How BaseBuilders Invoices Sync to QuickBooks Online

If you're used to QuickBooks Desktop's Customer/Job structure, QuickBooks Online works differently — and that difference affects how BaseBuilders invoices flow into QuickBooks. This article explains what changed and how BaseBuilders handles it.

QuickBooks Eliminated Jobs

QuickBooks Desktop, and QuickBooks Online in its early years, supported Customers and Jobs — where a job (like an individual project) sat underneath a parent customer. QuickBooks Online has since removed this structure. What looks like adding a "job" under a customer in QBO today actually creates a sub-customer, not a true job.

Why This Matters for Invoicing

This distinction creates a real problem for project-based invoicing. If an invoice is issued to a sub-customer (representing a specific project) rather than to the parent customer, payments received from the actual client can't be applied back to that invoice — QuickBooks treats the sub-customer as a separate entity from the parent customer, and money received against the parent customer won't reconcile against an invoice issued to the sub-customer.

Since every project in BaseBuilders is part of a client, and invoices are naturally tied to that client relationship, this sub-customer structure would create a mismatch between how you invoice and how you actually receive payment.

How BaseBuilders Handles This

Because of this limitation, BaseBuilders does not push invoices to QuickBooks sub-customers. Instead, all invoices flow directly to the parent customer in QuickBooks. This means:

• You can issue project-based invoices in BaseBuilders as normal.
• When payment is received from the client, it can be applied and pushed to QuickBooks without a mismatch between sub-customer and customer.

What About QuickBooks Online's "Projects" Feature?

QuickBooks Online has introduced its own Projects module, separate from the Customer/Job or sub-customer structure. At this time, that module is not available through QuickBooks' public API, so BaseBuilders has no way to communicate with it — we don't know how invoices would attach to it, or what the integration would even look like.

If QuickBooks opens up a public API for their Projects module, integrating BaseBuilders projects with QuickBooks projects looks like a viable path worth pursuing. Until that API is available, this isn't something BaseBuilders can support.

Summary

QuickBooks Online no longer supports true Jobs — what appears to be a job is actually a sub-customer, which breaks payment reconciliation for project-based invoicing. To avoid this issue, BaseBuilders pushes all invoices directly to the parent customer in QuickBooks rather than to a sub-customer. QuickBooks' newer Projects module isn't yet accessible via a public API, so BaseBuilders can't integrate with it at this time — but this may become possible if QuickBooks opens that access in the future.