit to revoke the access you just gave. Connect again, and pick the company that the message names.

If the Rules tab says QuickBooks Online is not configured, the service cannot store secrets yet, so it cannot save the credentials. Write to [email protected].

What the connection card shows

Under the credentials section, the connection card of the Rules tab shows the company of the organization. It shows the same company to everyone. What it offers depends on whether you are connected:

  • You are connected. The card shows Disconnect. The Refresh accounts button is on the Chart of accounts card under it.
  • The organization has a company, and you are not connected. The card says that you have no connection of your own, and offers Connect QuickBooks Online. You can read the rules, the report and the entries, but you cannot refresh the data or send until you connect.
  • No person has connected yet. The card offers Connect QuickBooks Online, and says that the company you pick becomes the company of the whole organization.

With Read only access, the card shows the company and offers no button. To change the company, see Change the company.

When you are connected, the card shows:

  • the name of the company, with a production or sandbox badge;
  • the day you connected;
  • the currency the company keeps its books in;
  • the company id in QuickBooks.

The Chart of accounts card under it says when Conta last read the ERP data.

The connection card on the Rules tab of the ERP page, with the company name, the books currency and the Disconnect button

Read the chart of accounts

Right after the first connection, Conta has not read anything from QuickBooks yet. The rules pick from a copy of the company's ledger accounts, so someone must read them first. The copy is shared: when one person refreshes it, everyone sees the new data. You must be connected to refresh. Without your own connection, Refresh accounts is off, and pointing at it says to connect first.

  1. On the Chart of accounts card, select Refresh accounts.
  2. Wait for the message that says what changed: how many accounts and classes Conta added, updated and removed.

The card shows how many accounts and classes Conta holds, and the day it last read them.

Conta reads two lists from QuickBooks:

  • The chart of accounts. Each ledger account keeps its QuickBooks account type, so each slot of a rule offers only the accounts that belong on its side of the books. Inactive accounts are not offered.
  • The classes. A rule can tag its lines with one class. If the company does not track classes, the list is empty.

When you connect, Conta also reads the name of the company and the currency of its books.

When to refresh again

Conta does not read QuickBooks on a timer. Select Refresh accounts again when:

  • you add, rename or deactivate a ledger account in QuickBooks;
  • you add or change a class;
  • the Sync tab says that the account a rule picked is no longer in the pulled chart of accounts.

A refresh replaces the copy. It does not change your rules. If a rule names a QuickBooks account that is gone or inactive, the rule stays as it is, and a warning lists the rule. The documents that need that account are blocked until you pick another one.

If the connection expires

If a message says that the connection expired, it is your connection that expired. The connections of the other people are not affected. Connect the company again:

  1. Select Disconnect, then confirm.
  2. Select Connect QuickBooks Online and pick the same company.

Your rules and the pulled chart of accounts stay, so you do not need to set them up again.

Disconnect

  1. On the connection card, select Disconnect.
  2. In Disconnect QuickBooks Online?, select Disconnect.

What changes:

  • Conta asks Intuit to revoke your access to the company, and forgets your connection. The connections of the other people stay.
  • The company of the organization stays, even when nobody is connected. A connection to another company is still refused, until a person with Full access changes the company.
  • The pulled chart of accounts, the rules and the settings stay. If you connect the same company again, you do not need to set anything up.
  • The ERP column and the ERP filter of the Transactions page stay. They follow the company of the organization, not your connection.
  • The Sync tab still shows the range, but Send to QuickBooks Online is off for you until you connect again.

What does not change:

  • The entries already in QuickBooks stay there. Disconnecting deletes nothing in QuickBooks.
  • Conta keeps its record of what it sent. Those documents still show as Synced on the Sync tab.

Change the company

The organization sends to one company. To send to another company, unconfigure the ERP, then connect again. Use it to move from a sandbox company to your production company, or to fix a company that was picked by mistake. The same steps change from QuickBooks Online to Universal ERP. Only a person with Full access can unconfigure the ERP. See Roles and access levels.

If the old company must stay clean, take its entries back out first. On the Sync tab, select Take it back out of the ERP for each document, as Send to the ERP describes. After you unconfigure, Conta has no record of those entries, so it cannot take them out for you.

  1. Open ERP in the sidebar. The page opens on the ERP of the organization.
  2. At the top right, select Unconfigure ERP.
  3. In Unconfigure QuickBooks Online?, read the list. It gives the number of each thing that Conta deletes.
  4. Select Delete and unconfigure.

Conta deletes these things, all together. If one of them fails, Conta deletes none of them:

  • the link to the company of the organization;
  • the record of the documents sent to QuickBooks, and of the documents that QuickBooks refused;
  • the default rule and the category rules;
  • the copy of the chart of accounts and of the classes;
  • the connection of every person;
  • the app credentials: the client ID and the encrypted client secret;
  • the ERP settings, which go back to their defaults.

Then Conta asks Intuit to revoke the access of each person. If Intuit refuses, the change still stands. A person who wants to remove the access at Intuit can do it in their Intuit account. A send that was running when you confirmed stops.

After that, ERP in the sidebar shows one card for each ERP. Then:

  1. Select QuickBooks Online, enter the app credentials again, and select Connect QuickBooks Online. The company you pick becomes the company of the whole organization. A person with Read and edit access or more can do it. Everyone else connects to that company, as in Connect the company.
  2. On the Chart of accounts card, select Refresh accounts to read the chart of accounts of the new company.
  3. Set up the default rule and the category rules again. See Map categories to accounts.

The first range you send after the change writes every document again, because the new company has no record of anything sent.