Send payments to QuickBooks
Every payment CivicPort collects can land in your books by itself, under the household that owed it, with the processor's fee already accounted for. You connect your books once, confirm where each kind of money posts, and after that nobody touches it.
You need Payments working first. CivicPort can only post money it has actually collected.
Connecting QuickBooks
From Finance → Accounting, choose Connect QuickBooks. You sign in with Intuit, pick the company you keep your books in, and come back.
There is nothing to paste and no developer account to create. CivicPort is a single registered Intuit application, and connecting authorises that application to write to your company — the same arrangement as Stripe, where your community has its own Stripe account rather than sharing CivicPort's.
What is yours alone is the connection: which QuickBooks company you chose, and the permission you granted. Each community connects separately, so two communities under the same management company keep entirely separate books, and disconnecting one leaves the other alone.
Nothing is written to your books until you finish the mapping on the next screen.
Map it once
CivicPort reads your chart of accounts and picks the closest account for each kind of money it collects. Change what is wrong and leave the rest.
| What CivicPort collects | Usually posts to |
|---|---|
| Dues and rent | Your assessment or rental income account |
| Late fees | Late fee income, if you keep one |
| Fines and violations | Other income |
| Special assessments | Special assessment income |
| Amenity and space rental | Facility rental income |
| Anything else | Other income |
| Security deposits | A liability account |
Security deposits are the one row CivicPort will not guess. A deposit is money you are holding, not money you have earned, so it belongs on a liability account until you either keep it or give it back. Posting it as income overstates a year's revenue and understates what you owe. The first sync will not run until you have chosen that account yourself.
You also say where money sits on the way to your bank:
| Row | What it is |
|---|---|
| Where the processor holds it | A clearing account, between the charge and the payout |
| The processor's cut | An expense account for card and bank fees |
| Where payouts land | Your real bank account |
| Where cheques and cash wait | Undeposited funds, or wherever counter money waits |
If you do not already keep a clearing account, CivicPort creates one. It is what makes your bank feed match to the penny instead of somebody reconciling the processor by hand each month.
Who the receipt belongs to
A receipt goes to whoever the bill was for, never to whoever's card or bank account the money came from. Three ordinary cases make those different things:
| Case | The receipt goes to |
|---|---|
| A member's own fee | That member |
| A family's bill either adult may settle | The household |
| Rent a subsidy pays part of | The household the rent is for |
So a household's history stays in one place in your books, whichever adult happens to pay, and income by customer for a unit matches what that unit was billed.
If your community has subsidised units
This section applies only where CivicPort Housing is switched on — a public housing authority, or an ordinary apartment complex with units designated for Section 8. Everywhere else these accounts are not offered at all, and your mapping screen simply does not show them.
Where a subsidy pays part of the rent, one month's rent is settled by two payments: the resident pays their share, and the authority pays the rest. You map each to its own income account:
| What CivicPort collects | Posts to |
|---|---|
| Rent — the resident's share | Rental income, tenant share |
| Housing Assistance Payment | Subsidy income |
Both receipts go to the household, not to the authority whose bank account the subsidy arrived from. That is what makes income by customer for a unit come to the rent on its lease rather than splitting across a tenant and a government body. A unit reaches these two accounts only once it has been designated — given the rent it is assisted at. Undesignated units carry on posting one receipt to ordinary rental income, exactly as a market-rate unit does, so a complex with eight assisted units and eighty-two market-rate ones sees no change to the eighty-two.
What ends up in your books
| When | What CivicPort writes |
|---|---|
| A resident pays | A sales receipt to that household, deposited to the clearing account |
| The processor pays out | A deposit: the gross out of clearing, the fee as its own expense line, the net into your bank |
| You refund someone | A refund receipt. The original receipt is left exactly as it was |
| You reverse a payment you recorded | A counter-entry, so the original and its correction are both on the record |
| A bank debit is stopped before it clears | The receipt is voided rather than deleted, keeping the audit trail |
Nothing is ever written twice. Every document carries the CivicPort payment it came from, so a retry — or syncing the same month again — updates the document that is already there instead of creating a second one. This is also why documents CivicPort wrote are best corrected in CivicPort: editing one directly in QuickBooks leaves the two disagreeing.
Cheques and cash
Payments you record by hand go over too, deposited to your undeposited funds account rather than the clearing account — clearing must only ever hold what the processor is actually holding, or it stops reconciling. The cheque number travels with the receipt, so a payment can be found again from either side.
Watching it
Finance → Accounting lists what went over, with a link to each document in QuickBooks, and a reconciliation line comparing your processor balance to the clearing account. In balance means every penny collected is accounted for in your books.
Anything CivicPort could not post is listed with the reason, and it is always a reason you can act on — an account not yet mapped, two customers that match a household equally well, a customer deleted in QuickBooks. CivicPort keeps the payment and retries once you have sorted it; it never quietly drops money.
Disconnecting
Disconnecting stops the sync and revokes CivicPort's access to your company. It does not remove anything already written to your books, and it keeps your mapping and your customer links, so reconnecting the same company does not mean mapping it again.
If you would rather hand over a file
The CSV exports are not going anywhere. GL, QuickBooks and Xero shapes are all still there for an accountant who would rather have a file, and you can use them whether or not you connect anything.