Accounting system integrations

The scope covers connecting the systems your revenue, payments and payroll actually run through, most commonly QuickBooks Online, Xero or NetSuite on the accounting side, and Stripe, Shopify, Gusto or another payroll and payments stack on the source side. For each connection we document the mapping decision before building it, back-fill historical transactions so reporting periods stay continuous, and set up monitoring so a failed sync is caught the same day. Where a platform has a well-established integration already built, such as A2X for marketplace payouts or Gusto's own accounting sync, we assess whether that existing connector already does the job well before building something custom on top of it, since a purpose-built connector is usually more reliable than a general one built from scratch.

We start by listing every system that currently touches your financial data and every export or manual re-entry step in between them, because the goal is removing that step entirely, not automating around it. For each system pair, we document how fields should map: a Stripe processing fee to a specific expense account, a Gusto tax liability to a specific payroll liability account, a Shopify partial refund to revenue contra versus a separate refund expense line. That mapping document is reviewed with you before any connection is built, because a wrong mapping built quickly is worse than a right one built a week later. Once approved, the connection is built under your own account credentials, historical data is backfilled, and a verification period compares the synced data against the source system line by line before we call the integration live.

This fits any business running more than one financial system that currently requires someone to manually move data between them, which in practice means most businesses past the earliest stage: an ecommerce seller reconciling Shopify and a marketplace by hand, a SaaS company matching Stripe subscriptions to revenue recognition manually, or a growing company running payroll through Gusto and re-entering the summary into NetSuite each period. It is less relevant for a very early-stage business on a single system with low transaction volume, where monthly bookkeeping inside a single platform already covers the need without an integration layer on top of it.

Manual re-entry errors, a mistyped payout amount or a payroll run booked to the wrong period, get eliminated because the number moves directly from the source system rather than through someone's keyboard. Reporting gaps at close, where the books lag the actual bank or payroll activity by days because someone has not gotten to the export yet, close because the sync runs on its own schedule rather than someone's calendar. Refunds and chargebacks that used to sit unmatched because nobody tracked which payout they belonged to now map automatically to the transaction that created them. And the multi-system reconciliation problem, where Shopify, a marketplace and the bank each tell a slightly different story that takes hours to reconcile by hand, resolves because all three feed the same mapped structure from the start.

Stripe and Shopify are the most common source systems on the ecommerce and SaaS side, each with well-documented APIs that expose payouts, fees, refunds and disputes at the transaction level rather than the lump-sum payout figure most sellers start from. Gusto exposes payroll runs, tax liabilities and benefits deductions through its own API, which maps cleanly to a payroll liability structure once the categories are defined. NetSuite and Sage Intacct sit on the receiving end for businesses with more complex entity structures, and QuickBooks Online or Xero for most others. Where a platform does not expose a full API, or exposes one but restricts what a third party can pull, we say so upfront rather than promising a connection that the platform itself will not support.

Integration work is scoped project work, priced by the number of systems being connected and the complexity of the mapping, not billed as a recurring line by default. It is typically quoted alongside an engagement on our pricing page, most often bundled with a Growth or Scale plan since ongoing monitoring after go-live is part of the same relationship. A scoping call covers exactly which systems, how many entities, and whether historical backfill is needed, before a number is given.

The verification period after go-live is the real test: synced data is compared line by line against the source system for a defined window before the integration is called live, not assumed to be correct because it ran without an error message. After that, monitoring checks that syncs are actually completing on schedule, and a dropped connection generates an alert the same day rather than waiting to be noticed at the next close. We also revisit the mapping document itself periodically, since a chart of accounts that changes, a new product line, a new entity, can make a mapping decision that was right at setup wrong six months later if nobody checks.

Every integration we build connects through your own account and your own API credentials on each platform, never a shared account we control. That means you can see exactly what access has been granted, revoke it at any time without needing our involvement, and hand the same access off to a new bookkeeper or internal hire without starting over. We document every mapping decision in a format that survives a staff change on either side, yours or ours, because an integration that only one person understands is a liability disguised as a convenience.