While Tailwind offers many administrative and accounting tools, it is not fully-fledged accounting software. To help businesses that require a more robust solution, Tailwind provides integration with QuickBooks Desktop.
Getting Started – Items in QuickBooks
The QB desktop sync uses Items within QuickBooks to map to. While you have revenue and expense items in Tailwind that give you the ability to categorize your revenue or expenses, and you have those corresponding accounts set up in your QuickBooks thru your Chart of Accounts, you will use “Items” in QuickBooks. Items in QuickBooks can be mapped to both an Income Chart of Account for revenue and an Expense or Cost of Goods Chart of Account for expenses. If you do not presently have items set up in QuickBooks, the SaasAnt tool will create them in QuickBooks for you.
This help article assumes that you have already set up your Chart of Accounts setup.
Downloading the Third-Party Tool
For QuickBooks Desktop Import, we are working with a Third-Party vendor with an established record of importing and exporting data into Quick Books.
You will need to navigate to the following website to download the tool on the computer that will be syncing data from Tailwind into QuickBooks.
Click here to download SaasAnt.
Upon purchase ($99 per year subscription), you will receive an email that includes your license key and instructions on how to register your activation code.
Please note: SaasAnt offers a full 30-day trial which you can use to ensure that it works for you.
Setup and Configuration
Once you have installed the application, there are a few steps that you will need to do before importing transactions from Tailwind into QuickBooks.
Click here to download the Mapping files.
- Open your SaasAnt application and go to Edit, Import Settings
This will prompt QB to show you a window that will allow you to grant permission for SaasAnt to connect to QB, and the recommended setting here is: “Whenever the QB company file is open.”
On the General Tab, you can set your date formats differently from the default one; you can find the matching transactions in QB by other items (check them out). The important one to set here is “Action when a Matched Transaction Found,” You will want to choose “Ignore and Show Warning. This will prevent any duplicate records from being created in QuickBooks.
- Navigate to the “Item” tab and set your default accounts (the pull-down is accessing and pulling the information directly out of QuickBooks.
You will want to ensure that they are set to the correct account type in Quickbooks (Income and Expense)
Then click the “Save” button in the bottom right-hand corner
- Navigate to Tailwind and to Tools, QuickBooks Desktop
On this screen, you will have the ability to download the date range of data you want to import into QB, but first, we need to take care of some tax mapping, and you will choose the actual QB Tax Code that is in your instance of QB here.
- Now, on the top portion of that screen, you can choose the date range to download:
Once the download has been completed, it will show in a zip file in the bottom left-hand corner.
- Create a folder on your desktop called QB Import Files and move the files that are downloaded into the zip file over to this folder
Now that the files are saved into your folder, the rest of the work is done in the SaasAnt tool.
Note: The records for customers and vendors will be linked to the legal names. The utility will automatically create any records that don’t yet exist in QB and can update address and contact details if you wish
Importing Transactions
After downloading the transactions, the following steps will outline how to import your transactions into QB.
- Open the SaasAnt software; if not already open.
- Clicking on File and choosing “Import” will let you select the transaction type and the file to use. For example, if the transaction type you select is “invoices,” then when you browse for the file, you will go to your new folder created “QB Import Files” and select the Invoices template, and then the software will prompt you to choose the “Saved Template.”
- Clicking on the Next button in the bottom right-hand corner will get you to a “mapping” screen. We have set the defaults here thru our mapping templates, but you can change them if needed and then save that new mapping if ours is not suitable.
- If using our mapping templates, bypass this screen, and you will come to a preview screen. This is where you can see the data that will be moving over to QB, and in the bottom right-hand corner, you have a button that will send this data to QB.
- Repeat for all other transaction types you want to import.