Connecting QuickBooks Online
Your mailbox says what was promised. Your accounting file says what was billed and what was paid. Connecting QuickBooks Online lets Scout compare the two, so it can tell you that shipped work was never invoiced, that a supplier's bill does not match the purchase order, or that a customer's payment cleared and an item can close itself.
QuickBooks Online is an org connection: one authorization covers the whole workspace, and only an Owner or an Admin can make it.
Connect your company
- Open Connections from your avatar menu.
- Find the QuickBooks card under Accounting. It reads "Customers, estimates, invoices, bills, payments, and credit memos — read-only."
- Choose Connect.
- Sign in at Intuit with the QuickBooks account that has access to the company you want read.
- Choose the company. Intuit shows a company picker if your sign-in can reach more than one. Pick carefully — this is the company Scout will read, and Scout checks after the fact that the company you authorized is the company it ended up with. One connection reads one company.
- Read the permission summary and authorize. Intuit publishes only one accounting permission, so the request covers accounting data as a whole; Scout limits itself to reading on its own side, and its code is checked against that promise before every release.
- Intuit returns you to Scout. The card shows CONNECTED with a summary such as "58 invoices · payments · 24 months of history".
Screenshot: the QuickBooks connection page after the first successful read.
What Scout reads
| Record | Why Scout wants it |
|---|---|
| Customers | To match a QuickBooks customer to the account in your mailbox and on the Map, so one client is one client. |
| Estimates | Quote values and dates, so a quote can be compared with what was actually billed. |
| Invoices | What you billed, when, for how much — the other half of "was this ever invoiced?" |
| Payments | What cleared. A payment that lands is often what closes an item without anyone touching it. |
| Credit memos | Credits promised and credits applied, so a promised credit that never arrived does not get forgotten. |
| Supplier bills | To set the supplier invoice beside the purchase order and show the difference. |
Scout also reads the identifiers it needs to reconcile these records with each other.
What Scout never does in QuickBooks
- It does not create, edit, void or delete an invoice, a payment, a credit memo, a bill, a customer or anything else.
- It does not send an invoice or a statement to your customer.
- It does not change your chart of accounts, your items, your terms or your settings.
- It does not touch payroll, banking or any part of QuickBooks outside the records listed above.
When Scout spots something — an unbilled job, a double invoice, a bill that does not match — it raises a point with the numbers and a link, and you decide. Scout prepares; you act in QuickBooks.
The deep links back into QuickBooks
Evidence rows on a QuickBooks-derived point carry an open in source link straight to that invoice, payment or credit memo in QuickBooks Online, so you can check Scout's arithmetic against the record itself in one click.
The link appears only when Scout proved it points at the exact object in the exact company it read. If Scout could not prove that, it shows the evidence without a link rather than guess a URL. A missing link is honesty, not a fault.
Schedule, history and freshness
- QuickBooks Online is read nightly at 2:00 in your workspace time zone. Accounting changes on a daily rhythm, not a minute-by-minute one.
- The first read is a backfill that can reach back two years by default, and the Look-back control offers anything from 1 month to 5 years.
- Between nightly runs Scout also accepts change notices from Intuit and reads only what changed, so a same-day invoice can reach Scout before the next night.
- Freshness is wall-clock, not elapsed: the connection page says "Nightly 02:00 · Stale after 10:00 local". If the ledger has not landed by mid-morning, the morning brief was written without money in it, and the card moves to NEEDS ATTENTION.
Good to know
- Intuit authorizations expire and have to be refreshed. Scout refreshes them quietly; if a refresh finally fails, the card shows SYNC FAILED or RE-AUTHORIZE and an Owner or Admin reconnects. Reconnecting binds the same company back to the same connection — Scout refuses a reconnect that would quietly point at a different company.
- Money-related Watches are the ones that need this connection: unbilled or double-billed customers, invoice reconciliation against the purchase order, the margin guard, promised credits, and receivables past due. Without accounting connected, those sit idle.
- A QuickBooks connection is owned by the workspace, and its work routes to the team you set as its default — Finance, usually. See Team-owned versus personal sources.
- Disconnecting stops the reading and queues deletion of the stored authorization. Points and receipts Scout already wrote stay.