Integrating FreshBooks with QuickBooks

Charlie Russell for The Sleeter Group writes:  FreshBooks is a very popular online program for small business billing, and the company recently announced a feature that will post information from FreshBooks into QuickBooks Desktop. Let’s take a look at how this new feature works and mention some alternatives you might want to consider.

What FreshBooks Can Do

Although the product is called “FreshBooks Cloud Accounting” and is “designed for small business owners,” it isn’t a full accounting system. As Greg Lam points out in his article “Online Accounting Software Types, Which Should You Use?”, FreshBooks falls into the “invoicing” category – products that can be quite handy for some kinds of businesses because they make invoicing easy – but it isn’t a true accounting software product.

FreshBooks excels at easily creating invoices, tracking time, and even logging expenses. For details on this, see Greg’s “Cloud Accounting Comparison” series.

Many businesses that use FreshBooks also want to use QuickBooks to manage their accounting – leveraging the simple, online invoicing features of FreshBooks while handling their other accounting chores with the familiar QuickBooks Desktop product. In other cases, business owners may just be using FreshBooks while their accounting professionals will be using QuickBooks for the financial statements. Until now, FreshBooks by itself didn’t have a way to pass information on to QuickBooks.

Integrating FreshBooks with QuickBooks

In February 2014, FreshBooks added a new feature – the ability to post journal entries to QuickBooks Desktop. This isn’t what I would call a “reconciliation” that synchronizes data between the two products; rather, it’s a simple way to get summary financial information from FreshBooks into QuickBooks. Let’s take a look at how it works with a basic test file I created. 

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The article continues @ The Sleeter Group.  Please click here to continue reading "Integrating FreshBooks with QuickBooks" @ The Sleeter Group.  The author is the founder of CCRSoftware.