How does the Abacus & QuickBooks Desktop integration work?

Abacus has a seamless integration with QuickBooks Desktop for both reimbursable expenses and corporate card expenses. 

How does the sync work for reimbursable expenses? 

• Abacus processes reimbursements via batched ACH transfers on a nightly basis
• When the ACH transfer is initiated by expense approval, Abacus creates a Bill & Bill Payment in QuickBooks for the same transfer amount, making reconciliation against your bank statement easy
• The bill will include line items for each expense batched into the debit; each expense will be booked to the correct expense account when it hits your books

To give you a better idea of what this will look like in QuickBooks, these screenshots show you a Bill and Bill Payment in QuickBooks Desktop:

Bill:

The sync to QuickBooks is triggered by the debit from the company bank account starting. Once the batch debit is created (this happens on a nightly basis whenever expenses are approved), the Bill and Bill Payment will sync. 

Each expense included in the batched debit will be booked to the correct expense account. The memo of the line item in QuickBooks Desktop for each Corporate card charges includes the Abacus note and a link back to the original expense in Abacus so that you can view the receipt image.

Abacus will be the vendor on the Bill and Bill Payment. We use a Bill and Bill Payment to make it efficient for you to reconcile to the periodic bank debits, while still giving you the full line item granularity for each expense that you need to properly roll up to the income statement, e.g. Account, Class, etc... a Bill can only have one Vendor, so Abacus is the Vendor because we're responsible for the reimbursement payments.

Bill Payment

The Bill Payment will match the amount of the bill.

How does the sync work for corporate card expenses? 

Abacus will sync corporate card transactions to QuickBooks after they are reviewed and approved by an Abacus Admin. Admin approval is what triggers the sync to QuickBooks. 

The corporate card transactions will be sent to the corresponding register, where they will match up against the corresponding transaction for fast and easy reconciliation. 

Corporate card feeds are located in your Bank Feeds Center in QuickBooks. Here's what an individual credit card transaction will look like. It will already be booked to the correct expense account when it syncs (in this example, automobile expenses): 

How to reconcile expenses in your corporate card transaction list: 

QuickBooks gives you the option to import your credit card statement into your books. Instead of manually accounting for each transaction, Abacus syncs the matching data in so that you'll already know the expense account, business description, etc. To reconcile, first navigate to the bank feed that's managing your corporate card statement, and view your transaction list. 

QuickBooks utilizes a matching logic that attempts to match corporate card transactions with the corresponding record that Abacus creates. Some will be auto-matched and some will need your review.

To match a card transaction, click 'match to existing transaction' in the Action column:

Then you will be able to select from the records that Abacus has created in your QuickBooks.

WebConnector: Because QuickBooks Desktop is not cloud-based, we work with WebConnector to help facilitate the transfer of data between Abacus and QuickBooks. Here's the sequence of events for the Abacus sync to QuickBooks.

Reimbursable expenses sync once a day: 

• Admin approves an expense 
• That night, all expenses are batched into a single debit
• Abacus sends the record to WebConnector and next time it runs, it will pull the data to QuickBooks

Corporate Card expenses sync any time WebConnector runs: 

• Admin approves an expense, and it's immediately sent to WebConnector 
• Next time WebConnector runs, it will pull through the approved corporate card transactions 

Most WebConnector settings are set up to sync in the background every 60 minutes. However, if you want to update the sync manually or on a one-time basis, you can update Abacus in Web Connector (File > Update Web Services).

Supported Account Types