QuickBooks Online: Where Business, Employee and Payroll Management Intersect

If you’ve heard of Intuit’s QuickBooks Connect Conference, you know the company spends three days laser-focused on connecting accountants, small business owners, and developers with each other. This year’s conference was no different, as a series of press releases were issued that highlighted the company’s commitment to connecting its QuickBooks Online platform with apps and third party integrations that make managing a business easier for customers. One of those apps is TSheets, a web-based employee time tracking and scheduling software designed for small businesses.

Intuit announced a deeper integration with TSheets, which will offer QuickBooks Online customers using TSheets with the ability to seamlessly track, approve and pay employees using one solution, leveraging the efficiencies of both apps. As a result of this integration, small businesses will have an end-to-end experience and will not know where QuickBooks ends and TSheets begins.

Features from the integration will allow small business owners to assign jobs, shifts and projects to their employees and later view their employees’ workload, location and time entries. When a project is completed, managers will get a project overview and they can review and approve hours worked right from the app. Now that payroll can be managed from inside QuickBooks, small business owners can accurately track overtime and paid time off while eliminating the time spent performing double entry.

“This integration is the next logical step in a partnership that spans nearly five years. TSheets first launched its app in the QuickBooks Apps store in 2012, and is currently one of the most popular apps in the Intuit QuickBooks Apps Store. In addition, TSheets is one of the top apps recommended by accountants to their clients,” said Vinay Pai, head of Intuit Developer Group.

“When TSheets first integrated with QuickBooks Online, it was because we had a hypothesis that an integration between our two apps was something our customers would want. We were right, and every year that integration continues to get better,” said Matt Rissell, CEO of TSheets.

“Managing and approving payroll has traditionally been a two-hour process,” said Rissell. “With the seamless integration between TSheets and QuickBooks Online, the entire process has been streamlined to just a few minutes, saving small business owners time that they can use to manage their business.”

Intuit worked closely with TSheets to determine how they could integrate their systems seamlessly in a way that solved pain points for their customers while delivering a solution that truly operated as one system. A key component was to ensure that all the data in TSheets would show up in QuickBooks to eliminate any duplicate entry for accountants and their clients. From there, the development teams from both companies worked to embed TSheets functionality deeply into QuickBooks to create the same look and feel as the native QuickBooks solution.

“This is the first integration that allows for another product to be embedded inside QuickBooks Online, making the solution very intuitive. Because customers can use TSheets functionality without leaving QuickBooks, they can accomplish their end goal of running payroll right from QuickBooks,” said Rissell.

Payroll is one area in which accountants have an opportunity to provide a value-added service to their small business clients. According to Intuit, more than 25 percent of QuickBooks Online customers provide payroll services and most have hourly staff on their payroll, which puts them in the position to effectively manage their clients’ payroll with an intimate understanding of their clients’ payroll needs. As it becomes more important for small business owners to keep accurate records of employees’ time, like overtime worked or PTO hours, accountants will find themselves once again moving from the role of task processor to trusted advisor. The deeper integration between TSheets and QuickBooks Online shortens the actual workflow for accountants, allowing them to continue to value bill because the time saved running payroll can now be used to offer more comprehensive advisory services.

“The QuickBooks Online ecosystem is solving the pain points for customers because we work with our third-party developer partners to address the needs of small business owners,” said Pai. “We want to harness innovation wherever it’s happening – and there is so much happening outside of Intuit – to deliver best in class solutions to accountants and our customers.”

The hardest and most time-consuming aspect of payroll is entering employees’ time into a payroll system. For many businesses, that process includes collecting paper time sheets from individual employees and faxing them to their accounting department, who then enters them into the payroll system. Now, all this happens within minutes. Employees can clock in and out from the app and that data is automatically captured and entered into QuickBooks Online for the small business owner or their accountant to process later. The depth of employee time and payroll information that is tracked via TSheets and entered into QuickBooks also helps small businesses maintain their labor records and compliance.

“We have seen time and time again that the apps accountants recommend to their clients are the ones that they know and use themselves. Accounting professionals are already using TSheets to track their own hourly employees and which clients they bill to. TSheets offers them many impressive features, such as GPS tracking and advanced shift scheduling. It’s functionality like this that helps small businesses run smoother,” said Pai.

As the TSheets integration is rolled out, QuickBooks Online will use existing QuickBooks data and machine learning to recommend TSheets via app discovery to the customers that are most likely to benefit from the TSheets integration. When customers are entering data, they will be prompted to automate their data entry with a link to get more information. If they click on that link, they are then only one more click away from getting set up with TSheets. Once the signup is complete, all of their information will be pulled over from QuickBooks.

“Intuit has found not just a great app, but a great company in TSheets,” said Pai. “We both have teams that are focused on the end-to-end experience, customer benefits and delivering innovation to customers.”

“This integration is all about the end-to-end experience. One of the things that draws Intuit and TSheets together is the mission of truly helping small businesses and accountants succeed,” said Rissell. “At Intuit and TSheets, it’s not only something we really believe, but it comes from the top down. And, that’s what makes this offering the beginning of something truly rich that will help accountants.”

Customers can visit the Intuit QuickBooks Apps.com for more information.