FreshBooks

Tally now integrates with FreshBooks so you can easily copy across invoices payments and customer details from FreshBooks into your Tally account.  There are a number of reasons you may want to do this.

  • You may be using FreshBooks as your primary means of invoicing but need something more capable for managing your company accounts. Or you may have somebody invoicing on your behalf in FreshBooks and you don’t want to give that person full access to your Tally account.
  • As well as doing the initial import to import data, it can continue to extract new information as and when it appears in FreshBooks. This article is a simple guide to get you up and running with using the FreshBooks Importer with your Tally account.

Setting Up

Enable the FreshBooks API

Before you can set up your Tally Account to connect to your FreshBooks account, you’ll need to enable the API in your FreshBooks account. Once logged in to your FreshBooks account you need to click the My Account link at the very top of the page, and then click FreshBooks API. Once you've agreed to their Terms & Conditions you'll be given an API Url and a Token. You will need these in the next step.

Connect Tally to FreshBooks

Log in to your Tally account and click on the Settings tab. Click on the FreshBooks Importer option. Click the button to enter your account information. First give the profile a name, this can be anything you like. As well as the API URL and Token mentioned above, you will also be asked for a start date. This is the date we will go back to when importing data. Click save and you will be taken back to the main FreshBooks Import page and your new profile will be listed. If you have multiple FreshBooks accounts then you can add them as new profiles.

Mappings

When you go to Settings > FreshBooks Importer you will see your profile(s) listed. At the far-right is a small icon that takes you to the configuration page for the FreshBooks profile. Click on it, from this configuration page you will see the option to map certain options in FreshBooks to their counterparts in Tally .

Sales Types

When you create an invoice in FreshBooks you can select from a configurable list of Items. In Tally we call these Sales Types. On this page you have your FreshBooks Items listed on the left hand side and on the right hand-side you have drop-down lists showing your Sales Types. You need to map Items to Sales Types. So when we copy across invoices for you we choose the correct Sales Type for the Tally created invoice.

Payment Methods

When you record a payment in FreshBooks you are asked to select a payment type. This page lets you select the payment method and bank account we should use for each of the payment methods set up in FreshBooks.

Customers

You can, if you wish, totally ignore this section. It shows you your customers in FreshBooks on the left-hand side and your customers in Tally on the right. By default we will create a new customer in Tally for each customer we encounter in your FreshBooks data. Once you have imported some invoices you will see this page automatically updates to show the mapping between your FreshBooks customers and your Tally customers.

Using

Tally does not communicate with FreshBooks automatically, so you need to tell it to update. Go to Settings > FreshBooks Importer and click on your profile. There is a large button at the top of the page labelled Check for new invoices. When you click on this we will connect to your FreshBooks account and download the latest invoice data.

Creating Invoices

Invoices will be listed on the page, along with checkboxes to the right of them. You will notice you have the option to filter the list of invoices so you only see those that are marked as Sent, Paid, etc in FreshBooks. Simply tick the box next to each invoice (or tick the box at the top of the page to automatically tick them all) and then from the drop-down list at the bottom of the page choose to Create Invoice(s). The invoice will then be created in Tally and a customer record created, unless the customer already exists (because of an early FreshBooks invoice imported for them).

Creating Payments

If the invoice was marked as paid in FreshBooks at the time you created the invoice in Tally, then the payment will also have been recorded in Tally. It may sometimes be the case that you have recorded the invoice in Tally before the payment was entered in FreshBooks. When the payment eventually arrives in FreshBooks, it will be listed under the Payments tab. To allocate the payments to invoices, simply follow the same process as you used for the invoices themselves: tick the boxes and select the relevant action from the drop-down list.

Update Invoices

If an invoice changes in FreshBooks after you have created it in Tally, then it will be shown in your list again so that you can copy across the changes from the FreshBooks invoice to the already created Tally invoice.

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