Writing Customer Phone Numbers To QuickBooks
Dan Fellman avatar
Written by Dan Fellman
Updated over a week ago

The Apple contacts user interface allows you to enter any number of phone numbers with any label (“mobile”, “cell”, “home”, “work”, etc.), and ContractorTools works the same way. This means that the ContractorTools database can have any number of phones with whatever label you give them. There are some default labels though: “home”, “mobile”, “fax”, etc.

On the other hand, QuickBooks has three phones for each customer: “Phone”, “Mobile”, and “Fax”. So the question is, how does ContractorTools merge the variable number of variably named phones into “Phone”, “Mobile”, and “Fax” in QuickBooks? Here’s how:

  • If the phone is labeled “work”, “home”, “main”, or “other” in ContractorTools, it goes into “Phone” in QuickBooks.

  • If the phone is labeled “mobile” in ContractorTools, it goes into “Mobile” in QuickBooks.

  • If the phone is labeled “work fax”, “home fax”, or “other fax” in ContractorTools, it goes into “Fax” in QuickBooks.

Now, what happens if there are more than one phone number with one of these labels? For example, a customer in ContractorTools has a phone labeled “work”, and another labeled “home”? Well, when ContractorTools syncs with QuickBooks, it randomly grabs any one of the phones that has one of these labels and puts it into “Phone” in QuickBooks.

This means that if a customer in ContractorTools has a phone labeled “work”, and another labeled “home”, then only one of those phone numbers will get written to QuickBooks, and the one that gets selected is by random chance. It also means that if a customer has more than one phone labeled “mobile”, then only one of those, selected randomly, will get written to “Mobile” in QuickBooks.

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