How orders sync from your store to QuickBooks

Order sync is how TruSync turns orders from your connected stores into QuickBooks Online transactions.

What gets created

The transaction type depends on your store’s platform and, outside marketplaces, on whether each order is paid. There is no setting to choose it:

• Marketplace stores (Amazon, eBay) — orders post as Invoices. The marketplace collects payment and remits sales tax, so tax posts at zero and there’s no payment method to map.
• Stores with your own payment processing (Shopify, Wix with Wix Payments) — paid orders post as Sales Receipts. An order that hasn’t been paid yet posts as an Invoice and is cleared when payment arrives. Processing fees appear as line items on the receipt.
• Stores using a separate gateway (BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix with an external gateway) — paid orders also post as Sales Receipts (unpaid orders post as Invoices), with fees pulled from a separate connection to your payment gateway rather than the store itself.

When sync happens

Sync starts from the date you connect a store forward — it doesn’t backfill automatically. If you want historical orders in QuickBooks too, use the Backfill step in setup.

If a historical import is started and stops part-way, TruSync says so in Settings → Sync Settings and on your dashboard, and tells you the date the last run reached. Orders it never reached are not in QuickBooks and raise no Order Exception — they were never fetched. See My historical import didn’t finish.

Choosing a Backfill start date if you used another connector

If a previous connector already sent your orders to QuickBooks, a Backfill over the dates it covered would enter them twice. When you choose Yes, sync historical orders, TruSync reads your QuickBooks file for a run of documents it did not write that looks like a connector’s work: consecutively numbered, one per order, entered every day, usually to a single customer such as “Shopify - Your Store”. If it finds one, the Sync Historical Orders step shows the date that run ends and a Start on button with that date. Pressing it fills in the start date.

The suggested date is the last day the previous connector wrote documents. Orders from that day that are already in QuickBooks are linked, not entered again, so starting on that day leaves no gap.

TruSync only suggests a date when it finds a clear, regular run. Documents you or your bookkeeper entered by hand are never mistaken for a connector. A connector that wrote only a few orders a week is recognised only when it also stamped every document with the same note, such as “Synced by Webgility”, and kept a single customer; in that case the message says it “looks to have written” the documents rather than “appears to have written” them. If nothing is shown, you choose the start date yourself, as you would without this feature.

What date a transaction gets

A transaction is dated by the day the order was placed in your store’s timezone, not in UTC. An order placed at 6am on 20 August in Sydney is dated 20 August — even though it was still 19 August in London at that moment.

This matters most at a month, quarter, or financial-year boundary. It’s what keeps an order placed on the first of the month out of the previous month’s books.

TruSync reads the timezone from your store platform, and shows the one it’s using in Sync Settings. If your platform doesn’t report a timezone, TruSync uses UTC.

When you edit an order that’s already synced

If you change an order after TruSync has synced it — add an item, correct a price — TruSync brings QuickBooks back in line with your store.

It does that by voiding the original transaction and posting a new one for the corrected amount. Both stay in QuickBooks. The original keeps its date and its place in your records, with its amounts set to zero and Voided added to its memo; the new transaction carries the figures your store now shows.

You get two documents rather than one edited document on purpose. A transaction that quietly changes its own amount after it has been reconciled is hard to explain later; a void next to its replacement shows what happened and when.

An edit that doesn’t change what the customer pays changes nothing in QuickBooks. Some edits reshape an order without moving the amount owed — adding a line and immediately removing it, for instance. TruSync compares what the customer actually owes, not how the order is put together, so your existing transaction is left exactly as it is.

There are three cases where this works differently:

• The original is already in a bank deposit. QuickBooks won’t void a Sales Receipt that’s been deposited, so TruSync corrects that one in place instead. You end up with a single transaction showing the new amount, and the deposit it belongs to is left alone.
• TruSync didn’t write the original. If the document came from a connector you used before TruSync and TruSync adopted it, the edit isn’t applied and you’ll see it in Order Exceptions. See Order exceptions.
• The new transaction wouldn’t add up to what the customer owes. Before it voids anything, TruSync totals the transaction it would post (the items at their new quantities, plus shipping, less discounts, plus tax) and checks that against what the customer owes. When you remove an item or reduce a quantity on Shopify, the items are rebuilt at the new quantities and the totals agree, so the edit is applied as described above. If the edit also changed the order’s discount and nothing on that order has been refunded, TruSync reads the new discount and the totals still agree. If they don’t agree, for example because the edit also changed a tax or shipping amount, or changed a discount on an order that has a refund, in a way TruSync can’t yet read, it leaves your existing transaction untouched and raises an Order Exception rather than post a figure it can’t stand behind. Adjust that transaction in QuickBooks directly.

Edits only reach QuickBooks if your store platform will still hand the order over. Shopify, for example, only lets a connected app read the last 60 days of orders — see the FAQ below.

Unmapped orders become exceptions, not guesses

If an order uses a payment method, tax jurisdiction, or product that isn’t mapped yet, TruSync doesn’t post it with a best guess — it creates an Order Exception and waits for you to resolve the mapping. You’ll get an email when a new exception is created.

Orders whose items don’t add up are held

Before TruSync posts a new Shopify order, it totals the transaction it would write (the items, plus shipping, less discounts, plus tax) and checks that against what the customer owes. If the two disagree, TruSync doesn’t post a figure it can’t stand behind. It holds the order and raises an Order Exception labelled Order Total Mismatch, with both figures on it. See Order exceptions.

Orders whose payment method contradicts their payment reference are held

Before TruSync posts a new Shopify order, it checks that the payment method recorded for the order agrees with its payment reference. A reference beginning pi_ is only ever issued by Shopify Payments, so an order recorded as paid some other way that carries one is held. So is an order recorded as Shopify Payments whose reference doesn’t begin pi_. TruSync raises an Order Exception labelled Payment Method Mismatch rather than book the sale to the wrong deposit account. Orders with no payment reference are not held. See Order exceptions.

When a retry will not help

Most sync failures are worth trying again — a timeout, a brief QuickBooks outage, a mapping you have since fixed. Those rows show a Retry button in Sync History.

So do failures you have to clear first. An expired QuickBooks connection, a QuickBooks Online subscription that has lapsed, a store that needs reconnecting: none of those will sync on a retry alone, but all of them keep their Retry button, because pressing it is exactly what you do once you have sorted the underlying problem.

Some failures can never succeed, no matter how many times they run. The most common is an order your store platform will not hand over: it has been deleted, or it is older than the window your platform lets a connected app read. Nothing on TruSync’s side can change that, and neither can your platform.

TruSync records which kind each failure is at the moment it fails. On a failure that can never succeed, the row shows the reason instead of a Retry button, so you are not left pressing something that cannot work. There is no waiting involved and nothing to re-run — if the order matters to your books, enter or adjust that transaction in QuickBooks directly.

When a transaction is deleted in QuickBooks

If someone deletes a TruSync-created transaction in QuickBooks, TruSync is told and marks the order’s row in Sync History as Flagged. The QuickBooks Doc column then shows a dash, because the transaction it used to name no longer exists.

TruSync does not raise an Order Exception for this and does not post the order again. A deletion is most often a bookkeeper removing a duplicate, and posting a replacement would create the duplicate again. If the deleted transaction should still be in your books, enter it in QuickBooks directly, or contact support with the order number.

A deleted refund works the same way. The refund still counts as refunded, so TruSync will not post a second one for the same amount.

Only deletions are noticed. A transaction that was edited rather than deleted keeps its row as it was.

FAQ

Does TruSync sync orders placed before I connected my store? No, not automatically — use the Backfill step during setup if you want historical orders synced too.

How far back can Backfill go? That depends on your store’s platform, not on TruSync. Some platforms only make a recent window of orders available to connected apps — Shopify allows the last 60 days, Walmart the last 180. Others place no limit. On Shopify, that 60 days is the order history Shopify grants apps by default, and TruSync does not currently have the extended access that reaches further back, so it is a Shopify restriction rather than a TruSync setting. If you pick a start date the platform can’t reach, TruSync tells you the date it will actually start from before you begin, and again when the backfill finishes, so a short result is never mistaken for missing orders.

How do I know what start date to use if I switched from another connector? In the Sync Historical Orders step, choose Yes, sync historical orders. If TruSync recognises your previous connector’s documents in QuickBooks, it shows the date they end and a Start on button. If nothing is shown, TruSync did not find a clear series, so use the date your previous connector stopped.

Why did Backfill stop without syncing anything? Before a backfill posts anything, TruSync checks every order in the range against the transactions already in QuickBooks so it doesn’t create a second copy of something you already have. If it can’t complete that check, it stops rather than sync orders it couldn’t check — duplicates in your books are much harder to undo than a second backfill run. The message on screen says which of the two reasons applies, because the fix is different.

Backfill says there are too many existing transactions in the range. What do I do? Pick a shorter date range and run it again, a few months at a time. The check reads every QuickBooks transaction in the range in one pass, and a range with a very large number of them is more than it can cover. Nothing was posted, so nothing needs undoing before you retry.

Backfill says it couldn’t reach QuickBooks to check. What do I do? Check your QuickBooks connection on the dashboard, reconnect if it’s asking you to, then run the backfill again over the same date range. A shorter range won’t help here — TruSync couldn’t read QuickBooks at all, rather than reading too much of it. This is usually temporary, and nothing was posted, so re-running is safe. See QuickBooks connection issues.

What timezone are my transactions dated in? Your store’s. TruSync dates each transaction by the day the order was placed in your store’s timezone, so a month-end in QuickBooks lines up with a month-end in your store’s own reports. You can see the timezone TruSync is using in Sync Settings. If your platform doesn’t report one, TruSync uses UTC.

Why did one of my orders not show up in QuickBooks? Check Order Exceptions first — an unmapped payment method, tax jurisdiction, or product is the most common reason.

I edited an old order and the change didn’t reach QuickBooks. Why? Shopify only lets a connected app read the last 60 days of orders, and TruSync does not currently have the extended access that reaches further back — this is a Shopify restriction rather than a TruSync setting. Editing an order older than that tells TruSync the order changed, but Shopify won’t hand the order over (it also won’t if the order was deleted), so there’s nothing to post. Sync History shows it as “Shopify did not return order…” rather than failing quietly. Retry will not clear it — a retry asks Shopify for the same order again and gets the same refusal, so Sync History shows the reason on that row instead of a Retry button. Orders inside the window are unaffected, and nothing already in QuickBooks is changed or removed. If the edit matters to your books, adjust that transaction in QuickBooks directly — see When a retry will not help and Order exceptions.

I edited a synced order. Why are there two transactions in QuickBooks? That’s expected. TruSync voids the transaction it originally posted and writes a new one for the corrected amount, so your books show both what was first recorded and what replaced it. The voided one has zero amounts and Voided in its memo. If the original had already been deposited, TruSync corrects it in place instead and there’s only one. See Order sync.

I edited a synced order and QuickBooks didn’t change. Why? If the edit didn’t change what the customer owes, that’s deliberate — your transaction was already correct, so TruSync left it alone. If the edit removed an item or reduced a quantity, TruSync normally voids and replaces the transaction at the new amount. It holds back only when the replacement it would post doesn’t add up to what the customer owes, for instance when the same edit also changed a tax or shipping amount, or changed a discount on an order that has a refund; you’ll find an Order Exception explaining it, and you should adjust that transaction in QuickBooks directly. If the order is more than 60 days old, Shopify won’t hand it over at all — see the question above. See Order exceptions.

Why does one of my failed orders have no Retry button? Because retrying it would fail the same way. Some failures can’t be fixed by trying again — an order your platform won’t return is the common one. Sync History shows the reason on the row instead of a Retry button, so you’re not left pressing something that can’t work. Rows that failed for a reason a second attempt can fix still show Retry as usual — a timeout, a brief outage, and also an expired QuickBooks connection or a lapsed subscription, where you clear the problem first and then press Retry. See When a retry will not help.

Can I re-sync a single order manually? Usually, yes — resolve the underlying mapping and the exception clears; TruSync then syncs the order. A failed row in Sync History also has a Retry button. Not every failure can be re-synced, though: some can never succeed, such as an order your platform will not return because it was deleted or has aged out of the window a connected app can read. Those rows show the reason in place of the Retry button, because retrying would fail the same way — see When a retry will not help.

Why does an order in Sync History say Flagged and show no QuickBooks transaction? TruSync was told the transaction it created for that order was deleted in QuickBooks, so the row no longer claims it exists. TruSync does not post the order again on its own, because the usual cause is a duplicate that someone removed on purpose. If the transaction should still be in your books, enter it in QuickBooks directly or contact support with the order number. See Order sync.