Create New Vendor option for Quickbooks Online

JMartell
JMartell Expensify Customer Posts: 1 Expensify Newcomer

What are the chances that Expensify can add an option to create new vendors in Quickbooks Online instead of assigning transactions to the Misc. Credit Card vendor? This is the only pain point that we have with Expensify; allowing this would make things work a lot smoother for us.

Alternatively, is there a better way to handle our expense reporting that will alleviate this issue for us? We just end up with about 400 Misc. Credit Card transactions each month, and it makes our QB file a bit messy. We are reconciling the credit cards in Quickbooks, so it is advantageous to have each transaction come in instead of using the vendor bills function.

Thanks in advance!

Answers

  • Zil
    Zil Expensify Customer Posts: 18 Expensify Admirer

    That would be amazing! Heck even an indicator of whether or not the vendor in Expensify is matched with a vendor in QBO would be amazing so that I don't have to check for every expense. A small check mark or turning green would be great.

  • Sheena Trepanier
    Sheena Trepanier Expensify Team, Approved! Accountant, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 1,362 Expensify Team
    edited October 2018

    Hi @JMartell, this is a great discussion! When we think about vendor mapping between Expensify and QuickBooks we have to take into account how merchant names look when they come from the bank.

    Typically, we get merchants like "Lunds&byerlys Wayza", "Holiday Stnstore 0393", or "Kwik Trip 45800004580". If you think of Uber or Lyft who add a unique ID to every ride in the merchant name, and it makes it very difficult to match merchants.

    The rule of thumb is, if the merchant in Expensify matches the merchant in QuickBooks exactly, we'll map the merchant correctly during export. We typically recommend that customers use Expense Rules to manage merchant names so that they match the vendor in QB.

    We have also toyed with the option of automatically creating vendors in QuickBooks when exporting a non-matching merchant name. But honestly, it resulted in dozens to hundreds of vendor records for the same merchant depending on how often the merchant name changed when being imported from the bank. Sadly, we don't have the ability to alter existing vendor records, so updating the merchant name isn't an option either.

    @Zil - your idea about a checkbox though, that is one I haven't heard before and I'm going to share it with my team members who specialize in our integrations. It might not be possible with the connection or we may be limited in the Intuits API, but I'll check into it and see if this would be a possibility in the future.

    Have a lovely weekend you two!

  • Zil
    Zil Expensify Customer Posts: 18 Expensify Admirer

    Wonderful! Let me know if anything comes of it. It would be an incredible time saver.

  • ExpertUser
    ExpertUser Expensify Customer Posts: 2

    I think it's a must have. Expensify should able to create a new Vendors.

  • Jenica
    Jenica Expensify Customer Posts: 10 Expensify Admirer

    There should be some way that Expensify can recognize key words from Vendors as they come in from the credit card statement that will allow us to choose which vendor in Quickbooks to match it to. We have been using Expensify for a year and a half and got so frustrated with the misc vendor as they came into quickbooks, that we found a 3rd party (Zachary Systems) that allows us to export the transactions from Expensify into Zachary systems which allows us to match vendors in Quickbooks and then upload them into Quickbooks. I would love to eliminate the 3rd party vendor and believe Expensify has the technology to match vendors with key words as it seems to be similar technology to smart-scanning receipts.

  • Nicole Trepanier
    Nicole Trepanier Expensify Team Posts: 498 Expensify Team

    @Jenica We have attempted some fuzzy matching with the vendors in order to try to better match these but the accuracy rates haven't been high enough for us to add the feature. We got to about a 50% match rate and then found that among those, some vendors with shorter names were actually words contained in other vendor names and made those successful matches fail. It's a much bigger process than it looks to try to match to thousands of different vendor lists.

    We are looking at workarounds and we are still trying to improve the fuzzy matching. We aren't fans of having to use Credit Card Misc. either but it is a better alternative than creating hundreds of duplicate vendors because credit card transactions can use different names for a single vendor.

    Let me know if you have any questions!

  • shaya
    shaya Expensify Customer Posts: 7 Expensify Newcomer
  • Alreadyhere
    Alreadyhere Approved! Accountant Posts: 12

    Hi - I know the QBO API is not great but Vendors are available. Have you tried making the vendor list available to the cardholder?

  • smartproduct
    smartproduct Expensify Customer Posts: 1 Expensify Newcomer
    edited March 1

    @Expensify Team, can we create custom mapping rules for vendors? For example, map any Expensify receipt starting with "Slack" (like Slack 12345) to the QuickBooks vendor "Slack". We (and many others) reuse 80% of vendors. So this would streamline things and reduce the dreaded "Misc." entries in QBO by a lot. It's a good compromise until a fully automated solution is available.