Linking clients and items

A link is a permanent association between a record here and a record in your books — this client is that customer, this catalog item is that product or service. Once linked, everything HootQuill creates posts to the right customer and the right income account without being told again.

Offered straight after you connect, and reachable later from Settings→Integrations→QuickBooks. It handles both directions at once:

• Matching — your existing records to the QuickBooks ones they already correspond to.
• Importing — bringing across QuickBooks customers and items you do not have here yet. Each arrives already linked, so nothing has to be matched up afterwards.

You can do clients, catalog items, or both. On the import step you choose which records to bring across rather than taking all of them — a book with three hundred customers in it usually has a long tail you do not want in your quoting system.

Imported QuickBooks items arrive as one-time charges; their billing period and unit need setting here, because QuickBooks does not hold that idea in a form HootQuill can read.

HootQuill ranks candidates and tells you why each one was suggested:

• Email — the client and the customer share an address. An address is a fact and a name is a spelling, so this outranks a name match.
• SKU — a catalog item and a QuickBooks item share an item code.
• Exact name — the same name once the suffix is set aside. Cherry Creek Widgets, LLC and Cherry Creek Widgets are the same company; so are Acme Inc. and Acme Corporation.
• Similar name — one name extends the other, the way a sub-customer does: Freeman Sporting Goods and Freeman Sporting Goods, Bayshore. Always shown as needing a look.

Each row is then marked confident or worth checking. Two records sharing one email address — a parent company and its sites, which is common — is always worth checking, because that is exactly the case where a person should choose rather than be told.

Rows carrying a suggestion can be accepted together rather than one at a time. Nothing is ticked for you and rows with no suggestion are never included — the bulk action saves the clicking, never the deciding.

Every client page and every catalog item page has a QuickBooks panel once you are connected. It does one of three things:

• Linked — shows what it is linked to, and opens that record in QuickBooks.
• Not linked, with a candidate — offers the match.
• Not linked, nothing to match — offers to create it in QuickBooks. HootQuill checks for a record with the same name first, so you are told about a near-duplicate rather than creating a second one.

A record can only be linked to one counterpart, and vice versa. If you are told something is already linked to another record, that is the guard working.

Once your clients and items are linked, you can push an agreement to your books — How billing works.