The ten integrations QuickBooks users install, and what each means for us
QuickBooks Online advertises 750 apps. Most exist to supply something the ledger lacks — assemblies, warehouses, a second location — and are of no interest to us. The rest connect the ledger to the world outside it, and those are the ones QuickBooks users actually install. This chapter reduces the directory to the ten categories that recur in every “most installed” list, says what each does for a QuickBooks user, what it would mean for a Ledger123 dataset, and which one has to be built first.
6.1How the ten were chosen
Three sources were read against each other: Intuit’s own integrations page and its Canadian “twelve best apps” list, which say what Intuit wants installed; the 2026 integration guides from Coefficient, Tailride, Quadient, Satva and Ace Cloud, which say what consultants recommend; and the Shopify app store rankings, which say what merchants actually pay for. An app made the list when it appeared in at least two of the three, and categories were merged where several apps do the same job (Dext, Expensify, AutoEntry and Hubdoc are one row). The result is ten categories, each with the named apps a prospect will mention.
- Inventory apps — Fishbowl, SOS Inventory, Katana, Cin7. They exist because QuickBooks has no assemblies, warehouses, serials or work orders. SQL-Ledger has all four; chapter 5 lists them.
- Reporting apps — Fathom, Qvinci, LiveFlow, Power BI connectors. They exist because QuickBooks data is reachable only through its API. Ours is a PostgreSQL database; chapter 4 item 7 opens it read-only, and Power BI, Metabase and a spreadsheet connect directly.
- Field-service and PSA suites — Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, BigTime. Vertical products with their own ledgers; they connect to whatever we expose in item 10.
- Marketing — Mailchimp, Constant Contact. Real, but the storefront already has mailing-list capture; a customer export to CSV is enough.
6.2The ten
Marks as in the earlier chapters: have partial build. The second column names the apps a prospect will have used; the fourth says where the capability stands once chapters 1 to 4 are done.
| # | Category and the apps | What a QuickBooks user gets | Ours | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bank feeds Plaid, Yodlee (US); Salt Edge, GoCardless Bank Account Data, TrueLayer (UK, EU); built into QuickBooks | Transactions arrive daily, are matched to invoices and bills, and the rest are categorised by rule. | partial | Chapter 1 item 1 imports statement files into a bankline table with matching and rules. The aggregator is the second phase, dropping into the same table on a schedule. |
| 2 | Payment processors Stripe, PayPal, Square; QuickBooks Payments | A pay-now link on the invoice; card and bank-transfer receipts matched automatically; payouts reconciled net of fees. | partial | Stripe and PayPal are in the storefront; chapter 1 item 2 puts the link on the invoice. Square, and a payout importer for all three, are new. |
| 3 | Bill pay and AP automation BILL, Melio; Bill Pay Elite | Vendors paid by ACH from inside the product, with approval chains and an audit trail. | partial | Payment files in chapter 2 item 6 and approval rules in chapter 4 item 3 cover it without a per-payment fee. A provider API for firms that want the money sent for them is optional on top. |
| 4 | Receipt and bill capture Dext, Expensify, AutoEntry, Hubdoc | Photograph or forward a receipt; OCR fills vendor, date, total and tax; a draft bill appears for approval. | partial | Chapter 1 item 4 builds the inbox natively. The OCR engine is the integration: Tesseract locally, or a document-AI service for accuracy. |
| 5 | Marketplace and e-commerce sync Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, WooCommerce — through Synder, A2X, Webgility, or Intuit’s own connectors | Orders, refunds, fees and payouts land in the ledger by channel, with SKUs matched to items. | build | Our storefront writes straight into the ledger, which no QuickBooks user has. But a merchant who also sells on Shopify or Amazon needs an importer, and we have none. |
| 6 | Payroll Gusto, ADP, Rippling; QuickBooks Payroll | The pay run posts its journal; taxes are filed by the provider. | partial | HR → Payroll is a real module with its own wage and deduction tables, which suits jurisdictions the providers ignore. For US and UK customers a journal import from the provider is faster than maintaining tax tables. |
| 7 | Time tracking QuickBooks Time, Clockify, Toggl, Harvest | Hours captured on a phone flow to invoices and payroll. | partial | Time cards exist; chapter 2 item 2 bills them. What is missing is a way in from the apps people already use. |
| 8 | CRM HubSpot, Salesforce, Method CRM, Zoho | Customers and contacts in both places; deals become estimates; invoices and balances visible to sales. | build | Nothing connects. HubSpot’s free tier and open API make it the one to do. |
| 9 | Sales-tax engines Avalara AvaTax, TaxJar; automated sales tax built in | The rate for the customer’s address, and the return filed. | build | Chapter 1 deferred address-based lookup until a US multi-state customer arrives; AvaTax on invoice posting is the path when one does. |
| 10 | Automation glue Zapier, Make, n8n | Anything else — a form, a spreadsheet, a chat message — creates a customer or invoice without code. | build | Needs an HTTP API, which we do not have. Backlog item 45. Everything else in this table is cheaper once it exists. |
Six of the ten are already covered in substance by the earlier chapters — three of them (1, 2, 4) by chapter 1 alone, which is a second argument for building that chapter first. The four absences are the marketplace importer, the CRM connector, the tax engine and the API, and the API is the foundation under the other three and under every connector a customer might write themselves.
6.3The order of work
The book’s earlier chapters ordered enhancements by the size of the gap closed. Here the order is dictated by dependency: the API first, because a connector built on ad-hoc database access is a connector built twice.
1A JSON API
Token-authenticated HTTP endpoints on the application server for the objects
every connector needs: customers, vendors, parts and services, quotations and orders,
sales and vendor invoices, receipts and payments, and account balances. Tokens are
rows tied to a login and a role, so the access list of chapter 4
applies to a token as it does to a person. Each endpoint calls the same
SL::* methods the screens call, so a posted invoice through the API is
the same invoice, with the same tax, numbering and audit row, as one keyed by hand.
Webhooks — invoice posted, payment received, stock below reorder point —
are the outbound half, and are what Zapier and a CRM subscribe to. An OpenAPI
document is generated from the routes and published under /manual.
2Payout importers for Stripe, PayPal and Square
Each processor pays out a net sum that is a bundle of sales, refunds and fees. An importer per processor pulls the payout list through the processor’s API, or reads its CSV export, and posts each payout as one receipt batch: the gross matched to open invoices or to a clearing account, fees to bank charges, refunds to credit notes, and the net to the bank account — so that the bank line from item 1 of chapter 1 matches to the cent. Square adds a Square sales → POS sales path for firms using Square at the counter and SQL-Ledger behind it.
3Bank aggregator feed
The second phase of the statement import. One adapter interface, two
implementations to start — Plaid for North America and Salt Edge or GoCardless
for the UK and Europe — each fetching new transactions nightly for every
connected account and inserting them into bankline exactly as a file
import would, so matching, rules and reconciliation need no change. Connection is by
the provider’s hosted consent flow, launched from System → Bank Accounts.
Provider fees are per connected account and passed through on the plan.
4Marketplace importer: Shopify and Amazon first
Shopify through its Admin API, Amazon through SP-API; eBay, Etsy and WooCommerce as later adapters on the same shape. Each adapter maps orders to sales orders or invoices against a customer per channel, matches SKUs to parts (creating them with a flag if unknown), posts refunds as credit notes, and hands the payouts to item 2 so fees and net deposits reconcile. Stock sold on a marketplace comes off the same shelf as stock sold in our own storefront, which is the sentence to put beside the Shopify connector on the comparison page.
5Payroll journal import
For Gusto (which has a partner API that exposes the pay run summary) and, by CSV, for ADP and Rippling: a scheduled or on-demand import that posts each pay run as one GL transaction — gross wages by department, employer taxes, deductions to their liability accounts, net to the payroll clearing account — and marks the run so it cannot post twice. HR → Payroll stays as it is for firms that run their own tables.
6Time import from Clockify, Toggl and Harvest
All three have free APIs and a CSV export with the same columns: person, date,
project, hours, note. An importer that maps person to employee and project to project
(remembering the mapping) and writes time cards into jcitems, after which
the unbilled-time button of chapter 2 and the profitability page of
chapter 3 see them. QuickBooks Time itself is closed to non-Intuit
products and is not attempted.
7HubSpot connector
Two-way on contacts and companies against customers, one-way on money. A HubSpot company becomes a customer on first quotation; a quotation becomes a deal at its value and stage; invoice posted, paid and overdue update the deal and add a timeline note, so a salesperson sees the balance without a ledger login. Built on the API of item 1 and its webhooks; HubSpot’s free tier is enough. Salesforce and Zoho follow the same shape if a customer needs them.
8AvaTax rate lookup, and a Zapier app
Two items deferred until asked for, written down so the shape is agreed. AvaTax: on posting a sales invoice for a customer flagged tax by address, call the rate service with the ship-to, write the returned jurisdictions as tax lines against the tax accounts mapped in System → Taxes, and store the transaction id so a credit note voids it; filing stays with Avalara. Zapier: a published app over the API of item 1 — triggers on the webhooks, actions on the create endpoints — which is a few hundred lines of their SDK and puts a Ledger123 tile beside QuickBooks in every automation tool.
6.4What the ten add to the comparison page
QuickBooks sells the number 750. We should not try to match it. The honest sentence is that a Ledger123 dataset connects to the bank, the card processors, the marketplaces, the payroll provider, the time tracker and the CRM a small firm actually uses, and that everything else reaches it through an API and Zapier — and that, unlike QuickBooks, the database underneath is also open to any reporting tool without a connector at all.
Build the API, then the money-in importers, then the payroll, time and CRM connectors — and the ten integrations a QuickBooks user would miss are present, six of them as native features rather than apps.
6.5What we will not build
Connectors to inventory and reporting apps that exist only to patch QuickBooks; QuickBooks Time, which is closed; Salesforce until a customer on it arrives; and a general “app store”. Third parties who want to integrate get the API and the manual, which is how the QuickBooks directory was populated in the first place.
6.6Sources
- Intuit, QuickBooks integrations — quickbooks.intuit.com/online/integrations/
- Intuit Canada, 12 best apps for QuickBooks integration — quickbooks.intuit.com/ca/resources/apps/quickbooks-integrations/
- Coefficient, Top 7 QuickBooks Online integrations in 2026 — coefficient.io/quickbooks/best-quickbooks-integrations
- Tailride, 11 best QuickBooks Online integrations for 2026 — tailride.so/blog/best-quickbooks-online-integrations
- Quadient, Top QuickBooks integrations for 2026 — quadient.com/en-us/learn/accounts-payable/top-quickbooks-integrations
- Satva Solutions, Top 12 apps for QuickBooks integration 2026 — satvasolutions.com/blog/top-12-apps-for-quickbooks-integration
- Ace Cloud Hosting, Top 67 QuickBooks add-on integrations 2026 — acecloudhosting.com/blog/top-10-quickbooks-add-ons/
- MyWorks, Best Shopify QuickBooks integrations 2026 — myworks.software/blog/best-shopify-quickbooks-integrations/
- Ledger123, SQL-Ledger 3.2.12 improvement backlog (doc/todo.md), items 20, 45, 46; Interchange feature requests (doc/features.md).