Before you start actively using QuickBooks Online (QBO) for accounting on Cloud-managed projects, you will need to add the products and labor types in the Cloud catalog to QBO. This way, you can skip creating items when pushing estimates, purchase orders, and invoices to QBO.
QBO categorizes items as Inventory, Non-Inventory, and Service. Typically, Cloud items are categorized in QBO as follows:
Product - Inventory
Project labor type and Service labor type - Service
If you'd like to know more about QBO item types, check out this article.
Exporting products
To export products, go to Catalog > My Products in the left navigation menu, select the products you want to export, and click "Export to QuickBooks" in the Actions menu.
If you are adding a large number of items in one go, you may see the "Loading" indicator for a few seconds. You can split up the items into batches and export them.
This will open a modal to create items for the products or map the products to existing items in QuickBooks. Here, you can do the following:
Create Item - create a new item in QBO under the Inventory item type. You will need to do this for all items. You can also select multiple items at once by pressing the Shift key on the keyboard and clicking the items one by one.
Map Item - map to a QBO item if it already exists in QBO. You can search for existing QBO items and map them to the correct ones.
Exporting labor types
Currently, it is not possible to export labor types beforehand. However, when pushing the labor type for the first time, you can add a labor type to QBO as a new "Service" item type.
Adding new items and services to QBO
As you keep adding items, labor types, and service plans to your catalog, you have the option to add them to QBO using one of the methods described above, or you can add them when you are pushing an estimate, PO, or invoice with new items or labor types.
Check out this article for more details.