Export Customers, Vendors and Products

Partners and products normally reach QuickBooks on their own — the connector creates whatever a document needs as part of exporting it. You can also push them ahead of time, which is useful when preparing a first sync or after editing a name or address in Odoo.

Export customers and vendors

  1. Go to Invoicing ‣ Customers ‣ Customers (or Vendors).

  2. Select one or more contacts in the list, or open a single contact.

  3. Click Actions ‣ Export/Update to QBO.

A notification reports how many records were created, updated and skipped.

Odoo sends the partner name, email, and billing / shipping address. QuickBooks keeps Customers and Vendors in separate ID spaces, so the contact form carries two read-only fields — QBO Customer ID and QBO Vendor ID. A contact that is both a customer and a vendor ends up with both.

Important

The action only exports contacts marked as a Customer or a Vendor in Odoo. If none of the selected contacts has either role, the action stops with an error — set the role first.

Note

QuickBooks refuses two records with the same display name. When that happens the connector looks for the existing QuickBooks record: if the email matches, it links to it, otherwise it retries with a suffixed name such as Acme Corp (Vendor) or Acme Corp ([email protected]). Either way the export completes and the chatter says what happened.

Export products

  1. Go to Invoicing ‣ Customers ‣ Products — or the product variants list.

  2. Select the products and click Actions ‣ Export/Update to QBO.

Products are created in QuickBooks as Service items for Odoo services, and Non-Inventory items for everything else, carrying the name, SKU, cost, and the default income and expense accounts from the connection.

Important

A product without a SKU (Internal Reference) is skipped, with a warning in the log. QuickBooks matching relies on the SKU, so set one before exporting.

Warning

Default Income Account and Default Expense / COGS Account must be set on the connection first — see Default accounts. Without them the export stops with an error.

How existing QuickBooks items are matched

Before creating an item, the connector looks for it in QuickBooks:

  1. By SKU — an exact match is linked to the Odoo product.

  2. By name — a match with no SKU, or with the same SKU, is linked.

If a different QuickBooks item already uses the name, the product is not exported and the log tells you to rename one of the two. This prevents the connector from silently attaching your Odoo product to an unrelated QuickBooks item.

Note

Re-running the action on a product that already has a QuickBooks ID updates the QuickBooks item rather than creating a new one.