Integrating QuickBooks + Insightly

Val: Hi, everybody. Thanks for choosing to spend part of your Valentine’s Day with us. I’m Val Riley, head of content marketing for Insightly. And I’ll be your host for today’s webinar. So let’s go ahead and meet today’s presenter. 

This is Matt Bright. Matt brings more than 20 years of experience to Intuit and this webinar. He’s currently a senior product specialist in the partner channel. Prior to that, he was channel marketing manager and then spent seven years as a sales engineer throughout all of his roles at Intuit. Matt has been able to share his passion of helping small businesses. 

And this is Luke Wade from Insightly. Luke specializes in helping buyers understand how Insightly works and how organizations derive value from it. Prior to joining Insightly, he held a sales engineering role at another tech company and also worked as a strategy analyst. 

And in a little while, we’re also going to meet Kyle Devries from Health Benefits Associate. Kyle is going to share his experience in being an Insightly and QuickBooks user. So we’re going to take it from the theoretical right into the practical. 

We had a pull open and I’d like to go ahead and reveal those results. Let’s see. Looks like we’ve got quite a few folks using QuickBooks and Insightly. 

So Matt and Luke, how do you feel about that going into today’s webinar? 

Matt: I’m definitely excited about that. You know, we’re as we’ll talk about through this webinar, very excited about this offering and how it can really support and enhance the QuickBooks functionality. So it’s great to see a lot of users are already seeing the value in it. And for those who are either using QuickBooks or Insightly or just here to learn. Super excited also to again, just talk to you a little bit about the benefits and how the one plus one equals three when you combine these two products. 

Val: Yeah, absolutely, Matt. For both for those of you that are using both. Hopefully you can learn a few new tips and tricks today. And for those of you who are not. Hopefully we can convince you that Insightly and QuickBooks. Online are quite the power couple. All right. Well, let’s take a look at today’s agenda. We’re going to start with looking at this problem we’re trying to solve for Matt’s going to tell us a little bit about why folks are moving from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks Online. Then we’re going to head over to Luke. He’s going to show us a little bit about the options you have for integrating Insightly and QuickBooks with a deep dive into the AppConnect route. And then we’re going to again, welcome Kyle, who’s using both Insightly and QuickBooks in that real world scenario. 

So, Matt, I’m going to go ahead and pass it to you now. 

Matt: So we really wanted to talk just a few minutes, especially to those of you either using QuickBooks or Insightly, but maybe not both why integrating the two products really can give you some tangible benefits. And we’ll talk a little bit about what those are. But the biggest thing that we are trying to help small businesses with is making things more efficient. And by doing that, automation comes into play As you can see here in the center of this screen. QuickBooks Online can integrate with over 700 different apps inefficiencies as it says there can exist when your accounting software isn’t talking to your CRM. And of course, there’s other tools you may use that are not necessarily talking across your tech stack. So how do we eliminate those? Well, we’re very excited about the QuickBooks Online platform. Now, as you can see here, you can plug in multiple different apps and you can kind of eliminate some of those efficiencies, not to spend too much time, but just to hit on it very quickly. A small businesses maybe get two or 3 hours to start off their business. As businesses start to grow and our needs become larger and they start to outgrow those apps, or they need a larger accounting platform to support them as they grow, or even businesses who have, you know, six, eight, ten years ago went to a monolithic. ERP because that was really the only solution for a mid-market or a very large SMB back then. But now five, ten years later, a lot of different cloud solutions present themselves. And as you can see again on this slide,. QuickBooks, along with other key apps like Insightly, we can really give you the same things as an ERP does enable all those workflows. But in the meantime, it connects all your data. It really can help automate workflows, as it says there. It can help you be more efficient and get more out of the tech stack. It’s very interesting when you start looking at the studies, how many businesses are increasing budgets to either one start the journey to the cloud or they’re increasing budgets to bring more work to the cloud. And so really whether you’re just getting started in this journey or whether you’re already on it, like many of you are in this webinar today, and that’s excellent to hear. We’re excited as QuickBooks to help you on that journey. QuickBooks is a long standing brand, as it mentions. We’re being we’re known for being easy to work with. Unlike an ERP where you have to do a lot of engineering and we’re not talking about ERP, everything has its place. OK, so let me just just say that sometimes businesses need things to be very, very customized and customized each and every step of their work. And that’s where an ERP really shines. OK. But if you’re looking for faster implementation, if you’re looking for plug in place solutions that you can still do some customization. Or QuickBooks is known for being deployed very fast, very easy to work with. No additional engineering needed and then it’s a complete cloud solution again as well as 700 plus other apps to support your CRM needs and reporting needs or any other needs that you may have. So we’re super excited again about talking to you a little bit today about how combining QuickBooks Online with Insightly can even bring more value to your business. Lastly, for those of you not currently using QuickBooks Online, we just like to tell you that we can really meet you again wherever you happen to be in that business journey. When you think about simple start, think about a very small startup business, maybe a side gig or something you have a hobby that you’re really interested in. I always like to tell the story of, you know, we’ve heard it several times where people start printing baseball logos for their little league team and then another Little League team sees it and then they tell other people and then all of a sudden you got a business. Didn’t even necessarily plan on having that business, but you do need some tools to help you track and manage your finances. So Simple Start can do that as you start to get more customers, more jobs. You know, Online Essentials can really step in and help you. As you start hiring your first employee, you want to track more receivables and payables as your jobs even increase further and you maybe want to start keeping inventory on hand, keeping track of profitability per project again and getting those tools to help you grow and succeed. Plus steps and does an excellent job as well as again, if you’re one of those businesses that’s growing rapidly, you’re maybe kind of thinking about going to an ERP but not sure what else is in the market to bridge the gap. QuickBooks Online Advanced will step up and is again excellent when you combine that with some of the other apps to nail all of your workflows. So again, just this slide real quick was a quick overview that whether you’re just getting started or you’ve been in business many years and you’re growing, we have a QuickBooks product that can meet you where you’rere at. And also provide for your feature needs. 

Val: All right. Sounds good. Looks like we’ve got another pull to launch. And while we’re having folks respond to that poll, I’ll say I can’t speak for all CRMs but the number one software that Insightly users integrate with their CRM is in fact QuickBooks. So, Luke, Matt, let’s see what our audience says here today. All right, guys. What do you think? 

Matt: Again, here we see a kind of a split between email and accounting software. And I think both of those are very important when we think about a CRM staying in contact with customers and the right tools to, you know, keeping in touch with your prospects. Yep, absolutely. This is about what we expected here. Both email and accounting are very important when you are running a business and managing sales for that business. So looks great, Val. Yeah. All right, 

Val: Luke, it is your time to shine. Let’s talk about the two ways to integrate Insightly and QuickBooks Online. The first way the native integration is what most people think about when they hear the word integration. It’s built right into Insightly CRM, right? Yep. Exactly. There’s no additional license fee to use our native integration with QuickBooks Online, and it’s super easy to install. I’m going to show that installation process in just a few minutes and we’ll see how simple it is to use during the demo. Great. OK, so that’s the first option. The second option uses AppConnect, which some folks may have never heard of before. It’s an app that’s available from. Insightly that allows Insightly users to connect literally to hundreds of apps, including QuickBooks. Yup. That is exactly right. Building integrations is incredibly easy with App Connect. It is a low code, no code application that uses a super simple drag and drop interface. You don’t have to be an engineer to use app connect. Really. Almost anyone can build integrations and it can be used across I.T., h.r. Marketing, sales, finance, support, and product. So our focus for today and for the webinar is going to be on QuickBooks. Online and Insightly integrations. That said, you can integrate any application with a web based API using AppConnect and you can get the benefit of making. Insightly your central hub of data so that you can maximize the data that you capture. And deliver great experiences to your customers. All right. Well, I’m excited to see it. I’m going to start my screen share, Luke, and then you can take it away and kind of get us through both that native integration, the first one we spoke about and then the AppConnect integration. Excellent. So we are looking at the Insightly CRM home page right now. Your homepage is going to display the most recent dashboard that you’ve looked at. These are very easy to customize, to share with your team, just like everything else in Insightly. And what I first want to quickly touch on is our free native connection our free native integration with QuickBooks Online. And I mentioned just a minute ago that we’re going to take a look at how easy that installation process is. So I am going to navigate to system settings here. And if I scroll down near the bottom of the list, there is an integrations section and if I go to my integrations list, we see that I’m presented with the option to install this native integration with QuickBooks. So go ahead and click that install button before making my connection. I have the ability to make this integration visible to everyone that uses Insightly at my organization or to select users. And we’ll just go ahead, make this visible to everyone. I will click the Connect to QuickBooks button here. And because I’m already logged in to QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks prompts me to give Insightly permission to connect, which I will do so. And we are now connected via our free native integration. And this gives you a quick insight into your QuickBooks. Online account and activity. So to show you how that works, let’s take a look at a contact here. So I am going to navigate to my contacts and we will pick Chris Chen. If I open up Chris Chen by default,. I land on the details tab, which has all of the relevant information about Chris Chen. And you’ll notice that there is a QuickBooks icon over here If I click on that,. I am prompted to link this contact with the QuickBooks. Online Contact Chris Chen, and you’ll notice this integration automatically provides me with a suggestion based on an email address in that match. So we see Christ Chen here is a QuickBooks online contact. If I add this link that will bring up our Native Integration dashboard, which shows me some demographic information about Chris Chen, the company he’s associated with. We have some aggregate measures on the right like open over to and revenue coming in for Chris. And then if I scroll down, we have line item tabular data on invoices, estimates and payments for Chris Chen. This can be filtered in different ways. And we can see here that we have due dates. We have the balance, the total, the status of these different items. And I also have the ability to open any of these items up in QuickBooks Online with a single click. So that is our free integrated option, our native integration with QuickBooks Online. And now let’s take a little bit more of a deep dove and walk through an example that’s possible with our integration platform. AppConnect to carry out more sophisticated workflows between Insightly and QuickBooks. Online. And what I’m going to do over the next few minutes is I am going to create a new opportunity. in Insightly, I’ll generate a quote from that opportunity, and I have an integration setup that will automatically take the information from that quote in Insightly and create a new invoice in QuickBooks Online using that information. So let’s go back and pick a different contact here. I am going to use Katherine Warren if I open up her contact page. We see that she is an employee of Clampett. Oil and Gas. Let’s go ahead and open up that organization. Page, and we will create a new opportunity for this organization. So at the top right there is an actions menu, and we are going to add a new opportunity. We’ll call this Clampett Oil and gas Kat Warren. We will add Katherine Warren as the primary contact for this opportunity here. And we will also assign a pipeline and we’ll say that this is a new business deal. When I click Save, that creates and automatically opens my new opportunity for me. As you can see, this opportunity has been assigned to my new business pipeline. These pipeline stages are completely customizable, just like everything else in Insightly. And before I generate a quote from this opportunity, I’d first like to add some products to the opportunity. So from the related tab, we can see that. I have the ability to set a price book in the event that I have different price points for different markets, for different lines of business. So we’ll go ahead and use my solar products price book. Now that that price book is set,. I have the ability to add products and I will add a few here. So we will add, let’s say 12 commercial ground mounted panels, we’ll add 15 residential ground mounted panels and let’s add 30 rooftop panels. I’m going to save my products and you’ll notice that still on the related tab for this opportunity, we now see my products quantity unit prices. So I’m now ready to generate a new quote for this opportunity. And what I’ll do here is. I will click the new quote button. This quote is automatically named. And as you can see, we are automatically pulling in information from the organization as well as the contact. So I’ll click Save here. And we’ve now generated a new quote on the details tab of this quote. We have the Associated Organization. Opportunity as well as Contact Katherine Warren here. And on the related tab, we see all of the, quote, products that we added just a moment ago. The integration that I have set up uses a custom button in Insightly, which you can see here at the top, right. Which fires off this integration for me that’s going to generate a new invoice in QuickBooks Online using this information. So I’ll go ahead and click that button. And we see a pop up screen here letting me know that the selected record was successfully sent to my integration recipe. So I have kicked off my integration workflow here. And what we’ve done is we’ve collected our products, our prices, our quantities, as well as customer information. And we have used AppConnect to pass those over to QuickBooks Online and create a new invoice. So now if I navigate back to the related tab, you’ll notice that currently there are no QuickBooks invoices that are linked to this quote because we just ran that integration. If I go ahead and refresh here, we see that we have created a new record of this QuickBooks invoice that was generated via the integration that we just ran. We have the invoice amount, which of course matches the grand total of the quotes. We have a link to that invoice and QuickBooks Online that we just created via integration if I click on that, that will open up the invoice for me in QuickBooks Online. And here we see that we have all of our customer information for Katherine Warren, including her billing and shipping information, the invoice state, which is today, the due date and all of the products quantities and prices that were automatically transferred over from the opportunity. And the quote in Insightly, another nice thing is you can customize this flow of information and configure it however you’d like. So if I jump back in to Insightly here and we open up the contact record for Katherine Warren on the related tab, again, we see that invoice that we just created here via our app Connect Integration. And we also have another section here which is purchases. And this allows you to quickly see the products that a contact or an organization has purchased in the past, including purchase date price, quantity and whatnot. We have that same information at the organization level. So if I pull up the organization page for Clampett Oil and Gas on the related tab, again, we have that associated invoice as well as those purchases with all of the relevant purchase information. I want to wrap this up by showing that you can also use the native integration in conjunction with our App Connect Integration. So even though everything that we’ve done over the past few minutes has used. App Connect, we still have that QuickBooks icon where we can very quickly see a snapshot into our QuickBooks account and activity or a contact or an organization. So if I open up the Native Integration. Display for Katerine Warren here again, we have a aggregate dashboard at the top and the top row in this list of tabular data shows the invoice that we just generated for the price. Of course, the invoice is open because it hasn’t been paid, and I had the ability to open up that same invoice from here. As well. We have looked at two integration options to review. The first, we gave you visibility into invoice pay invoices, payments and estimates using our Free. Native integration with QuickBooks Online. You can see what’s coming in. There’s visibility among your different teams and there’s fewer errors and accurate tracking of revenue with automations. Again, this is part of the Insightly CRM subscription fee. There are no additional fees for that native integration from the Insightly side or the QuickBooks Online side. The second option which we looked at in more detail use Insightly App Connect, which is our integration tool, and that is license separately. That integration option is virtual, virtually limitless, and can be truly customized to meet the needs of your business. So we have some examples here on the slide, but what’s going to really bring this to life is our customer guest who is going to share his story of using. Insightly AppConnect with QuickBooks Online. So Val, let’s go ahead and introduce Kyle. Great idea, Luke, and thanks for that demo. Everyone. Please welcome Kyle from Health Benefits. Associate Kyle loves making health insurance less complicated, something we can all appreciate by being a resource that his customers can trust. As a broker at Health Benefits. Associates, he’s not limited to writing for a single company, so he can take someone’s situation and suggest the right plan. That way. And he’s here to show how he uses Insightly and QBO to better serve his clients. Welcome so much, Kyle. Hey, Val. Thank you Thank you so much for having me.. Appreciate it. Great. So we’ve talked about these two apps now and we want to hear how it actually works in the real world. And just to clarify, you’re using QBO Insightly CRM and you have added App Connect in order to customize your integrations a little bit better. Correct Yeah. Great. So let’s get into it. So part of your business is dealing with commissions, receiving and distributing them. Can you talk about that process with Insightly and QBO? Yeah, absolutely. So really it’s going to start back when we write a policy for somebody. So let’s just say. I write a policy for you. We submit that to the carrier. I’m going to get a commission throughout the month from that carrier. Now, once or twice throughout the month, we’re going to receive all these commissions being dropped into our account. It’s up to our accountant here to go through those assigned those to our our clients, which then in turn assigns it to us the broker. So when they come in, each company is going to give us a breakdown. Whether you name the big insurance company, they’re all going to give you a breakdown of exactly who that commission is for and how much you receive for that.. We utilize the sales receipt function in QuickBooks Online to go through and assign our commissions. So when our accountant does is, he’ll go in, he’ll enter that commission, the amount paid, the client at that point, once that sales receipt is saved, that’s then pulled over to Insightly. It’s assigned to a contact which also assigns it to the connected opportunity. And then that opportunities then connected to our broker so at that point we’re able to run reports and see who the commission was for what the amount was paid, what company it was paid for, what line of business it was paid for, and that just allows us to organize and distribute those commissions properly. I would imagine if, on a simple scale that wouldn’t be so terrible, but what kind of volume are we talking about that quite possibly makes this a very arduous task if done manually? Yeah, absolutely. If it’s done manually, he’s got about 3000 different commissions to enter from roughly about 20 different companies that we work with in about three different lines of business that we work with. So we’ve got all of that coming in, and it’s just one single accountant that’s doing this for us. So if he had to do that manually, it would be a complete full time job at that point. Gotcha. So can you, for those who are interested in looking at the App Connect version, so can you talk about the App. Connect recipes that you have running that make it possible to automate this process? Of course. So we have our first one that I kind of just went over, with sales receipts there. So that’s the the those are the commissions coming in assigned to our brokers. But the other one that we have to use because there are some times where these companies will come back to us and say, well, we paid you too much, you owe us some money. We utilize the credit memo feature in QuickBooks Online. So we’ll enter the credit memos in there as a negative commission. And at that point, it’s the same process that we use with the sales receipts coming over to Insightly, connecting it to contacts, organizations and opportunities and that way we can,. I guess, properly get those chargebacks assigned to each broker. For folks who maybe are in a different industry. Can you just like articulate the outcome for Health Benefits Associates from the integration? Like, like how has this made your business processes better? Yeah, it’s saved us a ton of time. And I think that’s the biggest thing that we were looking for on this is entering those commissions double checking them, auditing them. You know, sometimes there’s times where companies won’t pay on time and we we’ve got to go track those down. So utilizing these integrations, that QuickBooks Online, AppConnect, and Insightly have has saved us hours on hours of our broker’s time. So we can then focus that time on other things, you know, such as growing our our company here. Got it. Matt, Luke, any thoughts on what Kyle just shared? I just really like that example, Kyle, of how, again, taking those manual processes writing some logic, having the two softwares talk to each other and getting your accountant and your whole sales crew, getting them time back to be more efficient and go grow the business, giving your accountant the ability to look over the books and do other things than just redundant tracking down of commissions or credits I think it’s an excellent story, and that’s really what we’re trying to do is help people automate business processes and kind of remove some of that manual work so that it doesn’t take as much staff. You can redirect that staff, just like you said, to more important work. Yeah, and I think it really highlights the power and flexibility of integrating Insightly and QuickBooks. Online using AppConnect. During the demonstration, we looked at a very specific use case of taking a quote in Insightly and creating an invoice from that quote. But you can do really anything that you can dream up. That information can start and Insightly and be passed to QuickBooks Online or vice versa. You can work with other item types like estimates, like the examples that Kyle spoke to. So really great story story, Kyle. And we are thrilled that you are taking advantage of AppConnect and saving your business, business time and money. All right, guys. So we do have some questions coming in. We’re going to answer some of those live. I’ll give folks a couple of minutes to maybe get any other questions they want in. And in the meantime, I’m going to give a short commercial for Insightly, but obviously tons of people on the call are already using Insightly, which is wonderful. But, you know, we call it the modern, scalable CRM that seems love, which is especially appropriate today. It’s super easy to adopt, customizable, it all integrates easily, as we’ve just spoken about with really every other application you use to run your business. We hear from customers that they’re fully up and running with Insightly CRM within weeks and growing revenue, three X in less than a year. Customers also tell us that there are able to significantly improve key sales metrics with Insightly, things like pipeline, sales velocity, deal size and deal predictability. And that’s music to any sales director’s heart. especially with what we’re going through with our economy. It’s the more predictable, more velocity, bigger deal size is what everybody’s looking for. We have a lot of customizable dashboards and reporting and super easy to share customer company performance with leadership and the rest of the company. And in a way that’s really easy to understand and interpret. And we’ve also found that companies can improve their team’s efficiency, reduce errors with workflow automation. And because Insightly is extremely flexible and customizable, it really does grow with your business. All right.. I’m taking my commercial hat off. We’ll go into some questions right now. And we actually had one that was pre submitted guys. So I’ll start with that one. Someone named Andrew was so excited for the webinar. He couldn’t he couldn’t wait. So his question was, what mechanism can be used to link Insightly quote creation with the QBO estimate stage? So sending an estimate out via Insightly, keeping the attachments, et cetera. So I’m not sure which one of you wants to tackle Andrew’s question. Sure. I’ll start,. Val, so you can set that process up almost identically to what we saw on the demo today. However, instead of creating an invoice object in QuickBooks Online, that integration could be used to create an estimate and automatically deliver that estimate. If you would like to do so. And one thing I would add there, this this is really where the different versions we showed your earlier QuickBooks. Online will will have a direct impact on how this works. And what I mean by that is, as we’ve been showing today with Insightly, a lot of if-then statements, you know, when this particular action happens, kick off the subsequent actions to happen. Our QuickBooks. Online Advanced actually has a very similar logic built into it. So as Insightly passes, whether it’s an estimate or an invoice, you can again pick that up in QuickBooks. Online advanced. I know one workflow was can or can if we get an approved estimate and we now need to create an invoice and send that out. If an approved invoice comes from. Insightly into QuickBooks Online Advanced and you have that logic setup up, then it can auto-fire out the invoice, which is very exciting. So again, just to showcase that that how that data flows across the entire platform and can help, you know, automate work so that someone from your accounts receivable department doesn’t have to go in and manually do that work. The 2 softwares can shake hands and automate that task for you. Sure. I think we got a really easy one for you,. Luke, that came in from Dan Carpenter. I’m pretty sure he’s asking, is that QuickBooks links permanent or do you have to rethink it every time? I think this was back when you were showing that native integration and the QuickBooks icon appears. Do you just want to answer that one for Dan? Yep, absolutely. That link is permanent unless you manually go in and unlink that entity, whether it be a contact or an organization from within Insightly, you can unlink it from QuickBooks. But if you don’t do that, the link is permanent. There’s also a somewhat related question that I saw in the Q&A, and that question was there are only,. I believe three members of the sales team that have access to a company’s. QuickBooks Online account. And with that button that allows you to open these items directly in QuickBooks Online, does that give other members of the sales team the ability to go in and change, edit or updates item items in QuickBooks Online without having a log in and an account? And the answer to that is no. So you do have the ability to make that QuickBooks Online information available and visible to those sales team members using the native integration. However, in order to work with and update those items in QuickBooks Online, they would need to have a a licensed account in QuickBooks Online. Great. Thanks, Luke. That was Michel Weir’s question, so I’m glad we were able to hit that I’m going to pull another one. Savannah Mertz is asking,. Can you pull reports in in Insightly using information from QuickBooks? Yes, you absolutely can. As long as you are bringing that information into Insightly using App Connect. So for the native integration, it’s really just a snapshot into your QuickBooks. Online account. You can’t create reports or dashboards based off the information that that native integration displays however, with the more advanced AppConnect integration, you have the ability to pull in any data that is available in QuickBooks. Online’s API, which is quite a lot. And you can then build reports and dashboards off of that information. And Luke, I’ll add in on that one. That’s exactly what we use. We use the report function. Each broker has their own commission statement. They can track it live throughout the month. So we’ve only shared it with that specific broker so we pull over amount, we pullover client name, broker name, everything. Yeah, that’s our use case right there. Awesome. Thanks, Kyle. From the real world.. Matt, this one might be for you. We have someone watching all the way from the UK. Andrew, thank you. And pretty late in the day for Andrew, but he’s saying that there maybe he saw some features that aren’t available in the UK, that are available in the US can you provide any commentary on that? QuickBooks of course isn’t just focused on the US, it is an international product. We have different versions not only for Canada but many other places. And of course, you know, they’re all in active development. You know, the great thing about a cloud based software is they’re always coming up with new features. Now some of these have got started programing a little, little sooner than others. You know, some are newer to market,. I should say, than others. So the idea is to continue to add features across all of our different product sets. So stay tuned there. We continue to listen to different groups of QuickBooks users in different localities. And, you know, we kind of prioritize or stack rank what’s most important and what features that need fastest. And then we work, you know, individually to those different geographies to bring those those needed features to market as fast as possible. So definitely depending upon where we’re at in development in different countries, it doesn’t mean we’ll never get those features. It just again, we’re prioritizing and bringing those to market as quick as we can. Got it. Matt, thank you. Folks, I am so sorry to say we have run out of time for questions and there are a lot if your question wasn’t answered live or by our team behind the scenes, we will reach out to you directly and get that response to you. Matt, Luke, especially Kyle. Thank all of you today for joining us. This was really, really entertaining and engaging. And I know our folks watching learned a lot. So everybody we’ll see you next time. Appreciate it. Thanks for joining us.