Small-to-medium sized enterprises have majorly benefited from the growth of cloud business software. It has made their accounting, marketing and client relationship management processes easier and more streamlined. While these software solutions provide powerful business tools for each separate area of your business, you can increase their power by integrating their data. This is a common reason for integrating QuickBooks Online and Zoho Books.

In terms of integration, users may want to leverage Zoho’s customer relationship management (CRM) functions with QuickBooks’s accounting functions. Essentially, they want to use Zoho to send estimates and quotes to clients. However, they don’t necessarily want the mess of having non-accepted estimates and quotes in QuickBooks Online. By integrating the two platforms, they can use Zoho to send the accepted quote or estimate to QuickBooks Online, convert it to an invoice,then push the invoice back to Zoho. They can then append it to the customer record to see that it was invoiced. This allows users to attribute sales revenue without unnecessary quotes confusing things. Alternately, users may want to undertake a full data migration from QuickBooks Online to Zoho Books to streamline things.

If you have any other questions about Zoho, check out one of our Zoho articles!

Integration and Migration from QuickBooks Online to Zoho Books

We recently completed two client projects involving QuickBooks Online and Zoho Books. In one project we used a Zapier connector to integrate the two services. In another case, we instead did a full data migration. Here are some quick tips that might help you if you’re undertaking similar projects. We should note, these tips are for integration or migration from QuickBooks Online – doing this with QuickBooks’ desktop version is a different process altogether, though one we are also familiar with. Feel free to reach out to us for a free consultation to chat about either.

Zapier Connector for QuickBooks Online and Zoho Books Integration

When connecting the two systems via Zapier (or any other API connector), there is a key first step that you must take. Every Zoho Books customer and Zoho Books item or product needs to first have their QuickBooks Online ID (unique identifier/primary key) uploaded or entered into a custom field on their record in Zoho. This is the primary key used to sync the data via any connector. For some reason, QuickBooks Online doesn’t make this unique ID available on the customer or product record, or available for simple export. However, you can extract it manually from the URL when you are looking at a customer record.

We had to write an API script to perform a mass extraction from QuickBooks Online’s developer portal in order to transfer these to the individual records in Zoho Books. Once you get all the IDs onto their matching Zoho Books customer and item records, then you’re in a position to leverage the Zapier sync. There are several other technical considerations that can necessitate writing a bit of custom deluge code and/or JavaScript based on your needs, but the point is that it IS possible to create this connector.

QuickBooks Online to Zoho Books Data Migration

The main consideration here is whether or not you want to migrate all of your historical transaction data (i.e. actual invoices, purchase orders, bank transactions, etc.) or whether you’re okay with a “fresh start” approach. By “fresh start”, we don’t mean a completely blank instance of Zoho Books. You would still migrate all of your customer and vendor records, items or products, and chart of accounts so that your Trial Balances match in Zoho Books and QuickBooks Online.

Timing is everything here: you need to make the switch at the end of a reporting period. For example, if you’re looking to start using Zoho Books on November 1st, then you would want to first complete your October bookkeeping in QuickBooks Online, close the month, and then use your October 31st Trial Balance as your opening balance in Zoho Books for November 1st.

2 Important Tips on Migrating from QuickBooks Online to Zoho Books

We’ve found that there are two things that most people don’t realize about accounting system migrations:

1. Migrating your historical invoices, POs, bank transactions, etc. is unnecessary, time consuming, and finicky work. We generally recommend that our clients go with a “fresh start” approach. It’s quicker, more cost effective, and leads to less discrepancies between your old and new system.
2. You don’t need to migrate all of your historical customer invoices, etc., to Zoho Books in order to have a great accounting/sales reporting system. You’re actually better served by using the easy integration between QuickBooks and Zoho Analytics (included with Zoho One).

The reporting system in Zoho Books is good enough for current year/period accounting. If you really want to dig into your year-over-year data, you should use actual business intelligence software. We love Zoho Analytics for our Zoho clients because you can blend Zoho Books, QuickBooks Online, and Zoho CRM data in the same dashboards. Powerful stuff!

Data Migration and Integrations with RFDM

As an authorized Zoho Partner with experience in Zoho Books and QuickBooks, we can help steer your accounting system migration or integration in the right direction. Contact us for a free consultation.