QuickBooks
Audit the books, do not add to the pile.
A tool that touches QuickBooks usually pushes more entries into it. Ezra, the bookkeeper behind Books, is built to do the opposite first: pull down what QuickBooks already holds, set it against a ledger that has been reconciled to your statements, and tell you where the two disagree. Bank rules and auto-add have been posting to your company for a year. Somebody should check.
Where this actually stands
Said plainly, because the alternative is a customer clicking a button that cannot work and a reviewer finding a claim that is not.
- Built
- The connector is complete: the authorization flow, the chart of accounts mirror, the mapping, the posting engine, the review queue and the audit. It has been exercised offline against recorded responses.
- Not connectable
- Connecting a QuickBooks company requires Intuit’s app review, and that has not started. Until it is done, no customer can complete the flow, and nothing on this site will tell you otherwise.
- Not required, either way
- QuickBooks is optional in this product and always was. The year-end package is the deliverable for people who do not run QuickBooks, and it is complete on its own.
What the audit looks for
Nine kinds of finding, sorted by whether they must be resolved, are worth a look, or are simply worth noting.
- Owner money booked as income
- Money you put in, sitting in revenue. It inflates the year and it is invisible in a summary.
- Owner draw or transfer booked as an expense
- The same mistake in the other direction: money moving between your own accounts, counted as spend.
- Loan payment booked as an expense
- The whole payment expensed, principal included, when only the interest belongs there.
- Card payment booked as an expense
- The payment to the card counted as well as the charges on it, so the same money is spent twice.
- Entered twice
- A duplicate in QuickBooks, whatever put it there.
- Sitting in Uncategorized
- Including Ask My Accountant, Opening Balance Equity and Reconciliation Discrepancies.
- Category differs from the books
- QuickBooks and your reconciled ledger disagree about what a line is. One of them is wrong.
- In QuickBooks, not on the bank statement
- An entry with nothing behind it. This is the finding only a product that reconciles can raise.
- Missing from QuickBooks
- A line on your statement that never reached the books at all.
And when it does post, it posts once
Posting is the easy half to get wrong, because the failure is silent and doubles a number rather than breaking anything.
Every entry carries the ledger line id as its document number, and the posting is recorded on the Books side and read back before anything is sent. Running a post twice sends nothing the second time. Purchases, deposits and transfers are what get written, and the plan of what would be posted, what is waiting for you and what is being skipped is computed without calling QuickBooks at all, so you can see it before anything happens.
What is held back, and why
A line that cannot be posted honestly waits for you rather than being posted approximately.
- It is still pending at the bank
- A pending charge can settle at a different amount. Posting it and correcting it later is two entries, not one.
- It is a check with no payee
- Posting it puts a blank in a vendor field that a 1099 question will be asked of later.
- It is a loan payment with no split
- Principal and interest have not been separated, so there is no honest single account to post it to.
- It looks personal
- Flagged on business books. Whether it belongs there is your call, and it is one question, asked once.
- Nothing is mapped for it
- The account or the category has no QuickBooks account behind it yet. Ezra says which, rather than guessing at one.
A question you already answered elsewhere in Books is not asked again here: Ezra reads the rulings you have already made and only holds back the lines that are genuinely still open.
You do not need QuickBooks to start.
Create an account and let Ezra keep books that reconcile. If and when the QuickBooks connection opens, it will have a checked ledger to audit against, which is the only thing that makes the audit worth running.
Statement PDFs are read from American Express, Apple Card, Citi and Wells Fargo. From any other bank, the CSV or Numbers activity export works, and a PDF Books cannot read is kept and says so rather than being booked.