Bring your customers in from QuickBooks
Office web page → Settings → QuickBooks Online (owners and admins). Connect QuickBooks first.
What comes in
- Customers with their service address, billing address, and the contact on the QuickBooks customer (name, phone, email — marked as the billing contact).
- Sub-customers (QuickBooks "jobs") become locations under their parent's account.
- Inactive customers come in archived (uncheck the box to leave them out).
- Past invoices, sales receipts and estimates, with their lines, on each customer's page under Past Invoices — plus a summary: visits, lifetime total, first and last service, what they usually get, and any open balance.
- Notes from the QuickBooks customer show under Past Invoices.
Customers already in Preflight
Each QuickBooks customer is matched to one already here by the QuickBooks link, then the same email, the same phone, then the same name. A match is linked, not copied: empty fields (address, billing address, bill-to name) are filled in, and nothing you typed is changed. Later invoices made from Preflight go to that same QuickBooks customer.
Steps
- Pick what to bring: inactive customers, which kinds of past sales, and how far back.
- Which customers: QuickBooks doesn't say residential or commercial, so Preflight goes by the company name — a customer with one is commercial; locations under a company count as commercial too. Bring in everyone, only commercial, or only residential (for example, a Zerorez location that keeps residential in ZRWare). Customers left out also leave out their past invoices. Change any customer later with Edit Customer.
- Look first shows how many are new, how many are already here (and which), and how many past sales — it changes nothing.
- Bring them in. It runs on the server a page at a time, so you can leave the page; come back to see how it's going. A big file (thousands of customers and invoices) takes a few minutes.
- When it's done, Check for duplicates — QuickBooks files usually have a few customers entered twice.
Running it again
It's safe: everything updates in place instead of making copies. After the first import, Bring in what's new since then only brings customers and sales added or changed in QuickBooks since the last import.
Removing an import (test runs)
Remove everything imported… (under the last import) takes back out what QuickBooks imports brought in — handy after trying it with the QuickBooks sandbox. It shows the counts first and asks.
- Customers the import made are deleted, with their contacts. Any of them someone already started work on (an estimate, scan, photo, appointment, or a location added by hand) are kept and just unlinked.
- Customers that were already in Preflight are unlinked: the import's contacts are removed and the fields it filled in are cleared. Nothing you typed is touched.
- All past invoices from QuickBooks are removed.
It can't be undone, but you can always import again. The button stays on this page after you disconnect QuickBooks.
Switching from the sandbox to your real QuickBooks: remove the test import, then Disconnect and connect your real company. Disconnecting also forgets every QuickBooks link, so the real company starts clean.