What Syncs Between BaseBuilders and QuickBooks

Once your QuickBooks chart of accounts and item mappings are configured under Settings, you're ready to start syncing real data. This article explains exactly what does and doesn't sync between the two systems — companies, staff, and transactions — and in which direction.

Companies: Customers and Vendors

In BaseBuilders, a company in your address book can serve multiple roles at once — client, consultant, vendor for expenses — and you only need to enter it once. QuickBooks doesn't work this way: Customers and Vendors are separate entities there, each requiring a unique name.

Because of this difference, a single company in BaseBuilders may correspond to two separate records in QuickBooks — one as a Customer, one as a Vendor — depending on how it's used.

Linking companies works the same way regardless of direction:

• Push — select a company in BaseBuilders and send it to QuickBooks.
• Pull — select a company in QuickBooks and bring it into BaseBuilders. Multiple companies can be pulled at once.
• Link — connect an existing BaseBuilders company to its matching QuickBooks record. Names don't need to match exactly to be linked.

Separate tabs exist for matching up Customers and Vendors.

Once your existing companies are synced, you shouldn't need to manually add new clients or vendors to both systems going forward — add them to BaseBuilders only, and they'll be created automatically in QuickBooks the first time a transaction involving them is pushed.

Staff

Staff are handled differently from other companies, since payroll and time tracking work quite differently between the two systems:

• Staff do not pull from QuickBooks, and do not push to QuickBooks automatically. Instead, you set up users in BaseBuilders and set up staff with their pay information separately in QuickBooks, then match them together manually.
• Matching staff is only necessary if you're pushing time slips for payroll purposes.
• Staff can also appear in QuickBooks as a Vendor — this is separate from their staff/employee record, and is used when pushing expense reimbursements. This means the same person may exist in QuickBooks twice: once as an employee for payroll, and once as a vendor for reimbursements. There's a dedicated tab for matching staff as vendors, though this typically happens automatically when needed rather than requiring manual setup.

Transactions: One-Directional, Push Only

All transaction types push from BaseBuilders to QuickBooks only — none of them pull back from QuickBooks. This is because QuickBooks doesn't retain the IDs BaseBuilders uses to tie a transaction to its project, phase, staff member, and so on. BaseBuilders has that information; QuickBooks doesn't have a way to hand it back.

The transactions that push to QuickBooks are:

• Expenses
• Invoices
• Income
• Pay Requests (from consultants)
• Payouts (to consultants)
• Time Slips

How Pushing Works

Nothing pushes to QuickBooks automatically or silently — you select the specific records you want to send, then choose the Push to QuickBooks action. If you edit a record after it's already been pushed, pushing it again updates the existing QuickBooks record rather than creating a duplicate.

Each record shows a status indicating whether it's ready to push, already pushed, or modified since it was last pushed — so you can use queries and filters to find exactly the records you want before pushing them.

Best Practice

Complete your one-time company sync (linking existing customers, vendors, and staff) before you start regularly pushing transactions, so new companies are created automatically going forward rather than requiring manual matching every time. Use status filters regularly to catch records that have been modified since their last push, and re-push them to keep QuickBooks current.

Summary

Companies sync bidirectionally (push, pull, or link) as Customers or Vendors in QuickBooks — a single BaseBuilders company may map to both. Staff are matched manually rather than synced automatically, and may also exist as a separate Vendor record for expense reimbursements. All transactions — Expenses, Invoices, Income, Pay Requests, Payouts, and Time Slips — push one-directionally from BaseBuilders to QuickBooks only, since QuickBooks lacks the IDs needed to link data back. Nothing is pushed until you select records and choose Push to QuickBooks, and re-pushing an already-synced record updates it rather than duplicating it.