QuickBooks Online Integration

Main Accounting Transactions List

DonorPerfect CRM is our main flagship product at SofterWare. Within it users can accomplish a variety of daily tasks for their non-profit, including reconciling donations in their accounting software. Prior to 2017 DonorPerfect only supported exporting transactions to QuickBooks Desktop. As more and more of our users started subscribing to the online SaaS version of Quickbooks, we noticed an increased demand on our UserVoice for a QuickBooks Online integration.

Problem Statement:

Non-profits want to seamlessly sync donations with their QuickBooks Online account for easy reconciliation.

Problem Diagnosis:

We were able to learn of this request from our UserVoice called Suggest & Vote. Here clients were expressing the desire to have an easy way to export and sync gift records with their QuickBooks Online account. Up until this point, users had to manually export a batch of transactions in Intuit Interchange file format and then manually import them into QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online.

“Currently the accounting interface is an IIF export. The Quickbooks IIF import process is clunky, error-prone, and requires single-user mode. As an integrated app, DonorPerfect could push directly into Quickbooks and avoid these issues.”

“It would be great if there was an automatic way to post to QuickBooks installed or QuickBooks Online using an XML-API integration. This would cut down on the number of steps involved when exporting a file, saving it, and importing it into QB.”

Results of Problem Diagnosis:

After spending some time interviewing users who requested this functionality on our Suggest & Vote we had the following key takeaways:

1. Users aren’t generally accounting experts.

2. Users would like the option to adjust the posting schedule to fit their accounting practices.

3. Users would like gift transactions to automatically map to existing QuickBooks customers to avoid duplicate entries.

4. Users would like the ability to map their DonorPerfect General Ledger accounts to QuickBooks accounts so they could track revenue sources within QuickBooks.

Applying the diagnosis:

Many users informed us that they weren't exactly comfortable or familiar with their organization’s accounting processes. Because of this overwhelming feedback, I decided to explore the potential of a wizard to set up the integration between our app and QuickBooks Online. This would allow the user to focus on one task at a time when configuring the integration. This stepped approach would also allow us to include ample amounts of copy to help explain each choice and make the user feel comfortable with continuing.

Here’s a short 5-minute tutorial video our content team created showing the onboarding flow I built:

Once their DonorPerfect and QuickBooks accounts connected the user would be taken to a list of transactions that are in one of the following statuses: Unposted, Posted, or Missing Data. From our initial beta usability testing we noticed that users had difficulty identifying which status a transaction was in. The original design just included a status column that the user could sort the list with. Because of this users were unsure if a transaction was already posted to QuickBooks or if it had missing information that needed to be corrected in order to be synced.

Resulting from this initial usability feedback, I decided to design large clickable filter counters at the top of the transaction list. These allowed users to get an overview of all of their transactions that are in each of the distinct statuses. Clicking on any of the counters would sort the transaction list below.

Transaction List With Unposted Filter Applied

Since things might change for our users in regards to accounting practices, we also created a settings tab that displays everything they configured during the initial onboarding flow. Here users could easily change their QuickBooks account, bank account, ledger mappings, and posting methodology.

QuickBooks Settings Page

Results:

Final user acceptance testing validated many of the decisions and discussions we had with users over the course of this project. Users felt comfortable configuring the integration themselves without the need to ask their accountant for help. We also learned that users quickly and easily discovered the filter circles at the top of the transaction list and found them to be intuitive to use.

Here are some notes and quotes from these user sessions:

“He found the filter circles right away! The first thing he clicked on was the 3 gifts missing data filter circle. He said, “that’s a great feature to be able to click on the problem and be able to fix it before importing to QuickBooks.”

“My Drexel intern had no questions about using this!”

“Chelsea was able to go through the setup process without asking her accountant for help”

As with any feature, there are always things to improve upon but I was happy to feel like we were able to accomplish our goal of making users feel comfortable setting up and using our integration without the need for any accounting expertise.