Having issues with your QuickBooks Online integration? Here are some common errors and how to fix them.
General technical issues
Many technical issues, like slow response times or inability to view forms (to name only a few) can be resolved simply by clearing your browser's cache and cookies. Click here to learn how to Clear cache and cookies to fix issues when using QuickBooks Online.
Contacts push limitation
The QuickBooks Online system has a known limitation that doesn’t allow 2 individual contacts with the same name to be pushed through to QuickBooks.
For example, in QuickBooks there's a contact called John Doe, with the email johndoe@onesaas.com.
When integrating with another system, QuickBooks Connector gets another John Doe contact - this one has a different email address and contact details (johndoe2@onesaas.com).
Because of this, QuickBooks Connector will treat both John Doe records as separate contacts. However, if we try to push the new John Doe into QuickBooks, the QuickBooks API rejects this on the basis that the name is a duplicate.
When this happens, we'll automatically append the second contact with a '-1' (John Doe-1) to send it through to QuickBooks Online.
Invoice rounding error
There is currently a known limitation with the QuickBooks Online system, where we sometimes run into calculation errors when dealing with tax codes.
For example, QuickBooks Connector receives the following data from the e-commerce system:
The unit price for the item is R14.90 with 10% VATalready applied. When we push this to QuickBooks Online, we are asked for an excluding tax total. We then calculate this by R14.90 divided by the VAT amount. This comes to R13.545454...
However, we can’t give that sort of tax total over to QuickBooks Online, so we have to narrow this down to 2 decimal places.
As a result, the ex-tax total is rounded up to R13.55. We try to assign 10% VAT on top of the excluding tax total (R13.55 plus 10% VAT is $14.905). Then, we need to reapply rounding to get R14.91. As you can see, there is a R0.01 discrepancy in the total.
This may also occur with payment gateway fees such as eBay fees posted that have tax included.
For now, we have reached out to QuickBooks Online support team about this, and hope to find a solution.
Stock starting date error
We sometimes get an error message that says “We were unable to send transaction(s) to QuickBooks Online because the transaction date is prior to start date for an stock item in the transaction.”
This error is being reported by the QuickBooks Online system.
It looks like the items you created in QuickBooks Online have an stock start date later than the invoices you are trying to push through.
For example, if invoice ABC123 is dated 3rd June 2014, all items in the invoice should have a starting date earlier than 3rd June 2014.
You may need to delete the item in QuickBooks Online and then recreate it. If you do that, contact QuickBooks Connector Support so we can adjust QuickBooks Connector for this.
This can also happen in reverse, where we're unable to push an item if invoices containing the item already exist in QuickBooks Online with an invoice date after the stock start date of the item.
Currency limitation
There is a limitation where one customer can’t order in multiple currencies. Consider the following scenario:
- Customer makes a sale in AUD.
- We add the customer to QuickBooks Online with AUD as their default currency.
- Customer makes another sale in USD.
- We hit an error as this isn’t the customers default currency.
We're currently working on a way to handle this better. For now, be aware that the above scenario can occur if a customer orders twice in different currencies. You'll have to process any invoice that hits this limitation manually.
Product name field limitation
The QuickBooks Online system has a known limitation that prevents 2 different products from having the same name.
On the other hand, there’s an optional SKU field that allows multiple products to have the same SKU. Most other systems do the opposite and treat the SKU field as unique for products, while the name can be duplicated.
Syncing sales receipts
If you are syncing orders into your QuickBooks Online and you select to send them as sales receipts, note that they are dependent on payment data.
Orders will only be sent to QuickBooks Online when the order has been paid in the source system. Unpaid orders can’t be sent as sales receipts to QuickBooks Online.
Support for bundle items
Currently, the QuickBooks Connector integration doesn’t have proper support for integrating with QuickBooks bundle items.
Our development team is already working on this issue. To help us prioritise this feature, upvote and comment here.