RICS provides the ability to export financial data to QuickBooks. This allows stores to easily manage their financial data or hand it off to an accountant.

Mappings

Before the user can export to Quickbooks, however, the account must be set up with mappings.

A Mapping tells the system which QuickBooks account to use for a certain piece of data. For example, the store owner might want the Cash tender to map to a particular checking account in Quickbooks.

Each Transaction Type, Payout Type, and Tender Type must be mapped. There are also a number of static fields that need to be mapped, such as Cost of Goods sold. In addition, each tax must be mapped to both an Account and a Vendor. (The Vendor is the person or entity in QuickBooks who will be paid, for example, the Indiana Department of Revenue.)

When setting up QuickBooks, you may also choose a Class. The QuickBooks Class is essentially a tag that can be used to identify a particular store. This way, if a store owner has multiple stores that are all part of the same QuickBooks company file, the user can tell which journal entries belong to which store. Mapping a Quickbooks Class is required for desktop integrations. For Online integrations, the Class is optional. (This is because Classes are only available in the higher end (and more expensive) versions of QuickBooks Online.)

Different Store Levels

QuickBooks mappings will inherit down the organizational tree in the same way as configurations. That is, if a mapping is defined at the Store Owner level, it will be used by the Store as well, unless there is a Store-level override.

RICS recommends setting up your QuickBooks Mappings at the Store Owner level first. Set up any accounts that are common across all stores. Then go to the individual stores and map any accounts that were not defined at the owner level (such as taxes and store-level tenders). Setting things up in this way will make it easier to add new stores in the future, since you will only need to map any items defined at the new store. Also, this setup reduces the chances that someone will accidentally map the wrong account at one of the stores.

The above recommendation will not work if the stores each use a separate QuickBooks Company file. If that is the case, the user must load each store individually (using the appropriate company file) and set up account mappings individually for each store.

Desktop vs. Online

RICS supports exporting to both Quickbooks desktop and online editions. The setup process is slightly different for each.

Desktop

To use a desktop version of QuickBooks, you should choose the “Desktop” radio button on the QuickBooks Edition tab, and then fill in the filename of your Quickbooks company file. After that is complete, press the Load Accounts button to initiate the connection with QuickBooks.

Depending on your system setup and the version of QuickBooks you are using, you may need to have QuickBooks closed, or have the program open and the company file loaded already. If you do have QuickBooks open, make sure that the company file you have open is the same one that you are using to map with RICS, or you will get an error.

The first time the connection is established, you will be prompted to allow RICS to access your company data. Simply agree when presented with the certificate, and then RICS will be able to load the accounts.

Online

When using the online version of Quickbooks, simply select the Online radio button and then press the “Connect to QuickBooks” button. This will open a new window where you must enter your QuickBooks Online login information. Follow the prompts, and when finished close the new window and click the Load Accounts button to pull in the Quickbooks Online account information.

Prior Data

When you set up Quickbooks account mappings for the first time, RICS will automatically mark all sales data prior to that date as already having been exported. This is to prevent the system from trying to export years’ worth of past sales history to Quickbooks with the first export. Before setting up Quickbooks mappings, please ensure that all prior sales data is in QuickBooks. Also, do not set up mappings until you are ready to start using the QuickBooks export, or you may end up with duplicate data once you do start sending information from RICS.