How your sales reach QuickBooks

Skuvelo posts your sales to QuickBooks so nobody re-keys them. This page is the short version of what lands there, and — just as important at period close — what does not.

The QuickBooks connection is in open beta. You will find it under Integrations. It works, and the pieces below are the ones to know before you reconcile a quarter.

Which date your income lands on

A sale is posted with the date the order was placed. Not the date it shipped, and not the date the payment settled.

That date is what QuickBooks uses to decide which month, and which tax period, the income belongs to. Skuvelo never changes it afterwards, because it never re-issues a document it has already posted.

The date is taken in your workspace's own time zone, the one set in your workspace settings — not in UTC. So an order placed at 5pm on 31 December in Los Angeles posts as 31 December and its income lands in that tax year, which is what your accountant expects. If your workspace time zone is wrong, this is the setting to correct before you reconcile a year end.

If that setting is ever missing or unrecognisable, Skuvelo stops exporting and tells you, rather than guessing a date: a sale dated to the wrong day moves income into the wrong tax period, and that is harder to find later than a paused export is now.

Your QuickBooks items hold no quantity, on purpose

Skuvelo is where your stock lives. QuickBooks is where your books live, and the two are not the same job.

So products are created in QuickBooks as non-inventory items: no quantity, no opening stock value, no inventory asset account. If QuickBooks also tracked a quantity, it would be a snapshot taken on the day you connected and wrong from the next day on — and it would post cost of goods against stock you do not really have. Your cost of goods comes from your own purchase bills, which is where it belongs.

Skuvelo does not import an opening balance into your books. Your accountant sets your opening position; Skuvelo starts from the cutoff date you choose when you connect.

If you switch an item in QuickBooks to "I track quantity on hand", Skuvelo holds that product's sales and tells you, rather than keep posting against a quantity nobody is maintaining. It checks the next time that product changes in Skuvelo — a price, a cost, a title — so it is not instant. If you have made that change in QuickBooks and want it picked up now, edit the product in Skuvelo.

A return or a cancellation is its own document

An issued sale is never edited or re-posted. When stock comes back, Skuvelo posts a separate credit memo for the returned units only, against the original sale, and numbers each returned line separately.

A cancelled order is handled the same way, automatically. If an order is cancelled after its sales receipt has already reached QuickBooks, Skuvelo posts a credit memo reversing it — you do not have to find it or fix it yourself, and that holds even when your channel stops reporting the order's lines, because Skuvelo reverses the receipt it posted rather than recalculating it — the note on the document says it was a cancellation rather than a return, so nobody goes looking for stock that never moved. An order cancelled *before* it reaches QuickBooks is simply never posted; there is nothing to reverse.

There is one cancellation Skuvelo cannot reverse on its own, and it tells you rather than guessing: an order your sales channel reports as *partly* cancelled without saying which units were cancelled. Skuvelo will not invent the split, so it raises a needs-attention item naming the order and saying the receipt is still there at its full value.

If a sale changes after it has been posted and the change is neither a return nor a cancellation — a repricing, say — Skuvelo raises a needs-attention item naming the order rather than quietly changing your books. It tells you what was posted and what the order says now, so you can see the difference at a glance. Skuvelo will not guess at a correcting document when it cannot tell you why the money moved.

A refund your channel reports as money only, with no units behind it (a shipping refund or a goodwill payment, say), is handled the same way. Skuvelo cannot tell whether that money was item revenue, so it credits nothing. It raises one needs-attention item naming the order, with the refunded amount when your channel's payout shows it, so that you can record the refund against the right account.

If an order has already had a returned item credited, and your Etsy payout shows more refunded than that credit (shipping refunded on top of the item, say), Skuvelo raises the same item for the difference. Other channels do not report the refunded total, so Skuvelo cannot see that difference for them yet.

A shipment that earned nothing is not a sale

Sometimes an order ships with nothing charged for it: a warranty replacement, a free sample or a demo unit. Skuvelo posts nothing to QuickBooks for that order. It does not post a zero-value receipt either, because every sales report would count that receipt as a sale. If that unit later comes back, there is nothing to credit.

Where the money lands, and the two things you still do yourself

Each sale posts as a sales receipt, which is a cash sale: it raises no invoice for you to chase and nothing for you to mark as paid. Because Skuvelo does not choose a bank account on your behalf, QuickBooks puts the money in Undeposited Funds — its own holding account — and you match those items against the real deposit when your payout arrives, exactly as you would for any other cash sale.

Your marketplace and payment-processor fees are posted for you, as their own expense. A marketplace pays out net of its fees; Skuvelo posts each sale at its full value, and once the marketplace has closed a payout it posts the fees that payout actually took as one bill, to the fee account you choose in the connection's settings (advertising can have an account of its own). So your revenue is right and so is your margin. Nothing is posted until a fee account is chosen, and an amount the marketplace did not label is never guessed at: you get one note naming it. What Skuvelo does not do yet is settle that bill against the payout. It waits in your bills to pay, and when you match the deposit, the receipts behind it less that bill come to what reached your bank.

Sales tax

Skuvelo posts sales tax to QuickBooks only when it is yours to pay, and it explicitly tells QuickBooks never to work out a tax figure of its own. Which case an order is in comes from what its sales channel reported about the tax.

• Tax a marketplace collected and remitted is not your liability, so Skuvelo does not post it. Booking it as yours would overstate what you owe, and the note on the sales receipt says the marketplace remitted it.
• Tax you collected and owe is posted as its own line on the sales receipt, at exactly the figure the channel charged, and booked to the sales tax liability account you choose on the connection's settings. Your income stays the net sale, and the receipt totals what the buyer paid. It goes through an item Skuvelo creates for that account, named "Sales tax collected (Skuvelo)" followed by the account. A return or a cancellation takes back its share of that tax on the credit memo, so no stray cent is left owing when the last unit comes back.
• Until you choose that account, a sale that owes tax waits, and a needs-attention item names the setting to change. Sales that owe none keep posting.
• A tax figure Skuvelo could not read is not treated as zero. That sale waits, with a needs-attention item, until the channel reports a figure it can read.

Read the other half of that before you close a quarter. Today Etsy is the channel that reports which tax is whose. For your other channels Skuvelo still posts the net sale with no tax line, and marketplace facilitator status does not extend to your own storefront, where the tax you collect is genuinely your liability. So for a storefront whose channel does not report it, the tax you owe is not in these exported documents, and your books understate your tax payable until you or your accountant put it in.

If those storefront prices are tax-inclusive, there is a second effect in the opposite direction: the price Skuvelo exports is the whole amount the customer paid, tax included, so that tax lands in your income account and overstates your revenue.

Neither is a figure to guess at. Settle with your accountant how that tax reaches your books.

Skuvelo checks this after posting, on both kinds of document: it reads the sales receipt and the credit memo back out of QuickBooks, and if QuickBooks applied tax to either one anyway, you get a needs-attention item naming that document rather than a silently wrong total. The credit memo matters as much as the receipt here — a credit raised on a different tax basis to the sale does not fully cancel it, and the difference would sit in your books unexplained. A tax line Skuvelo posted is not tax QuickBooks applied, so it never trips this check. Skuvelo also checks the credit came back at the amount it was sent for. Your own tax return still comes from your accounting system, not from Skuvelo.

Every document explains itself

Each sale and credit memo carries a plain-English note in QuickBooks saying what it is, which Skuvelo order it came from, and the two things above — that the item holds no quantity there, and what happened to the sales tax: the amount booked to your liability account, left with the marketplace that remitted it, or none recorded. You should never have to decode a calculation of ours.

Before your first export

Skuvelo asks whether anything else already posts these sales into the same QuickBooks company — a second accounting app, a bank rule that creates invoices, or a marketplace's own QuickBooks integration. Two systems posting one sale doubles your revenue in your own books, and nothing downstream catches it. Skuvelo checks what it can see and asks you about what it cannot.

You are asked again every time you reconnect QuickBooks, because a company that was clean when you connected may have gained another app since. Until you confirm again, nothing exports. Skuvelo takes you back to the mapping screen and shows one needs-attention item until you do.