How QuickBooks Works with ShelfSpace

Every time you pay a vendor, someone on your team types that same bill into QuickBooks a second time. The vendor, the amount, the check number. That takes hours, and one typo means your books stop matching your bank.

Connect QuickBooks to ShelfSpace, and that second round of typing goes away. Here's exactly what gets written into your books, and when.

Say you pay a vendor's invoice for one thousand dollars. ShelfSpace writes two things into QuickBooks. First, a bill. That's QuickBooks' word for money you owe a vendor: one thousand dollars, to Verdant Hill Botanical.

Second, a bill payment. That's the check itself, for the same one thousand dollars, with its check number on it, and it marks the bill as paid. A copy of the check and the vendor's invoice are attached to the bill, so your bookkeeper never goes hunting for paperwork.

Later, once the check clears your bank and shows up in QuickBooks, ShelfSpace picks that up overnight and marks the payment Cleared. So you always know which checks a vendor has actually cashed.

Consignment works the same way. When you approve a weekly consignment payout, its bill and its check go into QuickBooks together.

For product you buy outright, you also choose when the cost lands in your books, and the one your store uses today is marked Current. The first option is Cash: nothing goes into QuickBooks until you actually pay.

If you want to see what you owe the moment product arrives, it's Accrual, expense at receipt. The bill goes in when you receive the delivery, and the check pays it off later.

And Accrual, capitalize inventory, is for stores whose accountant closes the books every month. It records the product as inventory, not as an expense.

Connecting takes a couple of minutes. Go to My Account, open QuickBooks Online, and click Connect to QuickBooks.

QuickBooks asks you to sign in and pick your company. Then it sends you straight back here, to a short setup.

Step one: pick two accounts. The expense account is where your vendor costs land. The bank account is the one your checks are written from.

The bank account matters. Without it, the bills go in but the checks that pay them don't, so QuickBooks keeps showing bills you've already paid as unpaid.

Step two connects your vendors. ShelfSpace matches each QuickBooks vendor to one of yours by their cannabis license number and the invoices you already have, not by a look-alike name.

If it can't be sure about one, you pick the right vendor from a list, once.

Step three is for bills your bookkeeper already typed into QuickBooks. When ShelfSpace has the same invoice, you link the two. Then, when you pay it, the payment lands on that bill, instead of creating a duplicate.

Step four finds open bills in QuickBooks that ShelfSpace doesn't have yet. Import them, and they show up on your Payments page, ready to pay.

Step five fills in vendor details from QuickBooks, like billing email, phone, and mailing address. It only fills in blanks. And the address matters, because that's where paper checks get mailed.

And that's it. You're set up.

From then on, the QuickBooks card in My Account shows how it's going: what went in, anything that failed, and anything still waiting.

And if your bookkeeper keeps adding bills in QuickBooks, open Bills from QuickBooks and click Scan QuickBooks. New ones show up there, ready to link or bring over.

Pay once in ShelfSpace, and your books keep up on their own.