Set Up Syncing With QuickBooks

How to sync your ContractorTools data with QuickBooks Online

Dan Fellman avatar
Written by Dan Fellman
Updated over a week ago

How To Set Up QuickBooks Syncing

To set up QuickBooks syncing, go to Home > QuickBooks Sync.

The first time you open this form, it will look like this:

To turn on QuickBooks syncing, tap “Enable QuickBooks Sync”. The screen will look like this:

Tap “Connect to QuickBooks” to sign in to your QuickBooks Online account. Once you have signed into your QuickBooks Online account, the screen will look like this:

Tap “Connect” to authorize ContractorTools to connect to your QuickBooks online company data.

After you have finished authorizing ContractorTools to connect to your QuickBooks data, the screen will look like this:

Tap “Sync Settings”. The screen will then look like this:

First tap “None” on each type of transaction to select the appropriate account for that transaction.

Then turn the switches on or off to indicate whether you want to sync Estimates, Invoices/Credit Memos, and Payments/Refunds.

NOTE: Sync Payments is off by default. Before you turn it on, please read this article about syncing payments

When you are finished selecting all of the accounts, tap "QuickBooks" in the upper left corner to go back. “Sync Settings” should no longer say “Incomplete”:

Note: ContractorTools will not sync with QuickBooks if “Sync Settings” says “Incomplete”.

You are almost ready to sync with QuickBooks! ContractorTools does not sync jobs with QuickBooks unless you specifically indicate that you want an individual job to sync with QuickBooks. Once you have enabled QuickBooks syncing, you must now indicate which jobs should be synced with QuickBooks. To select a job to sync with QuickBooks, go to the Job home screen and tap “Job Info”. Tap “Sync Job with QuickBooks”, and tap “Yes”:

Now, to sync with QuickBooks, go back to the ContractorTools Home screen, and tap “QuickBooks Sync”. You can tap “QuickBooks Sync Report” to see a list of all of the transactions for all of the jobs that are ready to be synced with QuickBooks:

When you are ready to sync with QuickBooks, tap “Sync Now”:

Sync Errors

When ContractorTools has finished syncing with QuickBooks, it will display the date and time of the sync, and, if there were any sync errors, it will display a “Sync Errors” line, with a number indicating the number of sync errors:

Tap “Sync Errors” to see a list of the sync errors:

You Must Clear Sync Errors

When a transaction receives a sync error, ContractorTools will not attempt to sync that transaction again until you “clear” the error. To clear an error, read the error message and do what is necessary to resolve the problem that caused the error. For example, in the first error above:

“Error Adding QuickBooks Estimate For Job: 4 – QuickBooks Test Job 
Detail: Duplicate Document Number Error: You must specify a different number. This number has already been used.”

… this error is telling you that there is already a job that has “4” as the job number. To resolve this error, change the job number of this job to a different number.

Then, to get ContractorTools to try to sync this job again, you must “clear” this error. To clear the error, tap on it in the list of errors, then tap “Clear”:

That will remove the error from the list of errors. ContractorTools will then attempt the sync again the next time you sync with QuickBooks.

ContractorTools will not attempt to sync the errored transaction again until you clear the error.

Syncing With QuickBooks From Multiple Devices

You should not sync with QuickBooks from multiple devices. Select one of your devices or Macs that is the fastest, and has the best internet access (WiFi or wired connection) and always sync with QuickBooks from just that device. 

In theory, you should be able to sync with QuickBooks from multiple devices, but this requires that all of your ContractorTools data has been synced successfully between the devices, and that cannot be guaranteed at any point in time. So the best procedure is to only sync with QuickBooks from a single device or Mac computer.

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