Expensify Blog

QuickBooks is an amazingly powerful tool.  It can be configured (and misconfigured) countless ways.  But the high level concept of how to export from Expensify to QuickBooks desktop is relatively straightforward.  There are a bunch of detailed instructions in our help section, but here’s a quick step-by-step guide — feel free to print it out so you can follow along.

Phase 1: Clean up your account
First, if you’ve already started exporting and it’s not working for you for some reason, I suggest cleaning up your account so we can start over from scratch.  Don’t worry: you won’t lose any data or affect your QuickBooks company file or Expensify reports in any way — this just removes any old connections so we can rebuild them from scratch.

1. Sign in to Expensify using the https://expensify.comlink (eg, do notsign in via Intuit Workplace). This just keeps things easy.
   • If necessary, reset your password by going to https://expensify.com/signin and clicking “forgot your password?”
2. Click “Settings” in the upper right, then “Connections” on the left, and click “delete” next to any existing QuickBooks connections. This won’t affect your data, but it will just disconnect it from your Expensify account.
3. Remove your “Intuit” secondary login. Just more cleanup. Click “Settings” in the upper-right, then “Account” on the left, and click “[remove]” next to any “intuit” line in the “Secondary Logins” section.

Phase 2: Connect to QuickBooks and export the report
Next, let’s go set up a new connection to QuickBooks using the QuickBooks web connector, and then export our first report.

1. Shut down QuickBooks, QuickBooks web connector, or essentially anything Intuit or QuickBooks-related on your desktop.
2. Close all web browsers.
3. Open a new web browser (I strongly recommend Google Chrome).
4. Sign in to the Expensify website direct using this link: https://expensify.com
   • Note: Do NOT sign in via Intuit Workplace, Intuit App Center, or by clicking anything inside of QuickBooks. This is an advanced feature.
5. Click “Reports” at the top of the Expensify site.
6. Click the name of the report you want to export.
   • If there are no reports here, click “new report” and create one for testing — add at least one expense to it by clicking “new expense”. Basically, expenses needed to be added to a report before they can be exported to QuickBooks.
7. Click “export to…” along the top.  If there is no “export to…” button:
   • If someone else submitted this to you, click “approve” first, and choose “final approve”.
   • If you created this report, click “archive” first.
8. Choose the company you want to export to.
   • If no companies are listed, follow these instructions.
   • When done, go back to step (1) and start over.
9. Review the export options — this explains exactly where the data will be put inside QuickBooks.
10. Click “export” at the bottom.
11. Open the QuickBooks company file on your desktop.
12. Open the QuickBooks Web Connector by clicking “File -> Update Web Services” inside QuickBooks.
    • If it doesn’t open, reboot computer and try again.
    • If it still doesn’t open, call Intuit (888-222-7276).
13. Verify the Expensify connection is selected.
14. Click “Updated Selected”
15. This will cause QuickBooks to connect to Expensify and download the information into QuickBooks. When it reaches 100%, it should be done!

And that should do it.  It’s not exactly a painless process, but it’s an incredibly powerful one!