Connecting QuickBooks
What HootQuill reads, what it writes, and what it will never touch in your books.
HootQuill does not invoice anybody. Your accounting system does that, and it is the system your accountant, your bank feed and your tax return already agree with. What this connection does is make sure what QuickBooks is billing matches what somebody actually signed — and stop you rekeying an agreement into two places.
Connecting
Step 1. Open the integration
SettingsIntegrationsQuickBooks. Only an owner can connect or disconnect — it is a financial system, so it is not something a team member can attach or detach on their own.
Step 2. Authorise at Intuit
You are sent to Intuit to sign in and pick the company file. HootQuill never sees your QuickBooks password; what comes back is a token, which is encrypted before it is stored and never appears in a log or in anything the browser downloads.
The only permission requested is accounting. Payments and payroll are separate permissions and are not asked for.
Step 3. Run the setup walk-through
Straight after connecting you are offered a walk-through that matches your existing clients and catalog items to what is already in QuickBooks, and imports anything missing. It is worth doing then and there — Linking clients and items explains what it is asking.
What HootQuill writes
Only on your instruction, and only these:
- Invoices built from a signed agreement, when you press Send to QuickBooks.
- Recurring transaction templates for the parts of an agreement that recur — always with an end date.
- Customers and items you explicitly ask it to create, when a record here has no counterpart in your books.
- An end date on a recurring template when the agreement it belongs to is terminated.
What it will not do
- It does not email your clients. Nothing created in QuickBooks is sent from HootQuill. You review and send from QuickBooks, as you do now.
- It does not edit an invoice after creating it. Changes are made in QuickBooks. Two systems editing one financial record is precisely how they start disagreeing.
- It does not take payments or touch anything in payroll.
- It does not delete your data on disconnect. Clients and items imported from QuickBooks are your records and they stay. What is removed is the link between them.
Disconnecting
Disconnecting revokes the token at Intuit rather than just forgetting it here, and removes every link between your records and theirs. Anything already created in QuickBooks — invoices, recurring templates — stays exactly where it is. It is in your books now, and it is not HootQuill’s to withdraw.
Something here wrong or missing? Tell us — a page that confused you will confuse the next person too.