QuickBooks is the most popular accounting application for accountants and SMEs alike. It doesn’t matter whether you run a small shop or freelance online or are simply an accountant filing clients’ taxes, QuickBooks has you covered. With a huge array of features, there is no reason to consider another accounting software; however, what if you wanted to take QuickBooks’ functionality to the next level? What if you wanted to automate your workflows through QuickBooks’ integration with Office 365? Can it be done? In this article, we try to answer that question as best as we can: can QuickBooks be integrated with Office 365? Let us find out.
NOTE: We advise running a virtual machine (VM) to test this integration, because that way, your data stays safe in the event of some unforeseen incident happening. Such occurrences are likely to not take place, but it pays to take measures for disaster prevention.
Why Integrate QuickBooks with Office 365?
There are multiple reasons for you to consider this integration. Firstly, the functionalities of QuickBooks and various Microsoft Office 365 applications such as Word and Excel perfectly complement each other. You can use QuickBooks to crunch the numbers and Word to create a report out of them, or you can perhaps run some analysis on Microsoft Excel and then export the data to QuickBooks for accounting purposes; the possibilities are many.
So, can your QuickBooks be integrated with Office 365?
The short answer is YES.
Coming to the long answer, QuickBooks can integrate with your office productivity suite, but not directly. Now, Microsoft Office 365 contains several productivity tools such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and that will depend on the Office 365 plan that you choose after Hybrid Migration Office 365. QuickBooks may not work or integrate equally well with all of them. However, for the purpose of daily use, we believe you would mostly require QuickBooks to work with two apps inside the Office 365 suite namely, Word and Excel.
To start off with, if you are looking to integrate QuickBooks with Office 365 Excel, then you can do that without hassle. This allows you to export data between the QuickBooks and the Office 365 Excel application as needed.
Plus, the integration is in-app, meaning that when you open Office 365 Microsoft Excel, you can access your QuickBooks data directly from inside the application through the QuickBooks tab present in the Excel menu ribbon.
Moving on to Office 365 Word, QuickBooks can be integrated into this application as well. For instance, when you want to export some QuickBooks accounting data to Word for the purpose of reporting, you can do that smoothly for the most part. However, from our experience, you may face some issues like the QuickBooks client crashing or the Word application becoming unresponsive. Intuit and Microsoft are working continually to improve their users’ experience with their app integrations, so we expect this to improve in the future.
QuickBooks Integration Compatibility
Your version of QuickBooks is also important when it comes to Office 365 integration compatibility. QuickBooks, as you know, has multiple variants such as QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Enterprise Hosting, QuickBooks Premier, and more which run on cloud based desktop as a service technology. Hence, how smoothly you can use both applications depends also on your software edition. Some versions have been reported by users to cause more problems than others, but to get to the nitty-gritty of the situation, you must try it firsthand.
So, there you have it – QuickBooks integration with Office 365. While it may not always be easy to work with both applications together, the functionalities of Office 365 when combined with QuickBooks’ accounting features can synergize with each other and help boost your work productivity.
