10 best QuickBooks Online integrations small businesses can use to save 8 hours a week

As a small business, you end up performing tasks that are repetitive and time consuming. With a lean approach to business and making the maximum of the limited resources, automating these repetitive tasks can save several business hours per week. And ultimately, boost the overall growth of your business.

If you’re already using QuickBooks ® to manage your accounts and finance, it’s time to leverage the full potential of QuickBooks by integrating it with your other work apps. You can set up automated workflows to streamline your entire accounting process, collaborate better, and save time.

Based on the type of task, we’ve put together a list of the 10 best QuickBooks integrations to put repetitive tasks on auto-pilot and save time. Calculations are based on the average time saved by QuickBooks users who have set up these automations with us.

Let’s jump in.

1. Automate time tracking and payroll for employees

As a business, you probably work with contractors and freelancers alongside your full-time employees, who submit invoices on a monthly basis. Instead of manually keeping a track of their billable hours or handling payrolls month-on-month, you can automate it with QuickBooks Time to simplify payroll and invoicing. With this integration in place, you can see who is working on which task and what are they working on in real time.

A GPS location tracker enables accurate accounting. Employees can log in their hours using their phones or laptops, or time clock kiosk. For each project or job code, you can separately track time while getting valuable insights in reports. You continue to have the power to approve, edit, and review any timesheet submitted by your employees, and automatically handle payroll. Since you have accurate employee data at hand, it is easier to streamline the entire invoicing process and payouts.

Pro tip: Using other time-tracking apps? Here’s how you can track time in Toggl for QuickBooks customers.

Time saved: 56 minutes per week.

2. Sync QuickBooks with your payment gateway

Sales transactions incur a lot of data, from invoice receipts to payments history, tax details, and discount details. That’s why it’s better to keep your payment gateway apps in sync with your invoicing software.

With this integration, you can focus on increasing your sales rather than worrying about the paperwork to automatically create invoices, sales receipt, and sync customer data from your payment gateway apps easily. Let automation be your personal accountant!

How to set it up: You can integrate QuickBooks with almost all major payment apps, including Stripe, PayPal, Square, and more.

Time saved: 45 minutes per week.

3. Create orders from QuickBooks invoices

Inventory management can be a big challenge for small businesses that are into e-commerce. There are several invoices you may need to generate in QuickBooks after every successful order placed in your e-commerce app. Instead of doing it all manually, connect QuickBooks with your choice of e-commerce app, and automate it. Set up workflows to create orders against new payment invoices, add an invoice against a new order update, and create more such use cases.

How to set it up:  QuickBooks Online has native integration with Shopify that lets you manage and organize orders, customers, inventory, and shipping. You can create similar automated workflows with other e-commerce platforms such as ShipStation, Etsy, and more.

Time saved: 3 minutes per order.

4. Automate project management with QuickBooks integration

As a finance team, you may have to juggle multiple apps to maintain invoices, assign tasks, track progress, and ensure that you don’t miss out on important notifications. A project management tool can come in handy to maintain everyone’s tasks, and also keep a track of work/project progress. Instead of juggling between QuickBooks to check new invoices or payments, and project management tools to manually add new tasks for every new invoice or payment, you can automate this whole process.

How to set it up: QuickBooks integrat es with BigTime that lets you create automated workflows to track expenses and tasks. However, if you are using other tools such as Trello or Asana, you can connect QuickBooks Online with these apps and automate task adding against new invoices, new payments, new orders, and more.

Time saved: 36 minutes per week.

5. Sync customer contacts and buying history

Customer data is very crucial for any business. With updated customer information, it’s easy to understand customer buying intent and the timeline it might take to reach the bottom of the sales funnel. This is exactly why it is a good idea to sync all payment information from QuickBooks to your CRM. By integrating QuickBooks with your choice of CRM, you can create automated workflows to sync all contact information and buying history of each customer, as well as have a bird’s-eye view of each customer’s buying stage.

How to set it up: QuickBooks integrates with Method CRM. You can also integrate it with Salesforce, Zoho CRM, or any other CRM you are using.

Time saved: 58 minutes per week.

6. Turn new form submissions into QuickBooks customers

You may get several customer entries through your forms. This means you need to keep a track of every form entry you get, and then go back to QuickBooks to enter all details one by one. This whole process can take hours. Rather than spending so much time and energy, you can just automate it. Connect QuickBooks with your form app and automatically create new customers in QuickBooks against new form entries.

How to set it up: You can connect QuickBooks with form apps, including Jotform and Google Sheets to capture form responses and turn them into QuickBooks customers.

Time saved: 5 minutes per form responses.

7. Create invoices based on deal stages

For small businesses that are tracking their sales pipeline in a CRM, this automation can be quite useful, especially, if your lead volume is high. Instead of manually creating invoices for every deal you close, you can just set up an automation that does it for you when you update the deal stage in your CRM. You can use the time saved to focus on closing new deals!

How to set it up: Connect QuickBooks to HubSpot or Pipedrive to map customers and create invoices when the deal stage is changed.

Time saved: 30 minutes per week.

8. Send email reminders for pending invoices

While QuickBooks Online is a great tool to automatically generate invoices, syncing QuickBooks Online with email apps can help your customers get automated reminders before an invoice is due. You can create automated workflows to set up email notifications for a new customer in QuickBooks Online, or send out targeted messages to your customers or vendors.

How to set it up: You can integrate QuickBooks Online Gmail, Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign for sending out targeted emails, and keeping a watch on new or changed customer records. No more manual reminders or constant rechecking for pending dues.

Time saved: 15 minutes per week.

9. Automatically back up invoices for reporting

There are countless invoices that get generated everyday. Having a backup for all your invoices can help you create billing reports that are insightful. They also act as a safe haven if you lose any data accidentally. It is not just a good practice to keep your data safe, but also allows you to better align your cost structure.

How to set it up: Connect QuickBooks to Airtable or Google Sheets to easily back up all your customer, invoices, and expense data.

Time saved: 40 minutes per week.

10. Notify teams on activity in QuickBooks

There can be a number of instances where you need to send notifications to your team members. For example, you can let others know when a new customer is added or payments are enabled in QuickBooks Online. Instant notifications not just help your finance team to stay on track, but also acts as a motivation. After all, a new payment notification is more like a small win for you and your team!

How to set it up: If you are using Slack or Microsoft Teams for team collaboration, you can set up automated workflows to keep your team in the loop on any activity happening in QuickBooks.

Time saved: 56 minutes per week.

Wrapping up

Using these automation workflows, small businesses can easily save more than 8 business hours in a week! That’s almost an entire work day. Once you sync your payments, invoices, and bills with other applications, you can simply let the workflows do the rest, while you concentrate on driving more power to your business. Integrate QuickBooks Online with your favorite work apps and free up your precious time to do things that matter most. If you don’t see your app listed above, check out QuickBooks Online integration page for more integrations.