Overview

Welcome to QBO Self-Service! This is a feature that we’ve democratized to users to speed up the QBO x ABM onboarding process and put account mapping changes in the hands of those who know their accounts best! 

We’ve already written a handy article for QBO transmission behavior, and what kinds of changes in ABM have the potential to transmit to QBO. We recommend giving the following article a read prior to proceeding with the QBO onboarding process outlined in this article: ABM + QBO Sync.

Once you enable the sync, Customers, Purchase Orders, and Invoices will also sync to Quickbooks.

User requirements:

• ABM ‘Admin’ status

• Quickbooks Online subscription

Accessing QBO Settings

 To access your QBO settings and update mappings, click on the ‘Settings’ icon within your ABM Portal, and then click on the ‘QBO’ tab:

Now that you’re in the right place – if you have already onboarded to QBO and are looking for information on how to update existing account mappings, proceed to the ‘Updating Existing Account Mappings’ section. Otherwise, continue to read along!

Important Concepts

Mapping - When we refer to a ‘mapping,’ we mean the ‘rules’ that allow certain item commits, invoice lines, or deposits to map to a defined account. Within QBO Self-Service, we have both custom mapping (discussed later in this article) and predefined mappings (used by the onboard wizard).

Rank - Each ‘mapping’ has a rank. When we refer to a ‘rank,’ we refer to the importance of that mapping being evaluated. Lower ranks are evaluated first (i.e. rank 5 is evaluated before rank 6), while higher ranks are evaluated last (i.e. rank 100 is evaluated after rank 50).

Item Criteria, Location Criteria, Other Criteria - The ‘rules’ that we use to evaluate which item commits, invoice lines, or deposits should map to which accounts. For example, a predicate expression could be having a category of ‘beer’. We could then use this to say, “anything with a category of beer should map to my ‘Beer - Asset’ account.

Skip Transaction - a special account type that allows you to ‘skip’ a specific mapping rule. For example, if you want to ensure all material item moves are not synced to QBO, you would set up your mapping as follows:

Note: selecting a lower rank will ensure this mapping rule gets evaluated before other mapping rules that might be configured to pull materials in.

Conditions

When you are updating an existing mapping or creating a new mapping, you’ll be able to interact with a ‘conditions’ dropdown. The different ‘conditions’ selectable within this dropdown are outlined below. These definitions will be useful as you move through the later sections of this article.

• Always True - Selecting this condition will pull everything into this account that is not caught above. Something with a condition of ‘Always True’ is usually added as the highest rank (like 1000).

• Item Category - Matches with the Categories + Types available within your Product Families.

• Item Size Name (freeform) - References the name of particular item sizes. For instance, if you want to pull in every size with the name keg, you would type ‘Keg’ into this input field. 

• Other Location Type - The origin location’s type (i.e. Taproom, Storage, Production).

• Other Location Name (freeform) - The origin location’s name (i.e. ‘Taproom - Tax Exempt’, ‘Brite Tank #1’)

• Note: this cannot reference a customer - this needs to reference the name of an existing Location or Site.

• Location Type - The destination location’s name (i.e. Taproom, Delivered).

• Note: ‘Delivered’ is used as a destination location when we sell inventory.

• Location Name (freeform) - The destination location’s name (i.e. ‘Taproom - Tax Exempt’, ‘Brite Tank #1’)

• Note: this cannot reference a customer - this needs to reference the name of an existing Location or Site

Initial Onboard

If you are looking to sync / onboard your ABM account to QBO for the first time, there are a couple of requirements that must be met prior to completing this process. 

1. You must have an active Quickbooks Online subscription.

2. Ensure you have your base accounts set up in QBO. Reference the below Inventory, Asset, Item table when planning out which account types you want to use, and which account types you don’t need to use for your setup.

If you don’t need some of these accounts, you can leave them blank during onboarding. They will fall to the ‘bucket’ account you set up to capture general item movements (like the ‘Other Sales’ account in the table below).

Inventory, Asset, Income Account table 

For more information about some of the Location Types referenced in this table, check out our ‘ABM Inventory Location Behavior’ article!

Once you ensure you have the base accounts you’d like to start with when initializing the QBO sync, it’s now time to 1) connect your QBO account, 2) select your default accounts, 3) use the ‘onboard wizard’. 

1) Connect your QBO account

To connect your QBO account, you will need to click on the ‘Connect QBO to Arryved Brewery Management’ button pictured below. This will bring you to QBO’s authorization flow, where you will select your account and authorize your QBO account to connect to ABM:

Once this is accomplished, you’ll need to set your ‘default accounts’.

2) Select your default accounts

 If there are no mappings set up for your items (in the subsequent steps in this article), these are the accounts that your items / deposits will map to if they aren’t told to go anywhere else. These are required fields, and you will not be able to enable the QBO sync without selecting default accounts.

For example, if I have no mappings set up for my Income accounts, then when my items are sold, the sale amounts will be added to my default Item Income Account.

Attempting to ‘save’ without having your default accounts selected will throw an error, requiring you to make sure all dropdowns have an account selected:

Once all of your default accounts are selected, move on to the next section!

Note: the Item Redemption Account, while it is mandatory it be selected,  is used for CRV / Use Tax for deposits applied to cans / bottles. This may not apply to you, but you’ll need to select an account anyway!

3) Use the onboard wizard

The ‘onboard wizard’ is a reference to the account selection modal accessed when you click ‘Setup Account Mapping’. To use this tool, your QBO transmit status must be off:

When you select ‘Setup Account Mapping,’ you’ll see the following 2-page modal with ‘Select Account’ dropdowns. Of course, not all mapping types need to be selected, but you’ll want to consider the types of inventory / item movements covered in the Inventory, Asset, Income table shown previously. As mentioned in the table, you’ll likely want to ensure you select an account for ‘New Inventory Received’ unless you’ve discussed an alternative with a support representative.

First, select your Inventory and COGS accounts (also known as Asset and Expense), and then click ‘next’:

Then, you’ll move along to Income account selection. Once your desired accounts have been selected, click ‘Save’ at the bottom right of the modal.

You’ll notice that after you click ‘save,’ several mapping parameters will appear in both the QBO Inventory and COGS Accounts table, as well as the QBO Income Accounts table. These tables function like other tables within ABM - you can filter, sort, remove, and add columns.

Inventory and COGS

Income Accounts

Updating Existing Account Mappings

To update existing account mappings, you have two options:

1) Disable the sync via the ‘QBO Transmit Status’ toggle and utilize the ‘onboard wizard’ to add and update accounts. 

If utilizing this option, you’ll need to click ‘save’ after modifying the desired accounts. If you’ve made custom changes to an account mapping created via the ‘onboard wizard’ tool, these custom changes will save even if you’ve selected a new account for that particular mapping.

*** Important: while the sync is disabled, any actions taken in ABM during this time will need to be retransmitted to QBO. If you use this method, ensure you are either making these changes after-hours, or at least while no one else at your company is making changes within ABM.

2) Edit existing account mappings by clicking on the corresponding row within one of the QBO tables. 

After clicking on a row in one of the QBO tables, you’ll see a modal like the below:

Here, you can make edits to the ‘rank’ (lower ranks are evaluated first, and higher ranks are evaluated last), conditions, and account the rule is mapping to. If the rank is already in use, you’ll see the following message:

The above message means that you need to either change the rank of the mapping that is already associated with rank ‘5,’ or select a different rank for the current mapping you are attempting to modify.

Pro tip: for a quick look at the mappings that are currently in use, you can close out of the ‘Edit Account Mapping’ modal and check out the ‘rank’ column within either QBO Accounts table.

If there is a mapping you no longer have any use for, you can use the ‘trash can’ icon on the mapper’s row to remove the mapping altogether: 

Of course, you can always re-add that mapping by using the onboard wizard, or by creating a new account mapping. Creating a new account mapping is outlined in the section below.

Creating New Account Mappings

If the default account mappings generated with the onboard wizard don’t quite cover all the cases for inventory moves you’d like, you can use the ‘New Custom Mapper’ button to create a new mapping rule. Unlike when you are using the onboard wizard, the sync does not need to be disabled for you to add new custom mappings. Just be cautious: once you ‘save’ your new custom mappers, all future QBO transmissions will take the newly created rules into account.

When you create a custom mapper, you must select at least one condition and an account to map to, prior to saving. Attempting to proceed to ‘save’ without having an account selected will display a ‘field is required’ message:

Attempting to proceed to ‘save’ without having a condition selected will display ‘the custom mapper has an incomplete condition’ message:

Prior to saving, make sure your rank is right where you want it. Again, feel free to reference your QBO mapping tables’ ‘rank’ column prior to adding a new custom mapping, to get a feel for how your other mappings are currently ranked.

Once you save this new mapping, it will automatically be added to the corresponding QBO mapping table.

Related Guides

ABM Inventory Location Type Behavior

ABM + QBO Sync