Early in the pandemic, I bought a new MacBook. I decided not to put MS Office on it because I use GSuite for my business. Intuit recently introduced the ability to import into QuickBooks Online from Google Sheets and I gotta say… I love it so much that I wish I could snuggle with it.
To start the process to import into QuickBooks Online from Google Sheets, I recommend first downloading the template from QBO. The good thing is – you’ll only have to this part one time, for each of the types of lists (Items, Customers, Vendors, Chart of Accounts)
NOTE: You cannot import into QuickBooks Online for invoices (only available in QBO Plus and QBO Advanced); you must use a csv file for Invoices.
To do this, click the Gear Icon, then choose Import Data and you’ll get to this screen:
Now click on the icon for Products and Services, and in the screen below, click the link that says “Download a sample file”. (Because I’m lazy, I’ll be referring to these as ITEMS from now on, when I am able, because that’s a lot less letters to type than P R O D U C T S A N D S E R V I C E S.)
Save the file to wherever, you can leave the name as the default, which in my case was “QuickBooks_Online_PnS_Sample_File_SS_ESS.xls”. Then upload it to Google Drive.
Once it’s in Google Drive, I would suggest renaming it; you’ll be able to use this template. What I usually do is make a copy and rename it for each client, then share it with that client so that they can enter the data, or so that I can copy/paste data from a spreadsheet they’ve already given me.
Once I rename it, I save it as a Google Sheets by clicking File > Save as Google Sheets:
Edit your spreadsheet to include the items you would like to import into QuickBooks Online from Google Sheets:
We’re ready to iImport into QuickBooks Online from Google Sheets!
There are a couple ways to get to the screen to do this. You can go Gear Icon > List Menu > All Lists > Products and Services.
The other way is to click on Sales from the left nav, then choose Products and Services:
Once you’re at the Products and Services list, click the green action button drop down in the top right corner and choose “Import”:
We’re back to this screen, only now we’re going to click the button that says “Connect”:
You’ll get a pop up asking you to choose a Google account to which you want to import from:
Then grant permission:
Aaaaand confirm that:
Now we can choose the file. This screen is one of the reasons I suggest making a copy that is specific to the QBO account, it makes it easier to search for and select it:
Click the file name and then click the blue “Select” button in the bottom left:
You’ll be brought back into QBO so that you can import into QuickBooks Online from Google Sheets. Since our Google Sheets file only has one Sheet in it, we don’t have to select one, and we can click the green “Next” button in the bottom right corner:
The next screen is asking us to map fields in the sheet to QBO fields. Since we used the QBO template, ours all match, so we can click that green “Next” button in the bottom right. Yay!
The next screen we see shows us the data from the Google Sheet, where we can verify and/or make any changes to the data before we import into QuickBooks Online from Google Sheets. It all looks good to me, so we can just click the green “Import” button in the bottom right corner:
If the import is successful, you’ll get a little message that says it was. I was too slow in trying to get the screen shot. Oops!
Just click the X in the top right corner to close this screen, and we’ll go look at our newly imported items in the Products and Services list (if you’re logged into QBO right now, you can click right on this link to take you to that screen: https://app.qbo.intuit.com/app/items)
Here are our newly imported items:
In this piece, I only did two items… and if you already have the template uploaded to Google Drive, using this tool to import into QuickBooks Online from Google Sheets for even just two is faster than manually entering them into QBO. At least it feels like it to me… I haven’t actually ever timed it 🙂
