QuickBooks Connection Guide with Mangobeds

The Accounting app keeps your property’s books in Mangobeds: revenue and payments come from your invoices automatically, you record what you spend, and the whole period exports as a journal. If your bookkeeper works in QuickBooks Online, you can skip the export. Connect it once and Mangobeds posts the journal into your company instead.

This guide covers connecting QuickBooks, mapping your chart of accounts, running a sync, and what to do when a day is rejected.

What the QuickBooks connection actually does

It is worth being precise, because “connect QuickBooks” could mean many things.

Mangobeds stays the place you manage accounting. Your expenses are recorded here, the summary and the period totals are here, and the CSV export is still available. What the connection adds is one more destination: when you press Sync, each day’s journal is posted into QuickBooks as a journal entry.

Nothing flows the other way. Mangobeds never reads your QuickBooks transactions, never changes anything you or your bookkeeper entered there, and never deletes anything.

Before you start

You need to be an admin of the QuickBooks Online company you want to connect, because that is who Intuit asks to approve the connection.

One limit worth knowing up front: QuickBooks Online handles amounts to two decimal places only. If your property is priced in a currency with three (Bahraini dinar, Kuwaiti dinar, Jordanian dinar, Omani rial, Tunisian dinar, Iraqi dinar or Libyan dinar), Mangobeds will tell you so rather than connect, and the CSV export stays the right route for you.

Connecting QuickBooks

1. Open Apps → Accounting for the property whose books you are connecting. Accounting is per property, so each one connects to its own company.
2. Go to the Sync tab.
3. Click Connect an accounting system, pick QuickBooks, and click Connect.
4. Sign in to Intuit in the window that opens, choose the company, and approve the connection.

The window closes on its own and the Sync tab shows which company you are now posting to.

If you have not set the Accounting app up yet, you can also choose QuickBooks on the setup screen and do both in one step.

Mapping your chart of accounts

This is the one step that genuinely needs doing, and it takes a few minutes.

A journal entry has to name the account each amount lands in, and QuickBooks matches on its own accounts rather than on a number you type. So once you are connected, the account fields in Settings turn into dropdowns listing your company’s real chart of accounts.

There are two groups to map. Transaction accounts are the six that come out of your invoices and payments: accommodation revenue, extras revenue, tax collected, accounts receivable, deposits held and bank. Expense categories are the twelve expense types, one account each.

Two things are worth knowing while you pick.

Accounts typed as Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable in QuickBooks are not offered, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. QuickBooks refuses a journal line on those accounts unless the line names a specific customer or vendor, which a daily summary journal does not have. Offering them would give you a mapping that looks right and fails on every post. Pick another current asset account for receivables.

If an account is missing something you need, create it in QuickBooks first and it appears in the dropdown.

Syncing

Syncing is a button, not a schedule. Open the Sync tab and press Sync now when you sit down to reconcile.

That is a deliberate choice. An automatic nightly post drops entries into periods your accountant may be about to close, and it does it while nobody is watching. A button means the entries arrive when you are there to see what happened.

What a sync does:

• It looks back up to 62 days, ending yesterday. Today is left out because the day is not over.
• It posts one journal entry per day, carrying that day’s invoices, payments and expenses.
• It skips any day it has already posted, so pressing Sync twice cannot double up your books. If everything is already posted, it tells you so.
• A day that failed last time is tried again on the next sync.

The 62-day window is there so connecting today does not dump your entire history into your books. Your opening balance is your accountant’s own entry, not ours.

Reading the sync history

Under the button is a list of every day Mangobeds has tried to post, newest first, with how many journal lines it carried and one of three outcomes.

Synced means the entry is in QuickBooks. Failed means something went wrong and the day will be retried on your next sync. Rejected means QuickBooks refused the entry and will refuse it again, so retrying is pointless.

The most common rejection is a closed period: if your accountant has set a closing date, QuickBooks will not accept an entry dated before it, no matter how many times you try. Use the three-dot menu on that row to export the day as a CSV and give it to your bookkeeper to enter, or ask them to reopen the period and sync again.

Every failure keeps the exact message QuickBooks returned, including Intuit’s own request id. If you send us that, our support and Intuit’s can find the request itself rather than guess.

Disconnecting

Disconnect on the Sync tab stops Mangobeds posting to your company and hands your access back to Intuit. What was already posted stays in QuickBooks, because those entries are genuinely part of your books. Your account mapping returns to the default codes, and your sync history is kept so you can see what was sent and when.

Two related things worth separating. If someone removes Mangobeds from inside QuickBooks, or the connection sits unused for several months, Intuit stops accepting it and the Sync tab will ask you to reconnect. Reconnecting the same company picks up exactly where it left off, with your mapping and history intact.

Connecting a different company is treated as a fresh start: the sync history is cleared, because those days were posted to the old company and were never posted to the new one.

What Mangobeds sends, exactly

Each journal entry is dated with the day it covers, numbered with that same date so you can trace an entry back, and made up of the lines for that day.

An invoice records what you are owed against what you earned, splitting accommodation, extras and tax apart. A payment moves that amount from what you are owed into your bank, and a refund does the reverse. A security deposit goes to the deposits held liability instead, because it is the guest’s money you are holding. An expense records the cost against its category’s account and takes the money out of your bank.

Debits and credits always balance, which is the check that tells your bookkeeper the entry is sound.

Getting started

Connect the company, spend five minutes on the account mapping with your bookkeeper, then press Sync. Look at the first few entries in QuickBooks under Reports → Journal before you trust it with a full month. Once the mapping is right, reconciling stops being a data-entry job.