The QuickBooks Online integration connects CoolFocus to QuickBooks Online so your giving and accounting data can flow between the two. It's one of two ways to get giving into QuickBooks — the right one if your organization uses QuickBooks Online.
• QuickBooks Online (this article) — a live connection to the online version of QuickBooks.
• GL Batches — for QuickBooks Desktop users, who instead group giving into a batch and download a file to import.
Choose the one that matches the QuickBooks version your organization uses; you don't use both for the same data.
Open Settings, then go to Integrations and choose QuickBooks Online.
• Have your QuickBooks administrator available — that person may need to sign in and approve the connection.
• Decide with your finance team which funds, sources, payments, or batches you expect to track.
• Connect at a time when finance can review the result, since accounting connections affect important financial workflows.
Each fund syncs to QuickBooks as a line item on a Sales Receipt, and QuickBooks requires that line item to be a product or service. QuickBooks also lets you set up plain categories, which exist to group items and can't be billed on a transaction.
If a fund is mapped to a QuickBooks category instead of a product or service, contribution sync now stops before it reaches QuickBooks and fails with a message like:
The fund is mapped to a QuickBooks category instead of a billable product or service. Remap the fund to a QuickBooks product or service item, then retry sync.
This is treated as a permanent failure (it won't keep retrying on its own) and raises an ops alert so staff can fix the mapping. To resolve it:
1. Open the fund in CoolFocus and check which QuickBooks item it's mapped to.
2. In QuickBooks, change that mapping to a product or service item rather than a category.
3. Re-run product sync if the product list looks out of date, or reconnect QuickBooks.
4. Retry the contribution sync once the fund points at a valid item.
Product sync also skips QuickBooks categories automatically. Categories are never imported as new mappable products, and if one was previously synced in by mistake, product sync now deactivates it so it can't be selected for a fund going forward.
Each CoolFocus fund maps to a QuickBooks item so contributions can post as a sales receipt line. That item must be a product or service (Service, Non-Inventory, Inventory, or Group/Bundle). QuickBooks does not allow a Category item on a sales receipt line, since categories are only used to organize your products and services list, not to bill against.
If a fund is mapped to a category item, contribution sync fails permanently for that contribution with a message like:
The fund '[Fund Name]' is mapped to a QuickBooks category instead of a billable product or service. Remap the fund to a QuickBooks product or service item, then retry sync.
To fix it:
1. Open the fund in CoolFocus and check which QuickBooks item it's mapped to.
2. In QuickBooks, remap the fund to a product or service item instead of a category.
3. Run product sync (or reconnect QuickBooks if the product list looks stale) so CoolFocus picks up the change.
4. Retry the contribution sync.
Product sync also skips QuickBooks category items automatically going forward, so they won't show up as options to map a fund to. If a fund was previously mapped to a category item that has since been synced in, that product mapping is deactivated on the next sync.
• GL Batches — the QuickBooks Desktop alternative.
• Giving Overview
• Payments and Payouts
• Funds and Sources
