One direction: out
Crewfather pushes to QuickBooks Online and never imports from it. Nothing in your books is read back into your Crewfather records, so a change you make in QuickBooks is not reflected here.
That is the reliability story rather than a limitation to apologise for. Your books stay the system of record: nothing your bookkeeper does in QuickBooks Online is ever copied back into Crewfather, so their work cannot be undone by something changing over here.
What Crewfather does keep in step is the invoices it created. If you change a finished invoice in Crewfather, the matching one in QuickBooks Online is updated on the next sync. So make the edit in Crewfather, and treat a Crewfather-created invoice in your books as a copy rather than as a second place to edit.
What gets sent, in order
- Customers. The contacts on your jobs.
- Invoices. Only invoices you have finished. Drafts are never sent.
- Payments. Payments recorded in Crewfather against those invoices.
The order matters: a customer exists before the invoice that bills them, and the invoice exists before the payment that settles it.
It does not duplicate
Crewfather keeps a record of what it has already sent, so running a sync again does not create a second copy of anything. An invoice already in QuickBooks is updated if it changed here, not recreated.
Crewfather never writes to a record it did not create. Anything that was in your books before you connected stays exactly as you left it, and Crewfather never deletes anything in QuickBooks Online.
It does read a little, which is what keeps that true. Before creating a customer or an item it checks whether one already exists and links to it rather than making a duplicate, it reads an invoice’s version token before updating an invoice of its own, and it finds an income account to hang a new item on. Reading is how it avoids writing over your work, so “never writes to what it did not create” is the claim, not “never looks”.
If you delete a Crewfather invoice inside QuickBooks, it comes back
A record Crewfather created is one it keeps in step. Deleting it in QuickBooks Online is read as it having gone missing, so it is sent again.
What you will see, in order:
- You delete the invoice in QuickBooks Online.
- The next sync reports it, in the form “Invoice INV-1042 vanished in QuickBooks; will recreate next sync.”
- The sync after that recreates it.
This is not the two systems disagreeing about a number. Crewfather is not overwriting a correction your bookkeeper made to an invoice; it is restoring its own record, which it still believes belongs there.
What to do instead. If an invoice should not be in your books at all, act on the Crewfather side: void or delete it there, and it stops being sent. Deleting it only in QuickBooks removes a copy while leaving the original telling us to send it.
What to expect the first time
The first sync after connecting has the most to do, because everything eligible is new to it. Later syncs move only what has changed.