QuickBooks Online integration: Sync gifts from LGL to your QuickBooks Online account

In this article:

• Overview
• Who should use this integration?
• Setting up your integration
• Running the integration day to day
• Example 1: Checks
• Example 2: Online donations via LGL forms
• Search for gifts based on QBO sync status
• Export fields for gifts that were synced to QBO
• Questions and answers

Overview

Watch a recorded webinar from our Video Library that walks through this integration.

Little Green Light's integration with QuickBooks Online helps you create sales receipts in QuickBooks without needing to re-enter any data. You can set default mappings to populate the Product/Service and Class fields in your QuickBooks account, and match or create QuickBooks Customers based on your LGL constituents.

The synchronization is primarily in one direction, from LGL to QuickBooks Online, but we do pull back the deposit information for each transaction, once you’ve connected it to a deposit in your QuickBooks account.

The process looks something like this:

Option to queue deposits: If you're using Stripe as your payment processor in LGL Forms, we highly recommend turning on a feature that allows LGL to queue up deposits for you based on the transfers Stripe makes to your bank account. You can read more about this option in this article.

Who should use this integration?

You must be an Administrator or Gift Entry user in your Little Green Light account to use this feature. If you are not an Admin or Gift Entry user, you will not be able to see any of these features when you use your LGL account.

In addition, this integration is recommended if, and only if, all of the following are true:

• You use a U.S. or Canadian version of QuickBooks Online 
• You want to enter gifts into LGL first (versus entering them into QuickBooks first)
• You want to avoid double entry in QuickBooks
• You want detailed donation entries in QuickBooks (versus lump sum entries)
• You have the support of your accounting team to either submit transactions into your QuickBooks account, or your accountant will log into your LGL account to push over the transactions

Which transactions can be processed through this integration?

Please note that only "Gift" and "Other Income" entries are available to push from LGL to QuickBooks. This means you won't be sending over pledges or in-kind entries. 

Within your "gift" and "other income" transactions, you likely have different process flows depending on the payment type. For instance, the way you handle a check you receive in the mail likely follows a different process than money you receive via online donations. Using this integration may work really well for some types of transactions but not others, and it’s fine to use it for just a subset of your gift entries in LGL. Just make sure everyone from your team who is working on this is clear about which transactions should and should not be pushed over to QuickBooks from your LGL account.

IMPORTANT: It is critical that both your development team and your accounting team agree on exactly which types of transactions will be handled using this integration and which won't be. For example, you might decide that only donations made via checks sent in the mail will be part of this integration.

Setting up your integration

The QuickBooks integration feature needs to first be activated in Settings > Integration Settings.

After activating the integration, you'll see a button to connect your LGL account with your QuickBooks Online account.

Step 1 

Connect your LGL account and your QuickBooks account so they can talk to each other. Click the  Connect to QuickBooks button. If you aren't logged into your QuickBooks account yet, you can do that now:

Once you're logged into QuickBooks, you'll see a request to link your QuickBooks Online account to your Little Green Light account.

Once the integration is turned on, you'll manage it in the  Fundraising area of your account:

Step 2 

After you've connected your two accounts, the next step is to set up your default mappings so LGL knows how to categorize your transactions in terms of Products/Services, Classes, and Payment Methods.

Fields in LGL correspond to fields in QuickBooks as follows:

In the Fundraising > QuickBooks area, use the Settings tab to map your LGL fields to your QuickBooks fields. There are four tabs where you can configure your default settings:

On the first tab you can select if you want a Customer in your QuickBooks account for each constituent for whom you're syncing a gift. The alternative is to use a generic customer ("General LGL Constituent").

For each of the other three areas, LGL will pull over your list of active values from your QuickBooks account. And, if you make updates in QuickBooks, you can click the Edit button (see screenshot above) and then click Refresh list (see screenshot below) to pull in the most recent list of values from your QuickBooks account. 

Mapping campaign or fund to Classes

You can choose to use either the campaigns or the funds you use in your LGL account as the basis for setting the corresponding Class. You cannot use both. The reason for this is that conflicts could arise in which a single gift can have a campaign that is mapped to one Class but a fund that is mapped to a different one.

It is possible to switch from using campaigns to using funds instead (as the basis for mapping your Classes). Making that switch will affect only future transactions; no previously recorded transaction will be affected.

You can also opt to not sync to the Class field at all.

Running the integration day to day

Overview of how to push gift records to QuickBooks

The diagram below gives a quick view of the steps you’ll be taking. We cover each in more detail below.

Briefly stated: 

1. You enter gift records in Little Green Light
2. You then push them over to QuickBooks, where they create Sales Receipts
3. To finish, in QuickBooks you create a deposit for those Sales Receipts to move the revenue from Undeposited Funds into the bank account where the money went

High-level overview (one-minute video clip)

Here's a detailed explanation of how to run the integration.

1. Record a gift in Little Green Light

When entering the gift record in Little Green Light, select the constituent, gift amount, gift category, campaign/fund, and payment type, as you normally would. Then confirm that the appropriate Product/Service, Class, and Payment Type are set. The "Queue for sync to QuickBooks" option will be selected by default.

After you choose the “Queue for sync to QuickBooks?” option, you'll see the values LGL will push over for Product/Service, Class, and Payment Method (based on the gift category, campaign/fund, and payment type you entered for the gift):

You can manually edit (override the default values) for Product/Service, Class, and Payment Method. 

Each of the three dropdown menus shows a list of choices based on the mappings in your Settings area (Fundraising > QuickBooks > Settings). But, what if you occasionally want to map a gift to a QuickBooks value that isn't mapped as a default? The solution is to add those QuickBooks fields as additional values in the Settings area. When you look at the mappings in the Settings area, any value that has been mapped will be automatically included and grayed out because it can't be unchecked. However, you can check off any additional QuickBooks values that you want access to in your LGL account. 

In this screenshot, the Class value "General Fund" is automatically included, but the user has also checked off "Fundraising" and "Scholarship" so that they can access those when manually editing the QuickBooks values while entering gifts in LGL:

2. Push gift records to QuickBooks

The QuickBooks queue in Little Green Light

Once you have one or more gifts queued for QuickBooks syncing, look in the Queued gifts queue and check that all the information looks correct. All of the QuickBooks fields must be populated before you can sync the gift record over to QuickBooks. LGL will highlight fields that still need to be set.

Linking your constituent to a QuickBooks Customer

Every transaction needs to have a Customer in QuickBooks. 

If your settings are set to use the General LGL Constituent, then this is going to be easy, because every transaction will automatically sync with the one General LGL Constituent record in your QuickBooks account:

If your settings are set to create or match to a distinct Customer each time, then if no Customer is matched yet, you'll see a red warning in the  QuickBooks Customer column. Click the Set Customer button within the warning to link your LGL constituent to a Customer in QuickBooks. You can either match or create the Customer in QuickBooks. Note that Little Green Light can find matching Customers using display name, organization name or email address.

Example when a potential match is found

1. If you like the proposed match, click the blue  Link button to connect the two. To search some more for a match, you can click one of the other search options, such as by email or organization name.

2. Or, you can click the "Create Customer in QuickBooks" button to create a new Customer record in your QuickBooks account based on the LGL constituent's name and contact information.

Example when no match is found

When no match is found, you can 1) choose another search option (i.e., search by email address or organization name), or 2) click the "Create Customer in QuickBooks" button to create a new Customer record in your QuickBooks account based on the LGL constituent's name and contact information.

What to do if you inadvertently accept an incorrect match

If you accept a bad match in your QuickBooks queue within Little Green Light, you can undo the match by clicking the Reset link for the customer, as shown below. 

3. Creating deposits in QuickBooks

Once you push over gifts, they create Sales Receipts in your QuickBooks account, with the funds going to the Asset named Undeposited Funds. You'll then need to move those funds from Undeposited Funds to the bank account where the money is being deposited by creating a Deposit (in QuickBooks). 

You'll see the transactions that came over from LGL as available Sales Receipts when you start to create your Deposit. Check the box on the far left of each row that you want to include in your deposit.

A very important step here is to enter any fees associated with those transactions. For cash and checks, there won't be any fees, but for online transactions you should subtract the fees charged by the online payment processor (because those fees are subtracted from the amounts the processor will disburse to your bank account). 

For transactions coming through LGL forms, LGL uses the fees for each transaction to record a Deposited Amount (this can be made visible in your LGL account when you turn on (or check) the "Deposited Amount" checkbox in Settings > Subscription settings > Gift settings). We then calculate the fees and pass that over to QuickBooks on the Memo line for each transaction. See the highlighted section in the screenshot below.

You'll want to choose an account for the online fees and then enter the amount as a *negative* amount. You'll see the net total for the deposit listed at the bottom of the screen (in this example, it's $121.65).

Processed sales receipts

In Little Green Light, the Processed sales receipts tab shows every gift that’s been synced over to QuickBooks. The columns on the far right shows the sync date and status. When a gift is first pushed over to QuickBooks, it creates a Sales Receipt. Later, after that Sales Receipt has been pulled into a deposit in QuickBooks, that status will get reflected back in your LGL account automatically within 24 hours. Or you can use the Pull deposits from QuickBooks button to get a live sync of that information.

The "txnId for sales receipt" and "txnId for deposit" columns are showing the ID numbers ("txn Id" is short for transaction ID) from your QuickBooks account. In QuickBooks you can use those IDs to pull up these exact sales receipts and deposits. The syntax in QuickBooks to pull up a sales receipt with ID 272, for example, is https://qbo.intuit.com/app/salesreceipt?txnId=272.

Once you deposit a sales receipt and the deposit info has been pulled back to LGL, the deposit date for that gift in your LGL account will also be automatically updated. To pull up a deposit with ID 271 in QuickBooks, the syntax is https://qbo.intuit.com/app/deposit?txnId=271.

Example 1: Checks

Your particular process flow might vary from this example, but here's a common approach for depositing checks, before and after using the LGL-QuickBooks integration:

Before using the LGL-QuickBooks integration

1. As checks arrive in the mail, the development director enters them as gifts in Little Green Light
2. The development director places the physical checks in an envelope on the bookkeeper's desk labeled "to be deposited"
3. On Friday afternoon, the bookkeeper takes the checks to the bank and deposits them

4. The bookkeeper enters the details of each check in QuickBooks using a Make Deposit window

   ( duplicating the data entry from step 1)

After switching to use the LGL-QuickBooks integration

1. As checks arrive in the mail, the development director enters them as gifts in Little Green Light
   1. For each gift entry, the development director marks the gift to sync to QuickBooks and uses the Queued gifts tab to push them to QuickBooks (either one by one or in a batch)
2. The development director places the physical checks in an envelope on the bookkeeper's desk labeled "to be deposited"
3. On Friday afternoon, the bookkeeper takes the checks to the bank and deposits them
4. In QuickBooks, the bookkeeper opens a Make Deposit window, selects the Sales Receipts for that deposit, and marks all as deposited into the bank

Example 2: Online donations via LGL forms

Little Green Light customers don't always use LGL Forms for payment processing, but for this example we will be using LGL Forms as the example, with Stripe as the payment processor. (Note that Stripe assesses its transaction fee at the time of each transaction.) 

Before using the LGL-QuickBooks integration

A likely approach would be to wait until a transfer occurs from your Stripe account to your bank, and then use the transfer report that Stripe provides to record the transactions in your QuickBooks account, noting the net amount transferred by Stripe (after transaction fees are deducted).

After switching to use the LGL-QuickBooks integration

When using the LGL-QuickBooks integration, you can push transactions from LGL to QuickBooks anytime after they're recorded in LGL. As with all such transactions, they go into QuickBooks via the  Sales Receipt and the revenue is booked to Undeposited Funds.

Now, rather than having to enter the transactions from the Stripe transfer report, you can simply select the appropriate Sales Receipts for your deposit. LGL includes the Stripe fee information in the gift memo field. You can use this to calculate the fees to add into your deposit.

Add gifts donated through your LGL form to your QuickBooks sync list automatically

To save the hassle of needing to edit a gift collected through an LGL form to set it to be added to your QuickBooks sync list, you can enable the "Add gifts to QuickBooks sync list" radio button option for your form to do that for you, as shown here:

Search for gifts based on QBO sync status

When you want to determine whether a gift has been synced to your QuickBooks Online account or what its sync status is, you can search that status from your Fundraising page as shown here:

Export fields for gifts that were synced to QBO

You can also export gifts that you have synced to your QuickBooks Online account by selecting "Gift fields" in your export and checking the boxes for the columns you want to include in your export:

Questions and answers

Q. Will LGL also integrate with the installed desktop version of QuickBooks?

A. No, we do not currently have any plans to build that integration.

Q. Can I use something other than Gift Category to drive the Product/Service selection for QuickBooks?

A. Gift Category is the only LGL field you can use for mapping to the QuickBooks Products/Services field. However, you could manually set the QuickBooks Products/Services selection on each gift (meaning LGL will not pre-select a value for you).

Q. Can I edit a gift entry in Little Green Light after I've synced it to QuickBooks? 

A. Yes, but only by choosing to unlock the gift record. On the gift detail page, you’ll see a warning message saying that the gift needs to be unlocked to edit:

Changes you make to a gift record that has already been sync'd to your QuickBooks account will not be re-sync'd to QuickBooks. So, you will need to separately make those updates in your QuickBooks account directly, as needed.

Q. Can I use the Bulk Gift Edit feature on a bunch of gifts that have already been sync'd to QuickBooks, and would I need to unlock them each first?

A. You can use the Bulk Gift Edit feature on gifts like that, and you do not need to unlock them first. As with the previous answer, though, you would need to separately make any updates to those gifts directly in QuickBooks because gifts cannot be re-sync'd from LGL to QuickBooks as such.

Q. Can we push in-kind gifts from LGL to QuickBooks? 

A. No. We have purposely not integrated in-kind gifts from LGL to QuickBooks, because in LGL it's common to enter a dollar value for your in-kind gifts, but you wouldn't want that pushed to your QuickBooks account since it's not going to result in money in the bank.

Q. Can we push pledges from LGL to QuickBooks?  

A. No. We have purposely not integrated pledges due to the complexity of tracking pledge payments to the proper Invoice in QuickBooks. We know this won't work for all organizations, but we believe it makes most sense to track your pledges in your Little Green Light account and sync only your actual pledge payments to QuickBooks. 

Disclaimer

The QuickBooks service is completely separate from Little Green Light and carries its own pricing structure, terms of service, and privacy policy. Please see the QuickBooks Terms of Service for details.

QuickBooks is a registered trademark of Intuit Inc. Used with permission.