QuickBooks and accounting

What connecting QuickBooks does

Connecting QuickBooks Online ties your Trussi account to one QuickBooks Online company and keeps records moving between the two systems instead of you re-entering them by hand. It does not change how invoicing and payments work inside Trussi: recording an invoice or a payment on a project works the same with or without QuickBooks connected. What changes is whether a copy of that activity also lands in your books, and whether Trussi can read information back out of QuickBooks.

What syncs, and in which direction

• Customers and projects. A Trussi customer links to a QuickBooks customer, and a project links to that customer's QuickBooks job (stored as a QuickBooks sub-customer). Existing QuickBooks customers can be imported and auto-matched by email or name, or you can search QuickBooks and link, or create, a customer and a job one at a time from the Customer Mapping tab.
• Invoices. One-way, Trussi to QuickBooks: recording an invoice from a project's worksheet creates the matching invoice in QuickBooks once that project's customer and job are linked.
• Payments. Both directions. A payment recorded against a linked invoice inside QuickBooks is pulled back into the matching Trussi project once a day, and marks the Trussi invoice paid once its payments cover the total. Going the other way, Export Payments sends payments recorded in Trussi out to QuickBooks, mapped to the related project.
• Bills and expenses. The first time a project is linked to a QuickBooks job, any bills, purchases, vendor credits, refund receipts and credit memos already sitting against that job in QuickBooks are pulled in as paid or received amounts on the project. Going forward, Export Spend posts your orders out to QuickBooks as bills, using the labor and material QuickBooks expense accounts set on the connection's Settings tab.
• Vendors. Subcontractors and suppliers link to QuickBooks vendors from the Vendor Mapping tab, either to an existing vendor or a newly created one. That link is what Export Spend needs to post a bill to the right vendor, and the same tab checks each linked vendor against QuickBooks so a link broken on the QuickBooks side (a vendor deleted there, for example) is caught before an export fails on it.
• Items. QuickBooks items can be imported once to create the mappings invoice sync needs.

What appears once QuickBooks is connected

The Finance section of the sidebar, holding Export Spend and Export Payments, only exists once QuickBooks is connected; without it, the section is absent rather than just disabled. On the account's own QuickBooks page you get a Sync Status tab (every sync attempt logged, with totals, a success rate, and a retry option on failed entries), the Import, Customer Mapping and Vendor Mapping tools described above, and the labor and material expense account mapping Export Spend posts against.

Connecting QuickBooks

1. Open the add-ons catalog under Settings and choose QuickBooks.
2. Click Authorize and sign in with your QuickBooks Online account.
3. On the Settings tab, set the QuickBooks Labor Expense Account and Material Expense Account that Export Spend should post bills against.
4. Optionally use the Import tab to bring in existing QuickBooks customers and items, then use Customer Mapping to link the projects that need a QuickBooks job.

There is no separate disconnect control for QuickBooks in Trussi; if a connection breaks or expires, reconnecting is done the same way, by authorizing again.

Without QuickBooks connected

Invoicing and payments keep working fully inside Trussi on their own; nothing about recording either one requires QuickBooks. What you lose is the accounting copy: nothing posts to QuickBooks, and the Finance section (Export Spend, Export Payments) is not in the sidebar at all.

Who can do this

Connecting and configuring QuickBooks takes Modify on Account, which only the Account Admin role has by default. Using Export Spend and Export Payments takes their own capabilities, View and Modify on Spend Export, and View and Modify on Payments Export, which are also Account-Admin-only by default; an account admin can grant any of these to another role from the Permissions screen.