Grow your firm by automatically reconciling QuickBooks throughout the year

Can you imagine your clients’ QuickBooks® accounts reconciled before tax season? In one of our recent articles, we shared a personal story of using automation to not only reconcile QuickBooks throughout the year, but to also turn a business loss into a profit within only two months.

In this article, we compare Connex’s two automatic reconciliation features in QuickBooks that help accountants grow their firms.

Many firms still rely on manual data entry and reconciliation to do their clients’ books. There are so many apps and automations out there that it is difficult to parse out which ones are reliable and a good fit for your firm.

Unfortunately, manual data entry is slow, and it also leads to errors that need to be reconciled via journal entries. Other disadvantages of manual reconciliation are that it slows down your turnaround time, and makes it difficult for you to take on more clients and scale your firm.

Could automation help your firm to provide your customers with faster turnaround time, more accurate books, and lower costs?

Based on our experience with more than 5000 e-commerce businesses and accountants, the answer is a resounding yes.

Syncing orders into QuickBooks is not enough

There are several automation platforms that sync orders to QuickBooks. Many e-commerce platforms have a native integration to QuickBooks Online so you don’t need to double enter orders.

However, getting the data into QuickBooks is only part of the solution. If your clients have a flash sale with thousands of orders, the data can be synced to QuickBooks, but matching them to payouts is a whole other story.

CEO & Founder of Sync with Connex, Joseph Anderson, founded his company in 2010 with a vision to free people from manual data entry into QuickBooks. He successfully built integrations between QuickBooks and the most popular e-commerce platforms. Although he saved his customers hundreds of hours of data entry each year, he noticed that they were overwhelmed with reconciling their books after a surge in sales.

“The week after Black Friday was always the busiest time for my team to help customers,” Joseph recalled. He also struggled with keeping his own QuickBooks Online account reconciled. Joseph paid hundreds of dollars a month for a bookkeeper, but he still had to manually create journal entries. “We must have spent 20 hours a month with QuickBooks, but sometimes we just couldn’t find a missing sale,” he said.

With its core value being “growth,” Sync with Connex has freed businesses and accountants from manual data entry so they could grow. Joseph realized that as long as he relied on manually reconciling his own books, his own company’s growth would be limited. “We already had the code to automatically bring orders into QuickBooks. I wondered if we could automatically match them to payouts.”

Using his own QuickBooks Online account for testing, Joseph wrote the code to automatically match orders to payouts from Amazon, Stripe, Shopify, and Square. In this article we will cover the two options of automated reconciling: the automated match deposit tool and the detailed summary payout.

Option #1: automated match deposit tool

This tool alleviates the burden of hand matching each sale to the payout by automatically downloading the payout from the payment processor, matching the sales, and recording the fees.

The match deposit tool:

• Automated the process of matching deposits, saving time and money.
• Eliminates human data entry errors.
• Helps detect errors or missed payments.
• Manages your accounting records more efficiently.

During the pandemic, one of Connex’s customers, Animals Matter, saw a spike in their sale of luxury dog beds. Not sure how they could manually keep up with the orders, they reached out to Connex.

“The automated match deposit tool blew me away,” said Scott Avera, co-founder of Animals Matter. “Now, I can’t even imagine entering orders from Shopify by hand. Before, we used to cut and paste orders into emails, and send them over to the fulfillment team. Now, Connex automatically syncs ShipStation with QuickBooks for us, and it saves us at least 2 hours a day.”

Connex also provides the automated match deposit tool to accountants, who then pass on the savings in time, money, and energy to their clients.

The images below show how the “before” and “after” of unmatched orders, which are then matched automatically by Connex.

As these figures show, an automation that matches orders with payouts saves you, your firm, and your clients hundreds of hours a year.

Option #2: detailed summary payout

During the pandemic, companies that offered personal protective equipment saw a substantial increase in their sales across multiple e-commerce platforms.

Joseph realized that most of these companies didn’t want to sync individual customers to QuickBooks, so he created another automated reconciliation feature called “The detailed summary payout.”

The detailed summary payout syncs orders to QuickBooks and matches them to payouts when the payouts occur. For Stripe, Square, and Shopify, this is usually Monday-Thursday, excluding holidays. For Amazon, payouts usually occur every other week.

The only downside of the detailed summary payout is that inventory is only updated in QuickBooks when the payouts occur. For non-inventory businesses, or businesses who don’t need their inventory to be updated between payouts, this offers a more elegant way to sync and match orders in QuickBooks.

The images below show what this looks like inside of Stripe and QuickBooks Online to ensure that all the orders are reconciled.

Best practices for reconciling Square, Stripe, Shopify, and Amazon

As your clients grow, they will need their books to be reconciled even more regularly and accurately. It’s impossible to scale manual data entry without hiring more staff.

An automation that can be customized to your client’s needs is the best of both worlds: it allows you to offer your clients the solution they need at a low cost and a fast turnaround time.

Here are some best practices to help you automate reconciliation:

• Make sure customers are matched (if you have individual customers) between QuickBooks and selling channels.
• Make sure products are matched between QuickBooks and selling channels.
• If inventory is low, choose the automated match deposit tool.
• If your client is a non-inventory business or inventory does not need to be updated between payouts, choose the detailed summary payout.
• Use different holding accounts for different selling channels. For example: put all Amazon orders into one holding account, and all Shopify orders into another account.
• Choose different holding accounts for different currencies.
• Make sure that your payment processors deposit funds in your home currency.

Grow your firm through automatic reconciliation

Joseph’s vision is to help accounting professionals provide the highest-quality services, so both their clients and their firms can grow. “When you have five, 10, or more clients, it’s impossible to keep their QuickBooks accounts updated if you have to manually check off every order by hand.”

As an accounting professional, your client’s success is your success. When they grow, they can afford higher level services and they are more likely to refer other businesses to you.

“When it comes to reconciling QuickBooks, we don’t just take you halfway; we offer you a complete solution,” Joseph said.