How Does the Integration with QuickBooks Online Work?

Emburse Spend has seamless integration with QuickBooks Online for both reimbursable expenses and corporate card expenses. Because QuickBooks Online is a cloud-based accounting system, data syncs automatically every hour.

Using this integration, you can sync expenses from Emburse Spend to QuickBooks Online and you can sync fields from QuickBooks Online to Emburse Spend to apply to your expenses as Team and Expense fields in Emburse Spend.

The record we create in QuickBooks will include the Emburse Spend member name, business purpose, vendor, and a link to the original expense so that you may view the receipt image.

Cash Mode Reimbursable Expenses Sync

• Emburse Spend processes reimbursements via batched ACH transfers on a nightly basis.
• When the ACH transfer is initiated via expense approval, we push a Bill and Bill Payment into QuickBooks for the same transfer amount, making reconciliation easy.

To give you a better idea of what this will look like, these screenshots show you a Bill and Bill Payment in QuickBooks Online.

To locate a Bill, log in to QuickBooks Online, go to Expenses in the left-hand menu, and select Bills. 

On the screen, you can see For Review, Unpaid, and Paid. You will see the Bill and Bill Payment in the Paid section.

Bill

Bill Payment

Accrual Mode Reimbursable Expenses Sync

With the accrual sync, we will create a new purchase transaction for each expense against a Spend clearing account (type = Bank Account), and each transaction will be dated based on the date of the expense. We will also create a bank transfer in the amount of the associated debit from your bank register to the clearing account.   

Each time we debit the company bank account, we will also create a bank transfer from the Spend clearing account to your Operating Bank Register (where debits come from).

Reconciled vs. Unreconciled Status in the Clearing Account

The purchase transactions (i.e., expenses) will come into the clearing account as Reconciled. The bank transfers will be Unreconciled.

Reconciling the Bank Transfers Is a One-Step Process

In your Operating Bank Register, match the bank transfer to the corresponding bank debit. This will automatically change the status of the transaction to Reconciled in the clearing account.

To enable this feature, toggle Accrual accounting to "on" in Settings > Accounting Sync. The first time you approve a batch of expenses, the clearing account will be automatically created. 

Corporate Card Expenses Sync 

• When an admin approves corporate card expenses, corporate card transactions are synced into QuickBooks as an Expense to the designated Corporate Card register.  
• The date the transaction was made is synced to the Payment Date, to ensure it is synced to the appropriate QuickBooks period. 
• We recommend you also connect your credit card program to QuickBooks in order to benefit from QuickBooks' matching functionality, where the expenses synced into QuickBooks to the corporate card register can be matched to the card transactions being imported by QuickBooks, ensuring a streamlined reconciliation process each month.

The record we create in QuickBooks will include the Emburse Spend member name, business purpose, vendor, and a link to the original expense so that you may view the receipt image.

When corporate card transactions have matched with the corresponding transaction from your bank statement, it looks like this:

To reconcile, click the Match button.

Billable Expenses Sync

Emburse Spend is able to indicate when expenses are billable back to the customer. For more information on how to indicate whether an expense is billable, see this article. 

To sync billable expenses to your QuickBooks, you must create an Expense Field and map it to your customer list. Please review the instructions on creating an Expense Field here. 

Once these features are set up, this is how it will work in QuickBooks: 

For reimbursable expenses, the billable expense will show a checkmark in the Billable field. 

Since the expense is associated with a customer from your customer list in QuickBooks, the expense will also be listed under the customer as a Billable Expense Charge. The status will be Open, and you will see the option to start an invoice.

Supported Account Types