When we first released support for QuickBooks in 2012, we initially only provided the ability to send Invoices. But we quickly learned that a lot of people needed to send over Time Activities too, so we rushed around and added that support at a basic level.
Today we’re announcing the next phase of that support - a big overhaul of the way MinuteDock “sends time” into QuickBooks (which is also a first step along the way to support for sending time into other systems too). Keep reading for an overview of the improvements.
No longer a magic “behind the scenes” setting, Sending Time is now a first-class feature with it’s own section in MinuteDock. The “Send Time” section will show you a status of recent time you’ve sent over, giving you better visibility into what MinuteDock is actually doing to your QuickBooks account. It'll also show you when something didn't manage to send properly, allowing you to see what went wrong and retry sending once the issues are resolved. No more head-scratching when things don't quite work as expected! Get there by clicking the "Send Time" link at the bottom of the "Time" tab.
(Check out the help center guide: Sending time to QuickBooks)
You can configure sending time to happen automatically, or run it manually with a customisable the search to select the time you want to send across. This functions in a similar way to creating an invoice or a report in MinuteDock, so you can search for time entries you want to send across at any time, and MinuteDock will create or update the time activities in QuickBooks. You can save a default search and ask MinuteDock to automatically run it every hour, or quickly click through and send it yourself when you’re ready.
We found that QuickBooks users often had a slightly different way of organising their Service/Item and Class associations internally. So, sending Time now has much more flexibility around how Classes and Services/Items are assigned to the Time Activities in QuickBooks. This means MinuteDock should be able to be easily set up to work with the way your QuickBooks is set up (rather than you having to work around the way MinuteDock used to expect you to use Classes/Services). You can assign both a Class & Service to any of Tasks, Projects, Contacts and Users, as well as a default class and service across the board. Oh, and we’ve added proper support for sub-services/items - these will now properly show in the lists and send through for invoices and time activities. We think these are all great improvement as it provides lots of flexibility to work with QuickBooks reporting, invoicing, rates, and payroll.
(Check out the help center guide: Classes & Service/Items for QuickBooks.)
Of course, not everyone needs to sync Time Activities to QuickBooks, so we've also made made a couple of much requested improvements to Invoicing with QuickBooks
MinuteDock will now smartly pick the Item/Service for the line items based on the grouping and the linked Item/Service for the Task, Project, Contact and User. Previously, this was selected form a Contact or Account default.
Check out the help center guide: Classes & Service/Items for QuickBooks.
QuickBooks has gone global! For our global customers, QuickBooks has a slightly different tax model that wasn't well supported by MinuteDock until now. We've improved that support, so QuickBooks global customers should fly through invoicing now :-)
There are still a few things we’re working on, like improving the QBO login experience, and the ability to import your Employees over automatically - so we’ll keep you updated on what that comes. But for now, hopefully these improvements make your MinuteDock experience alongside QuickBooks a little more enjoyable :-) Let us know if you have any feedback.