For QuickBooks Online users

The situation

What people actually come to us about.

No department or location P&L

The most common request by a distance. Usually solvable in place, because the data is often recoverable from classes and vendor patterns even where nobody set up dimensions properly.

Keying every vendor bill

A workflow problem rather than a ledger problem. Bills can be read, coded, matched, and approved on top of QuickBooks, writing finished bills back into it.

Multiple company files

Consolidation in a spreadsheet. Reporting-level consolidation is achievable in place; genuine intercompany elimination is not, and that distinction usually decides whether you move.

A close that keeps slipping

Often fixable with daily reconciliation and a structured checklist without touching the ledger at all — the constraint is usually waiting rather than volume.

Revenue recognition by hand

For software and services companies this is the usual forcing event, and it is one of the three things QuickBooks cannot be made to do from outside.

Fixed assets in a spreadsheet

QuickBooks has no real fixed-asset subledger, so the schedule lives outside it and does not tie. Also on the short list of genuine limits.

What we can fix without you leaving

The integration is read-only and stays that way unless you enable write-back deliberately. Within about two weeks, on the QuickBooks file you already have:

Dimensional reporting — department, location, project, and entity P&L, where the data is recoverable from what you already capture.
AP automation — bills read, coded, matched, and routed, then written back into QuickBooks as finished bills.
Daily reconciliation — bank and card activity matched continuously rather than at month end.
A structured close — checklist, owners, subledger tie-outs, and the chasing.
A shadow ledger — a parallel double-entry ledger reconciling against your QuickBooks daily, which costs you nothing but a connection and makes any future decision low-risk.

Most of what people want from a new ERP is reporting and automation. Neither requires replacing the thing that holds the books.

The three things that genuinely cannot be fixed in place

Multi-entity consolidation with real intercompany elimination. Reporting-level roll-up is achievable from outside. Eliminations enforced at posting, with unmatched intercompany gating the close, are not.
ASC 606 with multiple performance obligations. Schedules can be maintained externally, but the deferred revenue rollforward will not tie to the ledger, and that is exactly what diligence pulls first.
A fixed-asset subledger. Cost, accumulated depreciation, method, and remaining life belong in the ledger. A spreadsheet that agrees with the trial balance by coincidence is not a subledger.

If one of those is your binding constraint, the ledger has to change — and the shadow ledger means it does not have to be a leap.

What the dimensions question turns on

Whether department reporting is fixable in place depends on whether the dimension was ever captured. Classes used consistently are recoverable. Payroll arriving as one lump journal with no department is not — no system can invent what was never recorded, and the fix is at the point of entry.

We will tell you which of the two you have during the assessment rather than in week three, and where we apply a defensible mapping we label those figures as derived rather than captured.

Questions

What people ask.

Will you write to our QuickBooks file?

Not unless you enable it. The connection is read-only by default and most engagements never turn write-back on beyond AP bill creation, which is a separate revocable permission.

Do we need your subscription as well as QuickBooks?

Yes — Connect at $499 a month hosts the graph, the reporting, and the shadow ledger. You keep paying Intuit for QuickBooks, which most customers find is still the cheaper total than replacing it.

What if we later want to move?

The shadow ledger will have been reconciling against your QuickBooks for months by then, so cutover is turning off the write-back on a ledger that has already demonstrated it agrees. We will not sell that until three closed months have tied.

Does this work with QuickBooks Desktop?

Differently. Desktop has no modern API and needs a separate approach — see the Desktop pages. Everything here assumes Online.

Will our accountant object?

Rarely, because nothing changes in QuickBooks itself. Bring them to the assessment anyway — their view on the chart of accounts is worth more than any feature discussion.

Keep QuickBooks. Fix what it will not do.