Running into the error QBO088 "Error Creating Vendor" when exporting to Quickbooks Online

I am using Expensify mainly to collect receipts, it is a sole-prop and the business owner forwards the receipts and I classify them.
The issue I am running into is that it wont export/sync to quickbooks. I keep receiving the same error:
Error Creating Vendor
A vendor with the same name already exists in Quickbooks Online.
For more details go to: Expensierror QBO088
I am not sure how to resolve this.
Answers
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Ted Harris Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 359 Expensify Team
Hiya @Drizzle, great username and welcome to the Expensify Community!
Thanks for checking in about this. That error, "A vendor with the same name already exists in QuickBooks Online" means there's a vendor listed in QuickBooks Online more than once. Since one of your vendors is listed multiple times, Expensify cannot successfully export the report, not knowing which vendor is the correct one to export to.
Can you check your vendor list to see if you can find which vendor is listed more than once? This should be referring to the submitter of the expense report. Then, you'd want to update (to remove the email address in one record) or ideally just remove that duplicate vendor.
Additionally, can you disable automatically create vendors in QuickBooks Online, and make sure the email on the existing vendor matches the email in Expensify?
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Hi Ted,
I am still having trouble with this. Is the vendor the company who we are purchasing from?
Some of the transactions are able to export, others are getting hung up. I am not sure what I need to adjust and where.
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Rachael Hopkins Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 904 Expensify Team
Hi @Drizzle it will depend on whether the expense is reimbursable or non-reimbursable.
If reimbursable, the Vendor will be the employee and with match via email address. So I'm guessing that it's non-reimbursable, meaning the Vendor will be the Merchant.
If you can give me a report ID I'd be happy to take a look!
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I'm having this error as well. And all I'm trying to do is submit an expense report for myself. I'm the only employee. And I followed the instruction below, and still received the same error. This is very frustrating. Even the terminology. Vendors and employees are two different things, but Expensify calls them the same thing??
Here are the instructions I followed that did not help:
In this case, I might recommend disabling Automatically Create Vendors under Settings > Policies > [policy name] > Connections > Configure > Advanced, so that you will receive the correct error messages when a vendor record doesn't exist. -
Why is it still trying to "create a vendor" when that is turned off now????
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@venom Can you send us a screenshot of your error message? With that feature turned of the error should be a different one. Can you also send me the report ID so I can take a look at our logs?
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And then this is the error.
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Are these images posting???
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You can see above that automatically create vendors is off, yet I still get the error.
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@Venom The images didn't attach. Can you give me the report ID instead so I can take a look at our logs?
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Please look again I see them above. Try refreshing your page.
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Where do I find a report ID anyhow? As you see from the image above, there is no ID provided.
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@Venom I'm going to reach out to you directly to trouble shoot this specific error and then update this thread once we get it resolved.
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Wonderful, thank you.
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Any idea when???
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@venom I sent an email to the email address listed on your community profile. Have you not received it?
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No, unfortunately. Nothing in junk mail either.
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I have the same error and I agree with Venom that the term "Vendor" when referring to an employee is very confusing. As a result, the recommended solution doesn't make sense. Secondly, I would expect expensify to know and assume that QBO would already have my employee (in this case myself) already setup in QBO. Third, why would Expensify trying to create an employee as a vendor?
In my opinion, Expensify should assume that any accountant would have already setup whatever vendor/employee in QBO and expensify should simply use the existing one in QBO if it already exists, rather than insist on trying to create it.
I am still stuck with this error and have no idea how to resolve it.
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@nicholas777 Because many users don't use Intuit Payroll with their QuickBooks accounts, we instead use vendor records to export rather than employees. Secondly, if you are exporting as vendor bills, a vendor is required and we use the submitter of the report as a vendor. In order to use an existing employee record, you would need to export as checks or journal entries.
You can turn off the feature that automatically creates vendors by going to Settings > Policies > [policy name] > Connections > Configure > Advanced. If we aren't finding a vendor or employee record it's because the email on the existing employee record doesn't match the email of the report submitter in Expensify. Turning off this feature will give you this error instead and links to a different troubleshooting article to help you correct it.
Let me know if you have any questions!
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Thanks for the response Nicole! I tried your suggestion and it still produces an error, now saying that I should perhaps turn ON automatic vendor creation:
"There was an error exporting to QuickBooks Online. The technical details of the problem are as follows:
2019-03-06 03:33:08::819173: Request ID O8a4xi
2019-03-06 03:33:08::819210: User XXXXXXX attempted to export report [41692024] - Nicholas's Expenses #XXXXXXX
2019-03-06 03:33:08::819225: Export is to QuickBooks Online
2019-03-06 03:33:08::819240: Oops! Expensify encountered an error when auto-exporting to QuickBooks Online, and this requires your attention.
2019-03-06 03:33:08::819259: Hmm.. we’re unable to find a QuickBooks vendor or employee for XXXXXXX. Don’t worry, just enable Automatic Vendor Creation and you’ll never run into this error again! Alternatively, you can resolve this issue by logging into QuickBooks, associating an email address with the appropriate vendor, and then exporting again." -
Can you confirm that the employee record you are trying to export to has an email that matches the report submitter in Expensify, then sync your policy and try exporting again?
The error message does tell you to enable this if you want us to create them for you but you can ignore that part of the message because in your case, you don't want us to create a vendor record.
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It's just me, no other employees. Maybe the problem is that I need to use a different email address when treating myself as an employee vs. a business owner?
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@nicholas777The employee record in QuickBooks has to have the same email address as your email address in Expensify.
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I just had to update the vendor in QBO to include the correct email address and the problem was fixed.