Live job cost integration: QuickBooks Online → Airtable (per Project)
Hi everyone,
I’m working on a workflow where I’d like to bring live job costing data from QuickBooks Online into Airtable, specifically linked to Projects (i.e. QBO “Customers” with IsProject=true).
The goal is to have Airtable show income and costs by project, so that project profitability and job cost tracking are always up to date. Ideally this would cover both accrual (Invoices, Bills, etc.) and cash-basis (Payments, BillPayments, Expenses, Checks, etc.) transactions — pulling the amounts tied to each project’s CustomerRef and syncing them into Airtable tables for Projects and Job Cost Lines.
Has anyone here implemented something like this — a live sync or near real-time integration between QuickBooks and Airtable for job costing by project?
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Yes, I have done stuff very similar to this for many of my clients.
It can be a little challenging to setup, because your Make automation will get triggered upon ANY sort of a change in QuickBooks, so you’ll need to use Make’s filtering capabilities to filter for the exact types of transactions that you’re looking for.
You may also need to setup multiple different automations in Make — one automation for each type of transaction. (Alternatively, you can setup many different conditional paths in Make — one path for each type of transaction.)
Yeap, I’ve done it before. Created Invoices and Bills on Airtable, automations to create them on QBO, and then have the Payments and BillPayments sync back into AT from QBO, and I used Make for it
One of the things to watch out for is the data from QBO occasionally just not being sent over at all, so I’d recommend building out some tripwires for this, e.g. if you’ve got an Invoice created and you normally have Payments attached to those within a month, then you should have an automation that alerts you if the Invoice doesn’t have a Payment attached a month later
I do free half hour calls and I reckon we could get you set up with a sync or two that you can duplicate for yourself afterwards within that time, and here's a link to schedule a call if that sounds good to you!
It does not seem that you want to have all invoices created in Airtable and only then pushed to QBO. However, if that is the case, you’ll want to really make sure that all data REQUIRED by QBO is actually found on your invoices in Airtable. Otherwise, the system will obviously error and invoices will not get created in QBO. This is important specially if you have multiple people generating invoices in Airtable.
That’s a great use case, @Sean_Hyland1 I’ve seen teams connect QuickBooks job costing data to Airtable in a few different ways depending on how real-time they want the sync.
Make and n8n both work well for daily or hourly syncs, but for live or near-real-time project profitability tracking you’ll want an event-driven approach that listens to QBO object changes (Invoices, Bills, Payments, etc.) and pushes deltas directly into Airtable without batching.
You can either build this using QuickBooks webhooks plus the Airtable API, or use a managed automation that handles schema mapping, rate limits, and record relationships automatically.
Platforms like Make can do this efficiently if you set up multiple scenarios, one per object type, and use filters to target only the relevant QBO events (https://apps.make.com/quickbooks).
If you end up hitting rate-limit or data-model friction with Make or Zapier, check out how managed two-way sync tools such as Stacksync handle accounting system integrations; they’re built for real-time bi-directional updates between systems like QuickBooks, Airtable, and databases without custom code
