Import Invoices into QuickBooks Desktop (IIF)

DocuClipper can export your extracted invoices and receipts as a QuickBooks Desktop IIF file. You can post each invoice as either a Vendor Bill (accounts payable) or a Sales Invoice (accounts receivable). This guide covers both, plus the most common errors users hit on the first import.

If you have not yet uploaded your QuickBooks Chart of Accounts (COA) to your DocuClipper project, do that first. See How to export your Chart of Accounts from QuickBooks Desktop. Once your COA is uploaded under Project Settings → QuickBooks Desktop, DocuClipper validates the IIF against it, flags account name mismatches before you ever open QuickBooks, and lets you pick your own accounts for the Default accounts.

Once your Chart of Accounts is saved, DocuClipper can also code each invoice line item to the right expense account for you, and turn the Category field in the invoice editor into a dropdown of your real accounts. See Categorize invoice line items with your QuickBooks Desktop accounts.

For a higher-level overview of the use case, see Convert PDF invoices to QuickBooks Desktop.

Default accounts

Every account an IIF export uses, apart from each line's own category, is a project setting under Project Settings → QuickBooks Desktop → Default accounts, right below your Chart of Accounts. Out of the box each one uses a fixed default, so an export works without any setup:

To post freight and shipping to an account of your own instead of Uncategorized Expenses, see Choose the account for freight and shipping.

A bill has to post to an accounts payable account and a sales invoice to an accounts receivable account, which is why those two default to Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable. Everything else defaults to Uncategorized Expenses or Uncategorized Income, ready for you to recategorize in QuickBooks.

Your company file does not need these accounts. Every IIF file DocuClipper writes starts with a short account list that declares the default accounts it uses, with the right account type, so QuickBooks creates any that are missing during the import. Accounts you pick yourself are not declared: they come from your own Chart of Accounts, so they already exist.

To use a different account, pick it from the row's dropdown. The dropdown lists the default first, marked (default), followed by every account in your uploaded Chart of Accounts. Choose the default again to go back to it. With no Chart of Accounts uploaded, the dropdown holds only the default; upload your chart to choose other accounts.

If an account you picked is no longer in your uploaded Chart of Accounts, the row is outlined in red with a note. QuickBooks rejects the whole file when an account does not exist in your company file, so pick one that does, or re-import your chart.

The pickers in the Download dialog read and save these same settings, so a change in either place shows in the other. Re-uploading your Chart of Accounts keeps your picks.

The Bank statements section also holds Export as General Journal entries, which writes bank and credit card statement IIF files as General Journal entries. See Import bank statement transactions into QuickBooks Desktop (IIF).

Before you start

• A QuickBooks Desktop company file (Pro, Premier, Enterprise, or Mac).
• A DocuClipper project with at least one extracted invoice or receipt.
• (Recommended) Your QBD Chart of Accounts uploaded once per project. See the COA export guide.
• (Optional) Your QBD vendor and customer lists, so you can see which names QuickBooks is about to create. See Import your QuickBooks Desktop vendors and customers.
• (Recommended for sales invoices) Your QBD Item List, so each invoice line uses the item you already have. See Items on sales invoice lines.

Step 1. Choose Vendor Bill or Sales Invoice

DocuClipper supports two QBD posting types from the same export dialog. The choice is the Transaction type radio at the top of the IIF panel.

The dialog picks the type for you from how the documents were uploaded: invoices uploaded as Bills/Payables start on Vendor Bill, and invoices uploaded as Invoices/Receivables start on Sales Invoice. If you change it, DocuClipper remembers your choice for that project and that kind of document, so the next download opens the way you left it.

Vendor Bill, accounts payable

• Use this for invoices and receipts you receive from vendors and need to pay or record as paid.
• The bill total posts to your Accounts Payable account.
• Each line item posts to the matching expense account from your Chart of Accounts.
• This is the right choice for accountants and bookkeepers processing supplier bills, utility statements, and expense receipts.

Sales Invoice, accounts receivable

• Use this for invoices you issue to customers.
• The invoice total posts to your Accounts Receivable account.
• Each invoice imports as one QuickBooks invoice, and each line item becomes an item line (for example Rentals, Damage Waiver, Setup/Strike, Logistics) with its quantity, rate, amount and description. See Items on sales invoice lines.
• If your invoices list every product you rented or sold but your books record revenue under a few items, the export can add those lines up into one line per item. See Roll lines up into your own items.
• Use this when you are migrating customer-facing invoices from another system into QuickBooks.

If the documents mix bills and sales invoices, the dialog starts on Vendor Bill. Bills are the large majority of DocuClipper invoice workflows, so it is the safer choice when you are unsure.

Step 2. Export the IIF from DocuClipper

1. Open the project that contains your processed invoices.
2. Above the invoice table, click Download, then choose QuickBooks Desktop IIF in the format dropdown.
3. Check which invoices are included. Right after an upload, the Documents list starts with just the invoices from that upload. Use the Last upload and All documents links above it to switch. This keeps you from re-importing bills that are already in your company file.
4. Check the posting type in the Transaction type radio. It starts on the type the documents were uploaded as (see Step 1):
   • Vendor Bill, accounts payable, or
   • Sales Invoice, accounts receivable.
5. Check the banner at the top of the panel:
   • If a Chart of Accounts is uploaded, an info banner reads "Categories will be validated against N accounts in your QuickBooks Desktop Chart of Accounts. Unmatched names will be flagged at the top of the IIF file." Any categories that don't match are listed inline right there, before you download. Its Manage QuickBooks Desktop lists link opens your chart of accounts, vendor, customer and item lists for this project without leaving the dialog. A list you import there shows up in the invoice editor's dropdowns straight away.
   • If no COA is uploaded, a warning banner reminds you that categories must match your QBD accounts exactly, and links to upload one.
6. Check the account pickers below the banner: Accounts Payable account (or Accounts Receivable account for sales invoices), Lines with no category, Shipping & charges, and, when any selected invoice carries tax, Sales tax. They are the project's Default accounts for the transaction type you chose, so leaving them on their defaults is fine. A change here is saved for the project.
7. For a sales invoice, check Lines with no item, Discounts and Line detail too. See Roll lines up into your own items. A note under them lists any item the file will create, and warns when lines will become new items named after their description.
8. Click Download IIF.

The Accounts Payable / Accounts Receivable account

Every bill in the export posts its total to one accounts payable account, and every sales invoice to one accounts receivable account. By default these are Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable. If your company file uses another name, such as A/P or Trade Creditors, upload your Chart of Accounts and pick it. DocuClipper remembers the choice for this project.

Shipping, charges, and sales tax

Shipping, freight, service charges, tips, and discounts are not line items, but QuickBooks requires a bill's splits to add up to its total. So DocuClipper posts each of them as a split of its own, to the Shipping & charges account. Sales tax gets its own split, posted to the Sales tax account. Bills and sales invoices each have their own pick for both, so freight on a bill and shipping you charged a customer can go to different accounts.

Both default to Uncategorized Expenses on bills and Uncategorized Income on sales invoices. Common picks:

• Shipping & charges on bills: a freight or shipping expense account.
• Sales tax on sales invoices: a liability account such as Sales Tax Payable, GST/HST Payable, or a VAT account.
• Sales tax on bills: your input tax credit account, or GST/HST Payable in QuickBooks Desktop Canada. Sales tax paid on a US purchase is part of what the goods cost, so choose the expense account it belongs to.

Changing these accounts changes only where the amounts post, never the amounts, so each bill still adds up to its invoice total.

Choose the account for freight and shipping

You choose the account before you export, so freight never has to be recategorized in QuickBooks. The choice is saved for the project and applies to every future IIF export from it. You can set it in either of two places, and a change in one shows in the other.

The dropdown lists the default first, then every account in the project's Chart of Accounts. If it shows only Uncategorized Expenses (default), no chart is uploaded yet: upload it first under Project Settings → QuickBooks Desktop → Import from QuickBooks Desktop (see How to fix it).

In Project Settings

1. In the project tree, right-click the project and choose Edit settings. The gear icon next to the project's name does the same.

2. Click the QuickBooks Desktop tab and scroll to Default accounts.
3. Under Vendor bills, open the Shipping & charges dropdown and pick your freight account, for example Freight and Shipping Costs. The pick saves as soon as you choose it.

In the Download dialog

1. Above the invoice table, click Download Data, then choose QuickBooks Desktop IIF under Output Format.
2. With Vendor Bill, accounts payable selected, open the Shipping & charges dropdown and pick your freight account.
3. Click Download IIF. The pick is saved for the project, so the next export already uses it.

In the exported file, each bill's freight is its own split on that account, labeled Shipping & handling, and the bill still adds up to the invoice total.

For shipping you charge your customers, pick the account under Sales invoices → Shipping & charges in Project Settings, or select Sales Invoice, accounts receivable in the Download dialog first.

Items on sales invoice lines

A QuickBooks Desktop invoice is made of items. With Sales Invoice, accounts receivable selected, every line of the export carries a QuickBooks item, so the imported invoice shows its lines under Item, with Description, Qty, Rate and Amount filled in, exactly as you would have entered them by hand.

Which item a line gets. In the invoice editor, the first column of a sales invoice is Product/Service. DocuClipper uses it as the line's item. When it is empty, the line's description is used when it names an item on your Item List, so an invoice whose lines read Rentals, Damage Waiver, Setup/Strike and Logistics imports with those four items and no setup at all. Any other line goes to the project's Lines with no item item when you have picked one, and otherwise becomes a new item named after its description.

Matching the items you already have. Import your Item List into the project (see below) and DocuClipper matches each line to it by name, ignoring capitalization:

• An item is found by its full name, such as Services:Logistics, or by its own name, Logistics, when only one item in the list has that name.
• A matched line uses the item exactly as it is set up in QuickBooks, spelled the way your Item List spells it.
• A matched line with no category of its own posts to the item's income account from your Item List.
• Once the Item List is imported, the Product/Service cell becomes a dropdown of your items, so you can point a line such as 120 gold chiavari chairs at your Rentals item. Type a new name to use an item you do not have yet. Set it once on the first line and choose Apply to all line items, or save it as a rule for the customer.

Items QuickBooks does not have yet. The file lists every item it uses that is not in your imported Item List in an item block near the top, as a Service item on the income account the line posts to (fees and discounts, such as Shipping & handling, as an Other Charge item). QuickBooks creates those items during the import, so the file imports into a company file that has none of them. A comment at the top of the file names each one:

; NOTE: the following items are not in your QuickBooks Desktop Item List.
; QuickBooks will CREATE them as new items on import.

Without an imported Item List, every item the file uses is in that block. Import your Item List first when your company file already has items, so your existing items are used exactly as they are set up.

Item names. QuickBooks allows up to 31 characters in an item name. A longer description is shortened at a word break for the item name, and the line's description keeps the full text. A colon in a description becomes a dash, because QuickBooks reads a colon as a sub-item separator. To use a sub-item, type its full name, such as Rentals:Linens, into Product/Service.

Quantity and rate. Each line carries the quantity and unit price printed on the invoice when they multiply to the line amount. A line that prints only an amount imports with its amount and no quantity or rate. With Line detail set to one line per item, each item line carries only its amount.

Sales tax. When your imported Item List has exactly one sales tax item (or sales tax group), the tax line uses it, and posts to that item's account, or to Sales Tax Payable when the list names none. A Sales tax account you picked under Default accounts takes precedence. With no sales tax item, or with more than one, the tax line has no item and posts to the Sales tax account. Either way the invoice total equals the sum of its lines.

Charges and discounts. A fee, a shipping charge or a discount printed in the invoice's totals becomes an Other Charge item, named the way the invoice prints it, such as Net Processing Fees. When that name is on your Item List, it posts to the item's account so it lands with the other lines on that item.

Roll lines up into your own items

A business that invoices from its own order or rental system prints every product it sold, such as Classico All Purpose Wine 14oz or Mila Velvet Burgundy Cushion, while its QuickBooks records revenue under a few items such as Rentals, Damage Waiver, Delivery & Pickup and Set-Up and Strike. Three project settings turn those invoices into the invoices you would key in by hand:

With one line per item, the lines that share an item are added up into one line for that item, with no quantity and no description. The amounts are only regrouped, so the invoice total does not change, and an item whose lines post to two different accounts stays two lines.

Set them up

1. Import your Item List into the project (see Import your Item List). Both item pickers list its items.
2. Open the project's Project Settings → QuickBooks Desktop, scroll to Default accounts, and find the three settings at the end of Sales invoices. Each change saves as soon as you make it.
3. Pick your main revenue item for Lines with no item, for example Rentals, and your discount item for Discounts.
4. Under Line detail, choose One line per item, adding up lines that share an item.

The same three settings are in the Download dialog when Sales Invoice, accounts receivable is selected, and a change there is saved for the project too.

Send specific lines to their own items with rules. Lines with no item catches every line you have not mapped. For the lines that belong to another item, save a rule once and every invoice you upload afterwards is mapped as it is extracted. For example, Line Item Description contains Damage Waiver sets Product/Service to Damage Waiver, and contains Fuel Surcharge, Drop-Off, Pickup sets it to Delivery & Pickup. See Setting up invoice rules.

For an event with a few dozen rented products, a damage waiver and a delivery fee, the result is one QuickBooks invoice with a Rentals line, a Damage Waiver line and a Delivery & Pickup line, plus its discount and tax.

Import your Item List

1. In QuickBooks Desktop, go to File → Utilities → Export → Lists to IIF Files, tick Item List (together with Chart of Accounts, Vendor List and Customer List if you like), and save the file.
2. In DocuClipper, open the project's Project Settings → QuickBooks Desktop, upload the file under Import from QuickBooks Desktop, and click Import lists.
3. The items appear under QuickBooks Desktop items on the same tab. Use Replace list after you add items in QuickBooks.

Bills are unchanged: a Vendor Bill posts each line to its expense account, without items.

Invoices that do not add up

Sometimes the line items, tax, and charges DocuClipper extracted do not add up to the total printed on the invoice. A QuickBooks bill has to equal the sum of its splits, so DocuClipper will not invent or drop a number to force the two to agree.

Instead, the panel shows a warning naming each affected invoice: what the bill will post, the total printed on the invoice, and the difference. You can still download. The same note is written as a comment at the top of the IIF. To post the printed total, open the invoice, correct the line items, tax, or total, and export again.

Step 3. Import the IIF into QuickBooks Desktop

1. Open your company file in QuickBooks Desktop.
2. Go to File → Utilities → Import → IIF Files.
3. Click Import IIF and select the .iif file you downloaded.
4. QuickBooks shows a confirmation when the import finishes.
5. Verify the result:
   • Vendor Bills appear in Vendors → Vendor Center under the right vendor.
   • Sales Invoices appear in Customers → Customer Center under the right customer.

The most common error

If your account names do not match, QuickBooks shows this exact error:

*** YOUR IIF FILE COULDN'T BE IMPORTED ***

[ERROR] [Purchases:Purchases - Dairy] The Account Name on a distribution does not exist in Quickbooks [11110]

QuickBooks writes the errors back into the file it hands you, each one prefixed [ERROR] and naming the exact account it could not find. Search the returned file for [ERROR] to see only the failed records.

For invoices, this usually comes from a line-item category that does not match an expense or income account in your QBD Chart of Accounts. The default accounts never cause it, because the file declares them. An account you picked under Default accounts causes it only if it is not in your company file; a missing header account gives a slightly different message: The Account does not exist [11153].

QBD account name matching is strict:

• Case-sensitive: Office Supplies is not the same as office supplies.
• Punctuation-sensitive: Meals & Entertainment is not the same as Meals and Entertainment.
• Whitespace-sensitive: trailing spaces and double spaces count.
• Sub-account paths must match in full, separated by colons. For example Auto:Fuel, not Fuel.

Vendors and customers behave differently

Unmatched accounts stop the import. Unmatched vendors and customers do not: QuickBooks creates them and imports the file normally. That is why an unknown vendor produces a note rather than an error:

; NOTE: the following vendors are not in your QuickBooks Desktop vendors list.
; QuickBooks will CREATE them on import.

Lines beginning with ; are comments and are ignored by QuickBooks, so the note never affects the import. It is there so you can spot a near-duplicate, such as Julina Foods Inc. alongside an existing Julina Foods Inc dba Leblon Foods, before it becomes two suppliers in your books.

To get that check, save your vendor and customer lists in DocuClipper: see Import your QuickBooks Desktop vendors and customers.

A bill from a brand-new supplier needs no setup in QuickBooks and no re-import of your vendor list. In the invoice editor, type the name in the Vendor box and choose + Create new vendor. The vendor is saved to the project's list, and QuickBooks creates it when you import the file. See Add a new vendor.

One thing QuickBooks does require: every bill must name a vendor. A bill with an empty NAME is rejected with Missing mandatory field NAME [15103].

How to fix it

1. In DocuClipper, open the project, open Project Settings, and click the QuickBooks Desktop tab.
2. Under Import from QuickBooks Desktop, upload the .iif file you exported from QuickBooks and click Import lists. Tick Chart of Accounts, Vendor List, Customer List and Item List when you export and this single upload covers all four. See How to export your Chart of Accounts from QuickBooks Desktop for the exact steps inside QBD.
3. Re-run the IIF export. DocuClipper compares every line-item category against your COA and lists mismatches inline. For each mismatch:
   • Rename the category in DocuClipper to match QBD, or
   • Add the missing account in QuickBooks and re-upload the COA.
4. Re-export and re-import. The error should be gone.

You only need to upload the Chart of Accounts once per project. DocuClipper reuses it for every future IIF export in that project, and each project keeps its own - so a separate project per company file keeps one client's accounts out of another's export. See Folders vs projects.

How DocuClipper maps fields

For a Vendor Bill (TRNSTYPE=BILL):

• Vendor → bill payee. Comes from the invoice's vendor field (edited values take precedence over automated values).
• Bill date → invoice date.
• Bill number → invoice number.
• AP account → the Accounts Payable account (see Default accounts).
• Line items → one expense split per line, posted to the line's category and labeled with the line's item description.
• Shipping and other charges → one split each, posted to the Shipping & charges account. Discounts post as a negative split.
• Sales tax → one split, posted to the Sales tax account.
• Default accounts → declared in an account list at the top of the file, so QuickBooks creates any your company file does not have yet.
• Bill total → the sum of all the splits. When that matches the printed invoice total (the usual case), the bill equals the invoice.
• Amounts → posted in whole cents. Line amounts printed with fractions of a cent, common on fuel and utility invoices (2 x 6.449 = 10.136), are rounded so the splits still add up exactly to the bill total.

For a Sales Invoice (TRNSTYPE=INVOICE), the same shape applies but with Customer as the payee, AR account as the header, and income accounts on the line splits. Each line also carries:

• Item (INVITEM) → the line's Product/Service, else its description when it is on your Item List, else the project's Lines with no item item, else its description. See Items on sales invoice lines.
• Qty and Rate (QNTY, PRICE) → the quantity and unit price printed on the line. Left out when Line detail is one line per item.
• Description (MEMO) → the line's full description.
• New items → declared in an item list near the top of the file, after the account list, so QuickBooks creates any your company file does not have yet.

The IIF file is written in the Windows (ANSI) character set that QuickBooks Desktop reads, so accented names such as Café Müller or Dépenses de bureau arrive exactly as spelled and match the accounts, vendors, and customers already in your company file. Characters that set cannot hold, such as ł or emoji, are converted to their closest plain letters or left out.

Limitations

• Sales tax uses your QuickBooks sales tax item only when the imported Item List has exactly one. Otherwise it posts as an ordinary line on the Sales tax account, which does not appear on QuickBooks sales tax reports.
• IIF is a one-way import. Edits made in QuickBooks after import do not flow back to DocuClipper.
• If a line item has no category, it posts to Lines with no category: Uncategorized Expenses on bills and Uncategorized Income on sales invoices, unless you picked other accounts under Default accounts. Categorize the line in DocuClipper to post it somewhere specific.

Troubleshooting

• Some bills or invoices are missing after import. Open the IIF import log file (in the same folder as your company file). It lists rejected rows along with the reason, usually a missing or mismatched account name.
• Uncategorized Expenses or Uncategorized Income showed up in my chart of accounts. The file created the default account because your company file did not have it. Recategorize the transactions in QuickBooks, or pick your own accounts under Default accounts for future exports.
• Some other new account showed up in my chart of accounts. That category did not match an existing QBD account. Either rename the auto-created account or upload your COA in DocuClipper to prevent this on future imports.
• A bill's total is different from the invoice. The panel's "does not add up" warning names the invoice and the difference. Open the invoice in DocuClipper, fix the line items, tax, or total, and export again.
• Shipping went to Uncategorized Expenses. That is the default. Pick the account you want for Shipping & charges: see Choose the account for freight and shipping. Then export again.
• The export includes invoices I already imported. Use the Last upload link above the Documents list, or pick the documents you want, before downloading.
• Tax posted to Uncategorized Expenses. That is the default. Pick the account you want for Sales tax under Default accounts, or in the Download dialog, and export again.
• A sales invoice line shows a new item instead of my existing one. The line's Product/Service or description did not match an item in the imported Item List. Pick the item in the line's Product/Service dropdown, save a rule for lines like it, or pick a Lines with no item item (see Roll lines up into your own items), and export again.
• Every product on my invoice became its own item. Pick your main revenue item for Lines with no item and choose one line per item under Line detail. See Roll lines up into your own items.
• A name contains tabs or line breaks. IIF treats tab and newline characters as field separators, so DocuClipper replaces them with spaces. Commas, ampersands, and accented letters are kept as-is.

Related

• Import bank transactions into QuickBooks Desktop (IIF)
• Export your Chart of Accounts from QuickBooks Desktop
• Import your QuickBooks Desktop vendors and customers
• Organize folders, projects, and sharing
• Convert PDF invoices to QuickBooks Desktop
• Editing invoice data
• Save your categorization as a rule for next time