Connect QuickBooks Online

Which QuickBooks Online versions PadFlow works with, and what a company file needs before you connect it.

PadFlow connects to a QuickBooks Online company file so a budget can sit beside what was actually spent. It reads the file's accounts, vendors, classes and customers, then reads the bills, purchases and vendor credits that carry costs. The one thing it writes back is a Bill per invoice on a funded draw.

One connection per company file. A deal held under its own LLC gets its own file and its own connection. Files are connected and disconnected on the workspace settings page, under QuickBooks Online.

What you need

• QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced. Those are the versions with class and project tracking, which is what tells one deal's costs from another's.
• Class tracking or projects turned on in the file, and used on the cost lines you want PadFlow to read. PadFlow reads the class and the customer or project on each line and nothing else about it, so a line that carries neither belongs to no deal.
• An admin of the company file to do the connecting. QuickBooks will not grant accounting access to anybody else, and the connection fails at Intuit rather than here.

Once the file is connected, PadFlow asks two questions on the settings row: which dimension carries the cost code, and how the file divides into deals. Those are the roles. The values themselves are placed on the mapping page.

On a version without it

PadFlow does not ask QuickBooks which version a file is on, so a Simple Start or an Essentials file will connect. What follows is the problem. Simple Start records no bills, so there is nothing for PadFlow to read. Essentials records bills but tracks no classes, so the mapping step cannot code costs by class and cannot let a class stand for a deal, and any cost line that names no mapped deal lands in no budget. Plus or Advanced is the supported version.