Quickbooks Desktop

Hello - me again.

I am new to OR but have been using QB Pro Desktop 2016 for many years.
I really like the class option that let's me show separate columns for each property and for misc income.
Now the kicker.
OR only uses Quickbooks Online. This means you need to pay $60 a month to get that feature that I used to get included with the desktop.

I want to make a request to integrate both Online and Dektop and I am willing to be the beta-tester Guinea Pig to get it done.

We've considered QuickBooks Desktop integration, but it doesn't offer full sync support that would let us make updates to invoices and payments as incidentals are added and payments come in.

We do have reports and exports for bookings and charges and payments, so some folks will dump those to Excel and then import to QB desktop that way.

Is there any documentation on how they do that?
I was just on the phone with QB - no deals after 1st year. Just wanting class will make you pay $720 a year.
Do most people just consolidate all their properties into one line?
What level of QB Online do most use?
Do you have reports that can break down the properties into columns by income and expense? I kind of doubt that.
Any other accounting options?

Hi Norman, sorry for the delay on this. Just noticed your response here from a couple weeks ago...

I don't have any documentation on the QB Desktop imports. Other users here may be able to instruct you in that. Yes, QB Online isn't cheap. It used to be, but then they did a bunch of work, cornered the market and drove the price up.

You don't have to use the Class attribute. Personally, I would recommend it since it allows you to pivot your reports by that, but you don't have to. See if you can get Department/Location attributes in QB without paying for Class. Department/Location can do the same type of tracking.

We do not, internally, have reports for income/expenses. We have avoided building out a lot of accounting features since our focus is on the booking side and we want to do well at that. Once we go accounting, the number of expected features would explode (double entry bookkeeping, chart of accounts, taxes, journal entry, depreciation, balance sheets and so on) and we don't want to head in that direction. We want to focus on the booking side of things.

Is there a plan to integrate with desktop? The article I read said online only.

No current plans for direct integration with QuickBooks desktop. We do have some users doing that by using the booking, payment, line item/lineitem pivot detail reports, exporting them to Excel, and then importing to QuickBooks desktop.

I'm curious how anyone would choose to use QB online. When I've looked at pricing it's $30/month for a year, then $60/month afterwards, and those prices are per entity.

I use quickbooks desktop for 3 entities, so my eventual cost would be $180/month which is vastly more than the cost of QB desktop (maybe $125/year with updgrading every other year)

Don't use it currently, but are there any quality cheap QB alternatives?

Yep, it is a tradeoff between price and convenience for sure. There's a lot of time savings with being able to log in from anywhere and share with multiple users, so you've got to factor that into the equation. And a lot of people use QBO just because its the de facto standard -- nobody every got fired for buying IBM and all that. I'd bet they have a bulk discount for several companies at once, maybe something through their Accountant program.

There are others like https://www.waveapps.com/ and https://www.xero.com/us/ that some folks use, with different features compared to QBO. I've used both of those for smaller companies and they worked great.

Are there any users that have a "Best Practices" write up on how to handle the various entries required from OR to Quickbooks Desktop?

- Deposits on Rentals
- Invoice Posting
- Handling Credit Card Payments that get imported as 3rd Party payments (Lynnbrook vs Guest Name)
- Credit Card Fees
- Security Deposit, whether in cash or as a Credit Card Authorization
- Refunds of the Security Deposit

Here's my simplistic view...

- Deposits on Rentals - INCOME
- Invoice Posting - DON'T CARE ITS JUST AN INVOICE
- Handling Credit Card Payments that get imported as 3rd Party payments (Lynnbrook vs Guest Name) - INCOME
- Credit Card Fees - FEE (but you may not see this)
- Security Deposit, whether in cash or as a Credit Card Authorization - TYPICALLY IS OFFSET BY REFUNDS. ANY POSITIVE==INCOME
- Refunds of the Security Deposit - SEE PREVIOUS

If you do direct bookings and accept credit cards, just put those fees against some kind of FEE account, probably those are useful to reduce income.

An accountant primarily cares about how much you earned in income, and then they'll look at your expenses and see if any of that can offset your financial picture, perhaps by reducing income or by adding to the cost basis of your property (ie: repairs).

You'd be pretty close if all you did was put income in one quickbooks account and expenses into another, no need for tracking guest names or anything more fine grained.

None of the above addresses sales tax payments, maybe that's part of your question? In the state of CO I've been told that you don't need to pay sales tax on the amount due to cleaning. I personally have been paying that in the past, but next quarter I'll look more closely.

Just saw your reply - thanks for this