Jobber and QuickBooks Online stopped matching. Here is how to tell which one is wrong.

Revenue in Jobber and income in QuickBooks sit a few thousand dollars apart and the quarter needs closing. Picking the more plausible number works once, because next month’s gap arrives carrying this one inside it.

Find out which integration you are running

Jobber has two. The newer QuickBooks Online sync is rolling out gradually to select accounts and the legacy one keeps its own help articles.³ Advice written for one misleads on the other.

On the legacy sync, clients sync both ways and invoices sync one time: edit one after it has synced and Jobber says you must repeat that edit in QuickBooks by hand.⁵ Paid status updates there on full payment, properties created in Jobber never arrive, and a payment covering several invoices does not sync.⁵ On the newer sync the direction is one way and paid status no longer comes back.³ If you have been marking invoices paid in QuickBooks, that alone pulls the two apart.

What crosses the line, and what does not

On the newer integration you choose when each object goes over. Clients sync when created, or once they appear on an invoice, payment or timesheet. Products and services sync when created, or once they reach an invoice. Invoices sync when created, or once sent or marked as sent. Payments, tips, refunds, payouts and fees sync when collected, or not at all. Timesheets go on approval.¹ Note the option not to sync payments at all before you go hunting a bug.

Custom line items, the one-offs typed straight onto an invoice, do not arrive as their own product or service. They sync as Custom Service, with the Jobber name pushed into the description.¹ Compare revenue by item and every one-off collapses into one line.

Where the gap actually comes from

A client matched to the wrong customer. Jobber maps the client name in Jobber to the display name in QuickBooks.¹ Rename a client, or keep two similar customers in QuickBooks, and a second profile starts quietly collecting invoices. Jobber calls this “Client already exists in QuickBooks”.² Merging is a QuickBooks job and it is permanent: display names must match exactly, and sub-customers have to be converted first.⁸

Tax that does not line up. Jobber has separate errors for a tax rate missing in QuickBooks Online, for no zero percent rate on a non-taxable item, and for a QuickBooks failure while calculating tax.² The one to watch is “Tax rate substituted in QuickBooks Online”, a warning rather than an error: the invoice synced, at a rate you did not pick. Errors stop an item syncing; warnings mean it synced and something changed.² Warnings are where drift hides.

A payment that exists on one side only. A payment entered straight into QuickBooks stays there, and Jobber goes on showing the invoice as owing. Jobber’s guidance is that edits to anything living in both systems belong in Jobber.³

A payout is not a payment

This causes more phantom mismatches than everything above combined. Money taken through Jobber Payments sits in Undeposited Funds until the payout containing it is initiated and synced.⁴ The payout lands as a deposit into Checking, with fees stripped out into a Jobber Payments Fees account.⁴ A negative payout, from refunds or disputes, arrives as a journal entry.⁴

Undeposited Funds exists for this reason: banks combine individual payments into one deposit, which QuickBooks has to match.⁷ So the deposit on your bank feed will almost never equal that day’s payments in Jobber, and that is correct. Payouts inherit upstream failures too. When one payment inside a payout never reached QuickBooks, Jobber fails the payout and names the invoices responsible.² One stuck invoice holds back a whole deposit.

Check the accounting method before blaming the sync

QuickBooks reports run on cash or accrual. A cash report counts income only once you get a payment; an accrual report counts it whether or not the invoice was paid. The setting sits in Account and settings under Advanced.⁶ An unpaid January invoice is January income on accrual and nothing on cash. If Jobber is counting invoices raised and QuickBooks money received, the two differ by your receivables and no sync troubleshooting closes it.

How to find the culprit instead of guessing

1. Pick one month and one number, not “revenue”: one figure, one report, accounting method written beside it.
2. Read the errors and warnings on Jobber’s QuickBooks sync dashboard in Jobber’s stated order: clients, products and services, invoices, payments, refunds and tips, then payouts.² Failures cascade downward, so any other order chases symptoms.
3. Find the individual transactions that differ, not the total. Clicking a synced item there opens its details with links into both systems.²
4. For each difference, decide which of four things happened: blocked by an error, altered by a warning, never sent because of a setting, or typed into QuickBooks by hand.
5. Only then work the customer list, searching QuickBooks for every plausible spelling of the client name.

What to reconcile monthly

Invoice count and invoice total for the month, both sides. Payments broken out by method. Every payout against its deposit in QuickBooks and the matching bank feed line. The Undeposited Funds balance at month end, which should be money collected and not yet paid out. And the sync dashboard, clear before anything closes.

Confirm two things in your own account rather than from an article: which integration you are on, and what each sync setting is set to.

Where we come into it

We build software for shops that run on Jobber, including checks that watch for this drift and flag it before month end. It reads your account; it cannot change anything in it.

You do not need us for this. It is all in your own two accounts and the order of operations is above. What we sell is not the method, it is not finding out in April. If you want to know what is unreconciled today, we will look once and send you the numbers for free.