QuickBooks Customers and Products

When your farm is connected to QuickBooks, every sync reads your QuickBooks customers and items. With Keep customers and products in step with QuickBooks turned on, each sync also brings that list into Sporeline, so a customer added in QuickBooks shows up on your orders without being typed in twice, and a term changed in QuickBooks is the term Sporeline uses.

The switch is off until a Manager or Owner turns it on. With it off, syncs work exactly as before and you bring customers and products in by hand with Bring in customers and products.

Who can use it

Turn it on

1. Go to Settings → Integrations → QuickBooks.
2. Under Customers and products, tick Keep customers and products in step with QuickBooks.
3. Click Sync now, or wait for the next scheduled sync.

Under the switch, Sporeline shows what the newest sync did: how many customers it added, how many customers and products it linked, how many customers it updated from QuickBooks, and how many QuickBooks records are waiting for a person to decide.

It works in both ways of using QuickBooks, Packing lists only and Full invoicing.

What a sync does with it on

• New QuickBooks customers are added to Sporeline. Each one gets its name, contact, email, phone, addresses, term and tax status from QuickBooks, and its type is set to Other. Change the type on the customer page whenever you like.
• Customers with the same name are linked. Names are compared without regard to capitals or extra spaces, so “Harbor Market” in QuickBooks links to “harbor market” in Sporeline instead of making a second customer.
• Products with the same name are linked. A QuickBooks item links to the Sporeline product of the same name that isn’t linked yet.
• Linked customers are kept up to date. See the next section.

Once a customer is linked, the link decides, not the name. You can rename a customer in Sporeline and the next sync still finds it and never makes a copy under the QuickBooks name.

What QuickBooks decides and what Sporeline keeps

On a linked customer, QuickBooks decides these fields, and each sync copies them over when QuickBooks holds something different:

• the sales term
• whether the customer is taxable, and the tax exemption reason
• the billing address and the shipping address
• email
• phone

Everything else on the customer is Sporeline’s own and a sync never touches it: the name, the customer type, the contact name, the delivery address line, delivery preferences, standing orders and notes.

When a field is empty in QuickBooks, Sporeline keeps what it has. A sync only ever copies a value over; it never blanks one out.

If someone is editing a customer in Sporeline at the moment a sync updates it, their save is kept and the sync tries that customer again next time.

What it never does

• It never writes to QuickBooks. It only reads the list the sync already pulled. Your QuickBooks company is not changed by this switch at all.
• It never deletes anything, in Sporeline or in QuickBooks. A customer made inactive in QuickBooks is left as it is in Sporeline.
• It never creates a product. A Sporeline product needs a kind and a species, which QuickBooks doesn’t hold. QuickBooks items with no Sporeline product of the same name wait for you in Bring in customers and products, where you pick the kind and species.

What needs a person

Some QuickBooks records can’t be brought in without a decision, and the sync leaves them for you:

• a QuickBooks item with no Sporeline product of the same name (it needs a kind and species);
• two QuickBooks customers with the same name;
• two Sporeline customers or products with the same name;
• a Sporeline customer already linked to a different QuickBooks customer;
• a Sporeline customer still linked to a customer in a QuickBooks company your farm was connected to before. Syncs never update it from the company you use now. Contact support to clear the old link.

The count under the switch tells you how many are waiting. Open Bring in customers and products to see the first four kinds with their reasons and settle them.

Turn it off

Untick the switch. Customers and products the sync already brought in or linked stay as they are, and the links stay too. Later syncs leave your customers and products alone.

Related

• Orders and Packing Slips covers choosing between Packing lists only and Full invoicing.