QuickBooks Online: Using the Integration

Admin permissions or restricted permissions to access Reports & Booking Data to View Invoice and Transaction Log.
QuickBooks Online integration enabled.
The QuickBooks Online integration is available to both those using items (Inventory > Items), a key feature of our classic version of Checkfront, and those using products (Inventory > Products), a key feature of our newest version of Checkfront.

New to Checkfront - Products ✨

Products (Inventory > Products) is the successor feature to (Inventory > Items) and is available in our newest version of Checkfront.

Not yet on our newest version and interested in upgrading? Please contact our Technical Support team for more information.

Discover more product-related help articles here: Products (New).

In this article, we look at how QuickBooks Online works with bookings.

New to the QuickBooks Online integration? Be sure to read the first article in this series for an introduction!

Please read the full series of articles, accessed at the side and bottom of this page, to learn more about the QuickBooks Online integration.

Using the Integration

QuickBooks Invoice

QuickBooks Ledger

The QuickBooks Online integration is now activated and configured for use in your account.

Based on the settings we used in the previous step when a Customer makes a reservation or payment is added to a booking, an invoice and transaction is automatically created in QuickBooks Online.

The integration is a one-way connection; information is synced from Checkfront to QuickBooks Online.

All changes to transactions and bookings should be done in Checkfront.

Viewing the transaction log

QuickBooks Log

You can check the booking's Log tab in Checkfront at any time to make sure these transactions are going through successfully, without needing to check every time in QuickBooks Online.

Viewing the invoice log in QuickBooks

QuickBooks View

When viewing an invoice in Checkfront, you can quickly access the associated invoice in QuickBooks Online by clicking on the View in QuickBooks link below.

Information synched to QuickBooks Online

- Bookings

Bookings are created in QuickBooks Online as invoices. The invoice is populated with the item/product information and booking total.

Please note that the taxes that are used on the invoice are calculated by QuickBooks; in order to ensure that the invoice total is accurate, you need to ensure that the taxes configured in the two systems are the same.

Invoices only sync to their default Class in QuickBooks Online. Learn more about Classes here:

Using Classes and Locations in QuickBooks Online

- Customers

Each invoice in QuickBooks Online is associated with a Customer. When creating the invoice, Checkfront also creates a new Customer the QuickBooks account.

QuickBooks Online requires that all Customers have a unique display name; in order to ensure all Customers have unique names, a unique identifier is added to the Customer's display name. Otherwise, unrelated Customers with the same name could be incorrectly associated with each other.

- Payments

When a payment is added to a booking in Checkfront, a matching payment is added to the invoice in QuickBooks Online. If you would like to stop payments from being created, then you can enable the 'Don't synchronize transactions' option.

Past transactions from before the integration is enabled do not automatically sync. Instead, this information needs to be manually exported from Checkfront and imported into QuickBooks Online.

- Refunds

Payments refunded in Checkfront are synchronized to QuickBooks Online.

By default, refunds are created as Credit Notes. If this is not appropriate for your business, then you can enable the option to instead use Refund Receipts.

There is also an option to not synchronize refunds at all if that is preferred.

Common Issues & Solutions

Listed here are common errors or situations you may come across when using Quickbooks Online:

Error creating invoice: Invalid Reference Id (Invalid Reference Id: Categories cannot be used in transactions).

This error is caused if a sales item is synced to a QuickBooks Online category. While QuickBooks Online categories show in the sales item dropdown menu, make sure to sync to a product or service in QuickBooks Online instead of a category.
The refund (CreditNote or RefundReceipt) does not match the amount that was refunded

This situation can occur if a single booking has multiple items/products with different tax amounts. When creating a refund, only a single tax amount can be used. So when the taxes are calculated in QuickBooks Online, the taxes for the booking may not match the taxes for the refund.

These situations need to be manually corrected by editing the CreditNote or RefundReceipt in QuickBooks Online.
Failed to refresh OAuth tokens. Please contact support for assistance: Refresh OAuth 2 Access token with Refresh Token failed. Body: [{"error":"invalid_grant"}]

This error is caused if the connection between QuickBooks Online and Checkfront is discontinued due to an expired access token.

When initially connecting the integration, QuickBooks Online creates an authorization access token that typically remains active for one year, after which access is automatically discontinued. Please note that no warning displays when the token is about to expire.

When the connection token expires, all you need to do is reauthorize the connection by following the setup steps again.
Error creating invoice: A business validation error has occurred while processing your request (Business Validation Error: We're sorry, QuickBooks encountered an error while calculating tax. Try reselecting the tax rate or reentering the product/service item and saving the form again.

This error occurs when there is already an existing account by the same name and/or number. Please check that your QuickBooks Online account has no duplicate accounts.
Object Not Found: Another user has deleted this transaction.

This error may occur if any data within your QuickBooks Online account has been tampered with or deleted. We recommend that you make sure that none of your data in QuickBooks Online has been deleted.

< QuickBooks Online: Setup | QuickBooks Online: Editing an Invoice >

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