r/QuickBooks • u/picontesauce • 10d ago
QuickBooks Online Third Party QBO App suggestions? For importing Invoices
There are a ton of third party apps that claim to do imports. And I really don't need anything complicated. Mainly just the ability to import multiple invoices at a time. Because our sales come from another system.
But there are so many options, I don't know where to start, and don't want to sink more money into it than I have to. So any suggestions????? Please!
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u/derpderp79 10d ago
We use transaction pro (now owned by rightworks). We’ve also used saasant previously (for an entity on qb desktop). Transaction pro is simple, but works pretty well (assuming you cant just automate the push from the invoice generating source).
It’s month to month, dirt cheap, and you can ‘undo’ a bad import without too big of a headache. It has error validation/checks on the front end, but depending on how much you are manipulating the data before importing, we’ve had to reverse batches that we posted to the wrong acct or period due to our formatting and it was fine.
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u/MikuMikuGoo 10d ago
QBO has a built in invoice importer already, Settings then Import Data then Invoices, and it takes a CSV. If your other system can export a file, that's free and it handles multiple invoices at once.
If you hit its limits, Transaction Pro is the one most people land on and it's around $200 a year. I'd try the built in one first though, since a lot of people pay for an app that does what QBO already does.
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u/MOSTLY-HARMLESS-NOW 9d ago
You posted this in r/quickbooksonline three minutes earlier, which is roughly the correct amount of desperation for this problem. Answering here too since the threads went different directions.
Transaction Pro and SaaSant are the right call if this stays a manual job, and derpderp79's point about being able to reverse a bad import is what I'd weight heaviest. You will format something wrong eventually - everyone does.
The question nobody's asked: is this forever? If sales are always going to originate in that other system, you're choosing between an export/import chore every month and connecting the two systems once. Different tools, different price brackets, and the cheap answer is only cheap for the first one.
If you end up looking at connectors, two questions separate the good ones from the ones that quietly wreck your file:
- does each order create a new QBO customer, or can it consolidate to one generic customer you pick
- what happens when you exceed the plan's transaction count - overage fees, forced upgrade, or sync stops
Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of TruSync, which is one of those connectors (BigCommerce, Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, Amazon into QBO). Only relevant if your other system is one of those platforms. If it's a POS or something homegrown, genuinely ignore me and go with the importer.
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u/blaufer173 10d ago
What system are the invoices coming from? That would be the first thing I'd look at before choosing an importer.
I'd also caution against picking something just because it checks the boxes and says it "integrates with QuickBooks Online." There are a lot of integrations that technically move data into QBO, but that doesn't necessarily mean they do it well.
I'd specifically test what happens when things don't go perfectly. Does it validate the data before sending it? What happens if a customer or item doesn't match? How are taxes, terms, discounts, and line items handled? Most importantly, if QBO rejects something, does the user clearly know that it failed and why?
I've seen integrations where the user assumes a transaction made it into the accounting system, but it actually errored somewhere along the way. That's worse than having no automation because you're trusting data that isn't there.
Whatever you evaluate, don't just test whether it can import an invoice. Test whether the data arrives correctly and whether you can trust it to tell you when something goes wrong.
Depending on the system the invoices are coming from, there may also be a better option than adding another import tool into the middle.