Explaining Accounting Integration

We’ve mentioned in the past we are working on Quickbooks & Xero Integration, as of a little while ago Xero integration was made available to all customers but we’re still testing Quickbooks internally with some beta testers.

I thought I should take a little time out to explain exactly what level of integration you should expect when it comes to ProWorkflow and these two offerings, while we don’t currently have plans to integrate with other accounting applications, we welcome any suggestions on what package you would like integration with next.

Turning on integration

In both cases you turn on integration in the “INVOICE Manager”, simply go into the Settings page then scroll down to “Integration Settings” and select either XERO or Quickbooks then click the UPDATE button.

This adds a new section in “ADMINISTRATION” called “integration” with either XERO settings or Quickbooks settings, in the future we will probably make this a little easier by adding it all into an integration section or something similar, this is just a temporary measure.

Xero Settings

The XERO Settings section

To set up the link between your XERO & your ProWorkflow account you will need a Key from the XERO Network, you can generate one by going to the Xero Network page in the Settings tab after going into your company in Xero.

Find ProWorkflow in the list of external services then click the Generate Key button, the page will reload with a key unique to your account.

Quickbooks Settings

To set up the link between your Quickbooks company file & your ProWorkflow account you need to install the “Quickbooks Web Connector” on the machine that has your Quickbooks company file.

You then download the two files in Quickbooks Settings and add them to the Quickbooks Web Connector, entering your ProWorkflow password when prompted. Whenever you want to sync your invoices/contacts between ProWorkflow & Quickbooks you will need to have the web connector running and either manually force it to synch, or you can make it run on a schedule (e.g. every 30 minutes).

Send to Quickbooks/Xero

When it comes to getting invoices into your accounting package (be it Quickbooks or Xero) you have to manually “send” the invoice from ProWorkflow before it can be imported, this is because importing can only be done once per invoice, once it is in your accounting package if you change the invoice it won’t be reflected in ProWorkflow and vica versa.

All you have to do is tick the invoices you want to send then click “send to {accountingpackagename}”

An example send to Quickbooks Link

This will either send the invoice straight to your accounting package (XERO – it will appear in draft invoices) or allow it to be imported through a manual/auto synch (Quickbooks)

Line Items

When an invoice is imported into your accounting package it will contain two line items, the total of all taxable items on the invoice and the total of all non-taxable items on the invoice, with the option for “taxable” or “non-taxable” already pre-selected per the line items in your accounting program.

Example Invoice to Line Items in Quickbooks

Contacts

When synching invoices from ProWorkflow to your accounting program, we also synch your list of contacts to ensure they are linked between our program and the exernal program correctly. Whenever a new contact is synched to ProWorkflow from the external program we try to link it to an existing contact in the system where possible (through simple name matching), when a contact is synched from ProWorkflow to the external program the contact is created in that program and linked to the contact in ProWorkflow.

You can see the links that already exist and create new contacts (if neccesary) on the Quickbooks/Xero settings page in Administration.

Company Matching on the settings page

Status

The status of the invoice is different per accounting application, listed below are the possible status’s and their effects on what you can do with an invoice at any given moment.

Quickbooks

• Unsent – This means the invoice hasn’t been made available for synching with Quickbooks yet.
• Awaiting Synch – This means the invoice has been made available for synching but has not yet been synched with Quickbooks. Any edits you make to the invoice at this point will be reflected upon being imported in Quickbooks.
• Sent – This means the invoice has been synched with Quickbooks, any changes you make to the invoice won’t be reflected in Quickbooks (we warn you when trying to edit or delete the invoice)

Tags: Accounting, integration, proworkflow, quickbooks, Xero