This is about sending your time through as Time Activities to QuickBooks. Read here if you’re just looking to create an Invoice in QuickBooks.
Sending Time is great if you want to sync your time entries between MinuteDock and QuickBooks so you can run Payroll and more advanced billing & reporting from your QuickBooks account.
First, do you need to sync MinuteDock time to QuickBooks?
- If you are wanting to send time billing invoices to your clients with QuickBooks from the time you've tracked in MinuteDock, then we typically recommend the Invoice syncing workflow rather than the Time Activity syncing workflow.
This is because MinuteDock gives you more customisability in how the invoice lines are generated and formatted, and a more powerful billing rate system.
In terms of what your client sees and your account receivable process, everything is still the same as if you created the invoice directly in QuickBooks. MinuteDock creates the invoice, then you will confirm and email it to the client using the standard QuickBooks workflow. See: Creating an invoice in QuickBooks - For simply reporting on how many hours spent for clients or employees, we recommend using MinuteDock's own reporting functionality over QuickBook's. See here for more info on reporting in MinuteDock.
QuickBook's reports are more "accounting focussed", where as for getting visibility on where your time is being spent, MinuteDock's reports can be quicker and simpler to get the information you want. You also get the benefit of Goals and Budget functionality in MinuteDock.
Additionally, the QuickBooks 'data model' is more limited and simplistic than MinuteDock's. MinuteDock allows you to create Projects and company-wide task codes that you can use to report on, configure goals, etc. Some of this information is lost when syncing to QuickBooks, and so wouldn't be available in the QuickBooks reports. - Unless there is something specific you're trying to get from the data inside QuickBooks that you can't get from MinuteDock (eg. Payroll pay runs, etc., a particular report MinuteDock is missing), then we recommend not syncing the Time Activities to QuickBooks and instead using MinuteDock's own reporting.
There is no harm in starting with the simpler, non-syncing approach: if you decide later that there is something you need from the information in QuickBooks, you can retroactively sync the historic time to QuickBooks.
If you are happy to go ahead with syncing Time Entries to QuickBooks
There are a few things you’ll need to get set up first:
- Make sure you’re MinuteDock users are matched to the appropriate QuickBooks employees. MinuteDock won’t send time for a user unless it’s linked to a QuickBooks Employee. Read the guide here on setting up your Employees.
- You’ll probably want to set up the appropriate Class and Service/Item to send across to for the time entries. MinuteDock provides a lot of flexibility here, and you can set the Class and Service/Item defaults, as well as on a per-employee, customer, project and task basis. For more information, read the guide here.
Once you’re set up and ready to send time across to QuickBooks, go to the “Time” tab and hit the “Send Time” link on the bottom left of the page.
The Send Time section shows a history of the time you’ve recently sent, and you can view whether or not your time was sent successfully.
If you’ve got time to send, hit the “Send Time to QuickBooks” button on the right hand side of the page.
Here you’ll be shown filters where you can customise a search for the time you want to export. Generally, the default search will be fine, but depending on your set up in QuickBooks you may want to customise the search to exclude/include specific time to send across. You can customise the search just like you customise a search for Reports.
Note: Initially the “default search” will include all time that hasn’t been sent to QuickBooks (or has been changed since it was last sent). You save a new default by hitting the arrow next to the Send to QuickBooks button and choosing “Send & save as default search”.
Once you’re ready, hit the “Send to QuickBooks” button and MinuteDock will send the time over. Remember, you can customise the Class and Service/Item for each User, Contact, Project & Tasks.
See also: