Need Your Help making QuickBooks Online play well with others
Over many years of spending many inspiring hours with small businesses (big-small and teeny-small) I know one thing for sure – your information is in lots of places. Some may live on paper, in notebooks, some on the computer – maybe on your hard drive, maybe on the web. Not to mention the information in your head!
If you’re new to QuickBooks Online, I’d love it if we had a magical device that could let you dump all the customer, vendor & financial information you want right into our product to help get you started.
If you’re a regular user of QuickBooks Online, I’d love it if we had a magical device that could let you share the information inside our product with other products. Because after all, who wants 4 customer lists and 2 lists of unpaid invoices? Who wants to bounce between 3 different pieces of software that don’t talk to each other?
There’s a bunch of us that have been considering what these magical devices might do. Certainly some of the feedback you’ve been giving us is inspiring us… because it’s only through talking and listening to small businesses that we get inspired to do what we do. So this is where we need your help – we’re listening – what information (from where?) would you like to dump into QuickBooks Online? What other software applications would you like QuickBooks Online to work with?
Heather Kirkby
About Me: I’m a QuickBooks Online product person that loves small businesses, bike riding, and good food (yes, the last two are directly related).
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September 19, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I’d love to be able to import contacts, e.g. from Gmail. Others might find Outlook or CSV beneficial.
October 13, 2009 at 8:50 pm
This is something we’ve been talking about – thanks for validating. We’re investigating ways to improve the first-time experience with the product (of course this would benefit everybody).
September 26, 2009 at 9:33 pm
At the moment I am carefully looking at moving my accounting to the online version of quickbooks. One of the things that Quickbooks in general lacks is the ability to generate professional and custom looking invoices. Yes, you do have the PDF invoice but it doesn’t look appealing to me or my clients. I would LOVE to be able to upload a custom PDF with open fields (following QB instructions) which will then be populated by the online app.
Another option is the ability to seamlessly integrate with 3rd party services like Freshbooks.com which DO tend to generate professional looking invoices.
Thanks!
October 13, 2009 at 12:09 am
You can do that now with Quickbooks Desktop 2010
October 13, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I would love to see the online version catch up with the desktop features like professional invoices that can be customized, job costing, HRIS functions, and multi-level users which the desktop has over 115 levels whereas the online has less than 15 levels?
October 13, 2009 at 12:11 am
You can create professional looking custom Invoice templates with the upcoming Quickbooks Desktop 2010
October 13, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Well, that doesn’t help. The article is about the QB online version. Focus!
It sounds to me like you may need to re-evaluate your future growth – as more people and companies are demanding better online services in your space. The faster you move in this direction the less likely you will need to make big purchases like the recent Mint.com acquisition.
October 13, 2009 at 8:51 pm
We’ve been talking a lot about improved invoice customization. What makes an invoice look professional to you?
January 4, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Definitely need the ability to send a personalized message as a ‘cover sheet’ to the invoices. A message at the bottom of the invoice isn’t what at least one of our clients is looking for. At present, the best solution we could find was to create a PDF of each invoice, and attach that to en email to the customer. Relatively tedious – although not as tedious as changing the invoice template for each invoice!
January 4, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Yes, a personalized message at the top of the invoice – without having to go into the customization settings – would be nice.
June 2, 2010 at 9:57 pm
Late to this thread. But I’m a graphic designer and web-app developer, and I need to be able to present invoices that match the quality of my site/logo design. At the moment you just can’t get this. And integrating graphics even into QB2010 desktop is a pain. As of now, I’m using ballparkapp.com and/or designing invoices in Illustrator because invoicing with QB is embarrassing looking.
Also, online invoice systems such as ballpark and freshbooks are so spot on because no one needs to download a PDF, then make a payment elsewhere. It’d be nice to have the invoice viewable and payable online (from something other than just QB cc processing – jump on PayPal integration).
September 28, 2009 at 6:35 pm
One thing that Quickbooks Online is really lacking in is the ability to download customers and product data and then re upload after making changes it would be a lot faster to add new products in a spreadsheet and upload them to the existing list.
January 31, 2010 at 10:38 am
I agree with Richard about the need for an ability to import and export using CSV files. The ability to import customers and invoices as CSV files would greatly enhance to ease of converting from another system to QBO. And export too!
October 9, 2009 at 6:28 am
I would like to see you update the QuickBooks Online SDK to make it comparable to the desktop SDK. There are indeed a ton of third-party apps that could easily be integrated with QBOE, but the SDK is currently very limited. Thanks.
October 13, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Ditto – I would love to see QuickBooks online catch up with the desktop version rather than pushing the Enterprise version as an alternate, which seems to be heading the wrong direction, because the Internet is so powerful and provides flexibility and access for multi-users nationwide!
October 12, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I have a customer that has over 300 employees and their bank statement has over 400 items each month.
I have been hoping that you will let me download the payroll and bank transactions for 3 years, I have been making the same suggestion all the time.
I would love to migrate him to the desktop web version but he doesn’t want to keep his information on one of his computers that someone can steal and /or it go down.
October 13, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Victor, are you an accountant? Would be really interested in learning more. You can contact me directly on twitter @Heather_QBO
October 14, 2009 at 9:01 am
I am accountant, how can I help change the QB online to except import information.
It would make my workload about half for this customer.
My email address is busbys@grandecom.net, I could not send this to you with the address you give.
October 17, 2009 at 7:38 pm
I would like to see a few things to help improve customer management. It would be nice to have a customer search box built right into the top of the OE menus where you could type the first few letters of a customer’s name and jump right to that customer’s summary, and add assets to a customer record. (Since QBOE targets the service industry, and many of us service specific assets such as computers in my case).
Also, It would also be nice if customers could be tagged or flagged with different colors for various reasons to be determined by the business owner. (VIP customers, business customers, past due customers, deadbeat customers, etc.)
Lastly, the ability to upload documents and attach them to a customer, vendor, employee, or a specific transaction would be a huge help. I would love it if when I purchased something from one of my vendors if I could upload the “order confirmation” as a PDF and attach it to the transaction in QBOE.
Marc
October 17, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Marc…We’re investigating some stuff exactly on these lines. Thanks for the suggestions. Good fuel and encouragement for our product planning.
Heather
September 29, 2010 at 5:23 pm
I agree with Marc – good suggestions. One quick, simple thing would make the Customer Center page easier – default the cursor to the search box when the page loads. It’s silly to have to mouse click in the field when its obvious you are going to be typing a customer name in the field box anyway. Keep it simple and quick.
October 18, 2009 at 3:57 am
I definitely agree with Marc we really need those bonus features to help manage our customers/clients. I might also add that if a customer has a note attached to their account that this should show up beside the name box when entering a sales receipt or invoice so that additional info could be added on the fly right there.
October 26, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Why don’t you open up QuickBooks Online to marketing services like email providers and of course, lil ‘o text marketing services like Fanminder?
November 7, 2009 at 9:30 am
Make it faster! I have several online clients and I’m sure I would have more if the online version was as fast as the desktop version. The future belongs to online versions and cloud computing. I love not having to worry about backups, upgrades, and other physical computer issues. “Back office” functions are a perfect “Home office” business for self employement. I provide bookkeeping services via many versions of QuickBooks for many clients both onsite and offsite. Keep up the great work! Warm regards, Connie
November 8, 2009 at 7:09 am
I hear you Connie, we’re working on it! Thanks.
November 20, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Please make it accessible via a Chrome Browser and Firefox browser running on a Linux (Ubuntu) OS.
December 16, 2009 at 8:45 am
Absolutely agree with Kent on this point about Linux and firefox etc. Also agree with Marc above about essentially what would be CRM functions. I know myself and several other companies that use a separate program to keep track of dated call logs with notes for current and potential customers. It’s a simple thing to add and would save allot of hassle. One last thing, concerning import/export of data from QBOE. Keep it simple, if QB could import/export via. something as simple as a csv text file than third party contributors like myself would be more than happy to share our scripts and such to the QB community. It just simply takes too much time to enter or update everything on click/reload at a time in an on-line environment. I need to temporarily lock a table, upload revised data and unlock the table. You get the idea. Thanks for listening.
December 3, 2009 at 11:03 am
Find a way to integrate with an online payment processing company such as PayPal, Google, or Amazon. I need to accept payments through one of these services and my only option is to get an add-on, OE Companion, which is inferior for my needs to anywhereERP. I find this irritating because such integration is something that should be included in Intuit’s service and thus should not impact the inventory management options available.
December 4, 2009 at 2:17 am
Hey Paul – so you just want to download PayPal transactions into QBO, is that right? versus being able to process a PayPal transaction directly inside QBO…
January 1, 2010 at 9:00 pm
For my needs, being able to download PayPal transactions into QBO would be great!
December 20, 2009 at 11:10 am
We are a small trucking company and use a dispatch system. This has the ability to export to Quickbooks desktop for invoicing but not QBO. I can only find one third party appplication and that is not easy to use. Does anyone know of any applications that might make this import easier?
January 4, 2010 at 2:44 pm
I would like the various tabs / windows to say more specifically what is presently being displayed in each. I often have a P&L by month in one tab, a P&L by class in another, and some transaction research in others. I end up clicking around the tabs until I find the one I am looking for. Would be solved by better titles in the tabs, yes?
February 11, 2010 at 3:33 pm
I believe that it would make a lot of sense to have options for people like us that use PayPal to process payments and SalesForce.com for CRM to have some data integration options other than third party developers. Even if these options were simply a CSV or XML import.
March 2, 2010 at 11:36 am
Definitely Paypal. That’s something I would pay extra for, hopefully only on one end….I’d be less than thrilled to pay both Paypal *and* QBOE for the capability.
Any method to import data would work for me. CSV, text delimited, comma delimited…I make it all work.
March 3, 2010 at 2:18 am
Interesting post… Looks like solid state memory is really starting to take off. Hopefully we’ll start seeing decreasing solid state harddisk prices soon. 5 dollar 32 gig Micro SD Cards for your DS flash card… imagine that!(Submitted by NewPost v2 for R4i Nintendo DS.)
March 16, 2010 at 11:02 am
I wish invoices were MUCH more customizable graphically. They look pretty terrible/generic, not what I want to send out to clients–weird leading/word spacing, etc. And I’d like to customize the address field–I don’t want the company name to appear twice, but I’d like to have the company name in a different font than the address, etc. More templates, more customization, more fonts.
March 16, 2010 at 3:29 pm
I could care less about looking pretty
; all I want is an easy PayPal integration. Am I the only one that works online and virtually has all transactions done via PayPal?
March 16, 2010 at 7:22 pm
Yes – most of our transactions are via PayPal. PayPal integration (importing transactions into QBO) would be save me a great deal of time.
March 16, 2010 at 5:54 pm
We use two software packages that I would like to interface with QB on line. Our point of sale software is Millennium for Hair salons. We track our students using the Fame Freedom software. I spend a lot of time doing double entry. Can these systems talk to each other?
May 20, 2010 at 6:31 am
To integrate Paypal with Quickbooks Online to transfer all transactions would save us a lot of time.
October 22, 2010 at 10:34 am
The SimplePort service (www.simpleport.net)is being tweaked to create a qbo file suitable for import to QB Online using the web connect import option. Currently the service creates an iif file and works with the desktop versions of the QB Pro product family only. We hope to have the QBO version available in early 2011.
June 2, 2010 at 9:08 am
Small businesses are on the rise with people loosing employment and starting their own businesses. What would be beneficial is if we could have our financial institutions OR Quick Books convert pdf into qbo files so you don’t have to manually insert everything! I choose the Quick Books online version as my computer crashed and I lost everything, now I have 12 pdf files of my bank statements I have to manually insert. ANYONE know a software that can turn pdf file format into .qbo for Quick Books!!!!
Best To All!
October 12, 2010 at 5:05 am
There are quite a few PDF to Excel conversion tools. Once in Excel, there is a great import software:
01 Transaction Pro Importer for Online Edition
Here is a link describing it. I have used it and it works great.
https://marketplace.intuit.com/AppID-2848-TechSpecs.aspx
Good luck!
Karl Sexton
Accounting On-Call
New Tampa, FL 33549
June 6, 2010 at 6:16 am
I am a General Contractor and I need JOB COSTING badly. QBOE does so many good things for me and does a good job. Having the ability to run a job costing report during and after the job is completed would put the icing on the cake.
June 15, 2010 at 2:11 pm
We are a small acct firm. We typically work with QB desktop editions. We like QB desktop, however, we have a new client who must use QB Online in order for their corporate division to have access to their financial stmts. I know we can export the online QB file and work with it in our desktop QB, but is that soley for the purpose of converting to desktop? Is there any way to then import the desktop file into the online version? This way we can work on the file using the desktop edition and just upload the current file each month online so that it’s available for viewing by corporate.
October 12, 2010 at 5:00 am
Hi Stacy,
Looks like noone ever got back to you. Having run into this from another scenerio, I can tell you that, currently, QBO does not have backup/restore capability such as you are looking for. You can export backups but they will not allow you to import them back in without creating a new Company.
I have quite a few clients who use Online and I have direct access to their Company. It is a wonderful ability to work on closing their month while they continue to work..seamlessly.
Good luck!
Karl Sexton
Accounting On-Call
New Tampa, FL 33549
June 17, 2010 at 1:43 pm
My only ongoing frustration with QB Online is the lack of integration wtih Quickbooks Time Tracker – another online Intuit product! I loved it because it integrated with Outlook AND with my Blackberry… I could simply click on a calendar item or task and make it into a time entry. I would have been happy to continue paying my $25 a month for the service, but sadly…no QB Online integration.
July 6, 2010 at 11:45 am
wHAT IS A SIMPLE AND/OR BEST wp PLUGIN FOR INTEGREATION? I only need to take payments in a designated box, as the particular website is for a printing company and we will be billing indiviusal clients per page. So a full ecommerce plugin is not neccessary as we only need to add a current invoice payment box or button to a client’s password protected webpage… and we would like it to go directly into our online quickbooks…
Possible?
July 22, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Hi,
I use a quotation program in which invoices are carried into an excel sheet. I would like to upload this excel sheets into quickbooks so I can generate invoices quicker, its really boring and really really slow to go product bu product when my invoices include almost 30 items always.
Please let me know how could i manage to make them quicker, if there is a way.
August 4, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Looks like they are not reading this or they don’t care because I have seen none of the above changes occur of which I am interested in many of them…WTF.
August 6, 2010 at 8:56 am
Hey Noah, we’re here. The team actually released an import from outlook and excel recently for customers. We’re working on more stuff. Any ideas on what you would like to import into QuickBooks Online?
Thanks!
Kristen Berman (QBO-er)
August 6, 2010 at 9:22 am
Hi,
Actually my device for importing from excel into quickbooks has been amazing.
I only need to import bills by products, because in this moment I can only import bills directly into accounts, it seems the option hasn’t been made to import products. (The second box). Would be nice if you could work on it.
Thanksss!!! And continue all your great progess it has been amazing.
September 30, 2010 at 12:01 pm
My small company recently got a government grant. We have a massive increase in compliance requirements. Our new contract accountant told us we needed to switch from QBO to the desktop version for basic tracking functionality. I like QBO and certainly don’t want to switch! I need job costing added to QBO or an add on. Is this coming any time soon?
October 1, 2010 at 7:41 am
Thanks for the feedback! Right now we don’t offer job costing – however it can be done. Just set up your jobs as sub-customers and there will be a preference to say “bill with parent”. It’s not intuitive but it works for lots of customers!
https://qboe.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1072/kw/job%20costing/r_id/103898
Kristen
September 30, 2010 at 8:26 pm
I currently work for a great Software company that offers Software As Service Web Application. We currently integrate our software with Quickbooks desktop version. The users enter a new Purchase order in Quickbooks and add Inventory Parts to the said Purchase Order and that information is communicated to our web services so the other users can scan in the items with the Order is received. We also offer picking after a Sales Order is created in Quickbooks, the information is transferred into our system and then the other users can “Pick” using our scanner to deplete inventory and fulfill the Sales Order. After the Order is shipped, An invoice is created for the Quickbooks user inside of Quickbooks.
Now that I have given a brief introduction to how our system works. I would like to know the best way of integrating with Quickbooks Online Edition. I know that we can push data from our system into Quickbooks. But most companies use Quickbooks as a starting point and we would like to integrate with Quickbooks Online so our growing customer base can use Quickbooks to manage their business and use our software to manage their inventory. We have a very great product and we have been driving some business to Quickbooks Desktop version. Now we would like to take the next step and integrate with Quickbooks online. I have done some reading about the IPP development program, but I would like more information before spending a fair amount of work on this.
Thank you very much for your time.
Sincerely,
Isaac.
Scout Inc.
October 1, 2010 at 7:45 am
Hey! Sounds like you are solving a big need for your customers! The integration potential is almost there – look for an announcement in the next few days which talks about the QuickBooks Online and IPP relationship. I’ll forward you the info when it is announced. Overall, QuickBooks Online customers would also love a service like this. Look for more from me in the next week. Thanks Isaac.
October 11, 2010 at 12:34 pm
I would love the ability to attach scanned docs/receipts to job invoices as well as my account in general for accounting / tracking purposes. I currently do this through a desktop application and then have to re-enter the information in Quickbooks online invoices and ledgers. By having the scanned docs online I would also have them already backed up. The ability to print or download them back to the desktop, if needed, would also be handy.
Is there an add on for this or something that is being considered? Love to continue to lose the paper and reduce the need to enter data twice.
Thanks,
Gardiner
Gabba Media, LLC
October 14, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Break down the client contact information upon export. PULEEZ.
QB Online needs to revamp they way contact information is exported. I mean really, I export and get “FULL NAME”? Yeah, that makes it easy to import my contact into every other software that has FIRST and LAST name fields. Pretty much makes using my contact list in QB (which is the most reliable and complete) worthless. We all need to be able to export in the following manner (a field for each):
Client
Main Phone
Mobile
Fax
First
Middle
Last
Street
Street 2
City
State
Zip
Country
Make this happen and make us happy.
December 5, 2010 at 5:20 pm
I use the Employee Single Activity Time Sheet exclusively for tracking billable time. Will this be available in the mobile version. If not the value of the mobile version diminishes greatly. I will need to continue to use third part apps to track time and transfer them to QB Online.
December 6, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Our new website is on adobe business catalyst. We opted for this platform for its robust CRM, and operations integration, however we’ve learned its not compatible with QB online, just desktop. We don’t plan on going backward-and need the security of a cloud since its ecommerce. Any plans for improving integration with adobe BC?
April 6, 2011 at 3:56 pm
I’d love to be able to import contacts, e.g. from Gmail. Others might find Outlook or CSV beneficial.
May 3, 2011 at 12:57 am
Our new website is on adobe business catalyst. We opted for this platform for its robust CRM, and operations integration, however we’ve learned its not compatible with QB online, just desktop. We don’t plan on going backward-and need the security of a cloud since its ecommerce. Any plans for improving integration with adobe BC?
May 12, 2011 at 7:53 am
What QB online really needs is the ability to build custom invoices and statements. I manage a homeowners association and getting the invoices to appear correctly is next to impossible in QB Online. I dont understand why you guys cant add a simple html editor that will allow users to build templates from scratch. I need the ability to pick and choose what fields and how they appear on the forms in order to make QB online actually be useful to the type of the industry I am in.