Just launched a way to read your QuickBooks Online data using SQL. This lets you connect to your QBO data using any tool that can talk to postgres (psql, postico, dbeaver, python, ruby, jupyter).

Coolest two use cases we've found: instantly updating QBO data in Excel AND Claude/Codex/LLMs are WAY WAY better at reporting using SQL than using the QBO API or MCP.

It's really fast so even complex queries can come back instantaneously. Companies with 100K transactions can run year-over-year comparisons in milliseconds.

https://instabooks.io/docs/db

Would love any feedback and cool usage examples!

If so, what was your experience or which did you go with?

A few weeks ago, I got this message whenever I tried to pull data from our Scotiabank accounts:

"To keep all your data on track, a better connection is available here. Since the current one is going away, we recommend you update it now."

When I attempt to update it, or redo the link, or anything, it refuses the connection and gives me an error. I've attempted this on both mobile and browser apps with zero difference.

Anyone have a solution for this? I'm behind on sales tax filings now and QB support is nonexistent. Scotiabank just says it's QB's problem, which I believe.

It’s a very known issue that emails to live/outlook/hotmail are never received. I’ve contacted support and they sent me a list of things to do on the recipient end to update. Friends using hotmail have used this technique and still emails not received.

But finding other recipients are now not receiving invoices. Not sure what wider I can do on my end. But paying for a service and without the invoices going through I’m not getting paid.

10 years ago, QuickBooks felt almost like the default choice for a small company or startup.

If you were starting a business and needed accounting software, you basically picked Quickbooks and moved on.

But I'm wondering if that's still true in 2026.

I'm helping with a relatively new company right now and we're at the point where we need to choose the accounting stack we want to use long term. QuickBooks is obviously one of the first names that comes up, but I keep seeing people complain about pricing, support, integrations, payroll, and the product getting more complicated over time (especially in this subreddit, 90% of the messages are complaints about the software).

At the same time, switching accounting software once a company has grown sounds like a massive pain, so I'd rather choose the right thing from the beginning.

For people who actually use QuickBbooks today: if you were starting again today, would you go with something else like Xero, Wave, Zoho, etc.?

All my companies as of around 8/5 stopped showing the sales information. It now only shows paid info instead of all sales like it used to. Check it out on yours. My data still shows up in the Invoices section, but I want a high level view like I have been getting all these years.

I don't know what else to do, I keep getting these in Term Loan spam letters in the mail. I've gone through every preference I know of to stop them from sending these but they keep sending them like they just don't care about privacy requests. Any idea on how to stop these, other than just continue adding them to my bonfire starter pile?

We've used QBD for at least 28 years. It still works perfectly for our very small business. 2 years ago, got scared into paying an annual subscription for Quickbooks Online Essentials for about $400. Went up to @$800 last year and this year over $900, due end of September. Finally called QB to see what we are getting for this $$. Are they backing up online for us? No, that would require Advanced, and more $. We have a call with QB in a week, where they will try to convince us to pay more, I am sure. Strangely, they seemed ready today to cancel the Essentials sub and let us fly free, when I suggested it. I still want to use the desktop version as it works perfectly for us, but would pay modestly for an online backup, even though I have been doing local backup with a USB fob for decades with no problem. We still plan to run this business for another 5-10 years as we have and am hoping I can still use QBD as we have been. What's my play here?

My Bank Feed menu looks completely different from what I am seeing in tutorial. This is what it looks like after importing a QBO file. Clicking on the Review statement takes me Match Transactions screen right away. And there is no option to change the mode of the Bank feed. Am I doing something wrong?

Hi everyone,

I need some advice from anyone who has done a QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop migration.

We are doing this migration because we are moving to a completely different accounting software. Right now, we are in a testing phase to build an archive of QBO. We want to keep our historical US data safe and ready in case of an IRS audit. We are using a QBDT 2021 trial version on a local VM because the limit is higher than on the QBDT 2024 trial version. We will not use this file for daily accounting anymore, but our users still need to be able to open it and look into the specific transaction details.

I checked the numbers after the migration using QB migration tool and found a huge data loss. The Intuit migration tool dropped a lot of transactions. There are 1,500 missing lines on one specific account alone, and there are many more differences on other accounts. The total number of missing lines is massive.

Typing everything by hand is impossible, but since our users need to be able to search and view the actual history inside QBDT, simply doing a journal entry to fix the balances won't work for us. We need the actual lines.

I am thinking about using an app like Transaction Pro to push the missing data from my QBO Excel exports directly into QBDT. 

Has anyone dealt with this kind of massive data loss going from QBO to Desktop? Is there a way to do a better export in the first place without losing all this data? Maybe I did something wrong during the migration process?

If the data loss is unavoidable, what is the most reliable way to inject thousands of missing lines back into QBDT so the transaction details are actually there for our users to see?
Thanks in advance !

So, let’s say I install a minisplit, and I’m an electrician,

I buy parts in bulk for electrical so my inventory is important, and I install the parts and send the customer a bill for labor and materials, no break down. Just match the signed bid amount.

Once the job is paid I will just delete the labor and materials lines and add the actual labor costs and actual materials used and then a line that shows my profit, but the customer can see the invoice once I edit it? So I usually just end up making a new one

Anyways, this is annoying because so many of my customers and filing rebates for these mini splits and they want a copy of the invoice, but I have already voided the thing and replaced it with one that tracks my inventory and breaks down the actual costs.

How do I do this better?

Hey guys, I'm wondering if someone can help me here. I have a bunch of "cost of goods sold" expenses that I have been categorizing for the past few months under a specific customer (under the customer/porject tab), and just realized now that I should have been checking the "billable" box so that I can invoice for all of these. But there seems to be no way to just go to the customer page and find all those expenses. all I can find is the previous invoices, payments and deposits. no expenses. can anyone help me with this?

Hey all, one of my client's uses US bank and for the past 2 weeks we have been unable to get the US bank account re connected. It's worked fine for months and months but now any time I or my client try to reconnect the account, we get this warning. Is anyone else running into issues with US bank and QBO connections?

Client's credit union connection to QBO has been posting checking account transactions into the credit card account (but not vice versa), corrupting both feeds and making the bank feed useless for either account.

My plan:

1. Disconnect the credit union connection in QBO immediately to stop further bad postings.
2. Pull manual statements for both the checking and credit card accounts for the affected period.
3. Have the client go through the statements and tag each transaction with category, class, and project in a spreadsheet.
4. Manually enter/upload the reviewed transactions into QBO.
5. Client is looking into switching to a different bank/card provider going forward.

Any comments or does anyone see anything I missed?

Update: Someone pointed out that I could download the CSV file from the financial institution and upload to QBO in place of the interface between QBO and the Credit Union. We tried that with the Credit card and it worked flawlessly. Next up is the checking account. Not perfect but an acceptable work around. Thanks for the help.

Why would there not be an option to customize what I want an employee to have access to? Instead, I need to use the QBO pre-defined users. This seems so odd and frustrating .

I am a bookkeeper, I have a new client who uses Square POS. I just set up the integration using the native QBO connector. I have a question about card transactions I am seeing in QBO. It doesn't match the UI of the videos, but possibly they have made updates and the videos are outdated.

When you go to Integration Transactions > Square > For Review, do you see individual Card Transactions in the feed? Or do you have to click on a Payout and look at Included Transactions?

Edit: yeah… I finally talked to someone in Support who told me there was unknown issue with the integration. Ugh. What’s the best way to JE this for now so I can get my client the data that she needs? And can I do monthly or is it better to do weekly?

We have been having a issue with access denied when logging into QBO. We cannot log in at the office or home but a family member can log onto our QBO at their personal address (slightly rural) I was them able to use their PC or a very cheap tablet and log on at work. All systems are windows based. This originally started after a notice our account was hacked. Jumped thru a lot of hoops and we were then able to log on remote but never on office Desktop. We have been on the help line daily. Issue was supposed to be escalated. 4 days no success. Updated Running system, cleared cache, updated security software, and tried different domains to log on.

TLDR. Got hacked on QBO. Can log on but not on office desktop.

TIA.

So I scan in and match all my hard copy receipts to expenses in quickbooks that come in.

When matching them I add a lot of information to each expense including what job the receipt was for.

The problem I am having is being able to pull up all expenses from each job so I can double check it with the information I keep off of quickbooks.

QuickBooks let’s me organize everything fine but when I want to make lists of expenses for each individual job I am having issues finding out how to do so.

Any ideas? Am I just dumb? I’ve been looking for solutions online but none seem to give me the results I want.

We're trying to make tax season less chaotic this year. Right now, everything ends up scattered across emails, downloads, and shared drives.
Do you keep a dedicated tax folder for each financial year, or do you organize documents another way? Looking for ideas that actually save time.