The QuickBooks Online integration connects CoolFocus to QuickBooks Online so your giving and accounting data can flow between the two. It's one of two ways to get giving into QuickBooks — the right one if your organization uses QuickBooks Online.
QuickBooks Online vs. GL Batches (Desktop)
QuickBooks Online (this article) — a live connection to the online version of QuickBooks.
GL Batches — for QuickBooks Desktop users, who instead group giving into a batch and download a file to import.
Choose the one that matches the QuickBooks version your organization uses; you don't use both for the same data.
Where to find it
Open Settings, then go to Integrations and choose QuickBooks Online.
Before you connect
Have your QuickBooks administrator available — that person may need to sign in and approve the connection.
Decide with your finance team which funds, sources, payments, or batches you expect to track.
Connect at a time when finance can review the result, since accounting connections affect important financial workflows.
Stop older contributions from syncing
If you turned on the integration after you'd already recorded contributions in CoolFocus, you may not want all of that older giving history sent to QuickBooks.
On the QuickBooks Online settings page, use Mark Contributions to set a cutoff date. Every contribution recorded before that date is set to Do NOT Sync and stays that way going forward, so it never gets sent to QuickBooks. Contributions on or after the cutoff date continue to sync as usual.
Marking contributions as Do NOT Sync with this tool is permanent. Pick your cutoff date carefully before you apply it.
Fund mapping: products/services, not categories
Each CoolFocus fund maps to a QuickBooks item so contributions can post as a line on a Sales Receipt. That item must be a product or service (Service, Non-Inventory, Inventory, or Group/Bundle). QuickBooks does not allow a Category item on a sales receipt line, since categories are only used to organize your products and services list, not to bill against.
If a fund is mapped to a QuickBooks category instead of a product or service, contribution sync stops before it reaches QuickBooks and fails with a message like:
The fund '[Fund Name]' is mapped to a QuickBooks category instead of a billable product or service. Remap the fund to a QuickBooks product or service item, then retry sync.
This is treated as a permanent failure for that contribution (it won't keep retrying on its own) and raises an ops alert so staff can fix the mapping. To resolve it:
1. Open the fund in CoolFocus and check which QuickBooks item it's mapped to.
2. In QuickBooks, change that mapping to a product or service item rather than a category.
3. Run product sync (or reconnect QuickBooks if the product list looks out of date) so CoolFocus picks up the change.
4. Retry the contribution sync once the fund points at a valid item.
Product sync also skips QuickBooks categories automatically, so they are never imported as new mappable products and won't show up as options to map a fund to. If a category item was previously synced in, product sync deactivates it so it can't be selected for a fund going forward.
Reconnecting QuickBooks
If contributions stop syncing and remapping a fund doesn't fix it, the connection to QuickBooks itself may need to be refreshed. From the QuickBooks Online settings page, reconnect the integration and sign in again as your QuickBooks administrator when prompted. Reconnecting also refreshes the list of QuickBooks products and services CoolFocus can see, which helps if that list looks out of date.
Related
GL Batches — the QuickBooks Desktop alternative.