Not sure why your Fishbowl and QuickBooks don't match? Don't worry we've provided 10 reasons to help you find out why.
1. Incorrect Account Mapping
This is where I always start when I am asked to solve a Fishbowl – QuickBooks out of balance issue. If you are sending the dollars to the wrong accounts in QuickBooks, you may need to look no further.
2. Forward dating or back dating transactions
So, my techniques are designed to reconcile inventory at a point in time. If the Fishbowl users are in the habit of using a date other than today’s date when entering transactions this becomes quite difficult.
3. Changing or Deleting inventory transactions in QuickBooks
You can have perfect mapping and dating habits in Fishbowl, but if the QuickBooks user decides to change or delete an inventory transaction in QuickBooks, instead of correcting the transaction in Fishbowl, Fishbowl and QuickBooks can no longer balance.
4. Creating Inventory transactions in QuickBooks
Sometimes the QuickBooks folks just do not respect Fishbowl and they just go ahead and use the old part numbers in QuickBooks. I had someone who did not like seeing FB_Item on her invoices so after the invoice was in QuickBooks, she would change it to the QuickBooks part number. That support call opened with “Why is our inventory negative?” Fishbowl sends over a Journal entry to record cost of goods sold and now she was doubling Cost of Goods Sold with the use of the QuickBooks part.
This is a common initial mistake. Too often the QuickBooks folks do not get trained on Fishbowl. Accounting should be reconciling the Vendor Bill to the PO and the Receipt in Fishbowl perfecting the classic Three-Part Match.
6. Reconciling the Bill before receiving the part
Fishbowl will let you reconcile the bill against just the PO, defeating the “Three Part Match” which is a vital internal control. Recently had a customer whose AP department had reconciled $700K of such invoices. Resulting in QuickBooks being $700k higher than Fishbowl.
7. Not reconciling Fishbowl and QuickBooks at the Start
Got a few tales of woe for this one. The guy who was $700k between Fishbowl and QuickBooks because he used Fishbowl for a year before connecting to QuickBooks and made no adjustments for the balance in Fishbowl. He called me because the IRS wanted an explanation as to why they did not match – Ouch! Another issue that could have been
resolved by reconciling Fishbowl and QuickBooks at the Go Live Date are the dozens of clients that used Cycle Counts to bring in their inventory quantities without costs. The proper import is the Add Inventory Import which requires a cost.
8. Trying to reconcile to the wrong Report (Valuation reports can only be run accurately as of now)
My Fishbowl Colleagues may disagree with me, but I have never seen a Fishbowl valuation report run for a prior date that was exactly equal to a valuation report on that date. So often a portion of my trouble shooting is asking which report we are trying to balance to and when was it run. I find it invaluable to have a valuation report set up on a daily schedule to be saved to a .csv file, so the client can find the on-hand value at any date. Including month andyear end.
9. Using FB_Item in QuickBooks for non-Fishbowl transactions
When Fishbowl sends transactions to QuickBooks it uses the Intuit, Software Developers Kit, (SDK) which recognizes the different part mappings coming from Fishbowl and posts the dollars to the correct accounts. When you use FB_Item without the SDK QuickBooks posts the dollars to the account associated with the QuickBooks Part FB_Item, which is generally set to “Retail Sales”. This usually results in Bills being coded to “Retail Sales” instead of
Inventory Asset.
10. The Tax Guy or Gal
This is one of my favorites. I once had a tax accountant call and complain that Fishbowl and QuickBooks were close to a million dollars off. He had recommended Fishbowl and was fussing that Fishbowl was making him look bad. He finally engaged me to find the problem. I could find none of the above bad behaviors.
So, I looked at the QuickBooks Inventory Valuation
Summary on the day before they went live and compared it to the QuickBooks General Ledger account the same day. Guess what, they were close to a million dollars off before Fishbowl. Had to do with Entries made for tax purposes over the years. This error is always an awkward conversation.