When it comes to managing your Shopify store, you need a way to keep track of your finances, such as your income and expenses. Luckily, you can connect QuickBooks accounting to Shopify, and there are ways to make it sync seamlessly.
You want to automate as much of this process as possible. Reconciling your online commerce manually takes up a lot of time and resources, and increases the risk of user error. Automating this process saves you time and ensures accuracy.
On top of connecting QuickBooks and Shopify, you can use a tool like Reconcilely to provide even more insight into the details of your transactions. This will allow you to spend more time analyzing your business and less time copying numbers into spreadsheets!
Instead of having to hire someone to manually do the accounting for your business (or even do it yourself), you can get it done automatically.
Having this process automated means that you won’t have to think about it, freeing up your time to focus on other aspects of your business.
If you sync QuickBooks and Shopify, you also remove the chance for errors to occur, as the information is moving directly from one to the other.
This makes reconciling your books a breeze. You can also look into automating other parts of your Shopify store.
You start by downloading the Shopify Connector by Intuit. This allows you to link your Shopify and QuickBooks.
After working through the setup wizard, you will have the basics enabled. It will keep track of stock changes and create or update sales invoices.
If you are a small business or feeling overwhelmed by the technology involved, you can stop at this step.
You won’t have fully optimized your experience, but you will still be much better off than having to manually add transactions to your accounting software.
You can also go back later to make some of the other changes we suggest next.
Now that you have the basics set up, you can go into more detail about exactly what you want synchronized.
Some things that you will want to sync are the timezones, the integration start date, and the email reports,
This is where you can take full advantage of the automations available.
Decide what things you want to happen when an order comes in so that you minimize the amount of admin work you have to do.
While this will take some time to set up, it will save you a lot of time in the long run.
It’s a good idea to set up workflows so that a sale in Shopify automatically generates an invoice in QuickBooks.
You can also set up a workflow so that payouts from Shopify will be sent as deposits in QuickBooks.
This is also a space where you can make a lot of customizations to meet the specific needs of your business.
Once you have your workflows set up, you can get into the even finer details and adjust specific settings.
This will obviously be very specific to your individual business, but here are some things to think about.
You can change the order number prefix so that it uses your own prefix, rather than Shopify’s automatic one. This makes reconciling much easier.
You can also set up automatic invoices that use your order numbers, rather than Shopify's. This means that your order numbers can match the system you use in QuickBooks.
While automating, you want to make sure that you have set up taxes correctly. You can consult our Complete Guide To Shopify Sales Tax for more help if you are struggling to understand all the details.
Payments are one of the most important parts of your business, and you can set it up using the accrual accounting method, which records both when you send an invoice, and when you receive a payment for that invoice.
You can also select options for different payment gateways, offering your customer a wide choice.
This is also where you can set up a fallback account for refunds.
While connecting QuickBooks and Shopify is a great step in improving your business, you can do more to get the best user experience.
Shopify will send QuickBooks one giant transaction representing all of the separate transactions you have had. This means that your accounting will balance, but it makes it hard to keep track of individual orders.
Having just one transaction is a big problem when it comes to processing refunds for a specific order, or even just trying to understand where your money is coming from.
This is where Reconcilely comes in. Reconcilely is a powerful tool that captures payments and other transactions and syncs them with QuickBooks, keeping the individual transactions separate.
So, instead of getting a total from multiple transactions, you now have information about individual sales, refunds, and fees. This level of detail helps you to better understand your business’s finances and ensures all your numbers line up.
Reconcilely also shows the exact amount that is being taken off in terms of Shopify fees, taxes, and shipping. This gives you more insight into your business, allowing you to make better choices for growth.
Another benefit of using Reconcilely is that it works in real time. You don’t have to wait for the close of business to check in on your situation but can look at whatever you need to, whenever you need to and trust that your financial data will be up to date.
Reconcilely can also manage things like currency conversions and refunds, taking even more stress away from you.
In order to sync your sales seamlessly, use a tool like Reconcilely that goes above and beyond what just connecting QuickBooks and Shopify can do!
Connecting your Shopify page to QuickBooks is easy and hugely beneficial for your business. Remove the stress and time of manually recording transactions.
Then use Reconcilely to reconcile your books in real time, removing any possibility for errors. This also gives you up to date information about your business, allowing you to make the best decisions to grow your business.
Streamline your bookkeeping today with a free Reconcilely trial!