Why will your two software systems not talk to each other?

Two systems you pay for are supposed to hand information to each other, and one of them is not doing it. You open a support ticket and wait.

The feed you are waiting on may never have existed, on any plan, at any price. Nothing is broken, so nothing is going to be fixed.

This is how to check, in about twenty minutes, before you assume anything is broken, and two vendor pages read live on 2026-09-09. It works the same whatever two systems you run, a job management system and an accounting package, or a CRM and an email platform.

One company that waited months for a fix

Cobble Creek Plumbing and Drain is a fictional plumbing company from one of our published sample audits. In that fictional sample audit, payroll hours were re-keyed by hand on five payroll runs out of eight. The owner believed an update to his job management software had broken the feed carrying technician hours into his accounting software’s payroll product. He had been waiting since summer.

There was no break to find. His job system’s time tracking feeds that vendor’s own payroll product directly. The accounting connection, the one people call “the QuickBooks integration,” carries invoices, payments, customers and price book items. The guide does not list hours. The feed he was waiting on had never existed.

How to check what a QuickBooks integration carries

Skip the vendor’s marketing page. It will use the word “sync” freely and tell you almost nothing about direction or fields. Go to the vendor’s help center, the one with numbered articles, and search for the integration by name: “QuickBooks Online integration,” not “accounting.”

Read for four things. First, the field list, meaning the data types the article names rather than implies. Second, the direction, since a vendor can sync invoices one way and customers the other. Third, the plan requirement, because some integrations only run on a specific tier. Fourth, whether hours or timesheets appear on the list at all. If they do not appear, that is not a gap in the documentation. It means they do not sync.

Housecall Pro and Jobber, read on 2026-09-09

Housecall Pro’s QuickBooks Online integration onboarding guide, last updated March 5, 2026, requires the Essentials or Max plan and states what imports from QuickBooks into Housecall Pro: customers, tax rates, invoices, products, services, income accounts and classes. The customer fields it names are first name, last name, email, company, phone and billing address. The article does not name hours anywhere. That is what the guide says the integration carries.

Jobber’s QuickBooks Online integration guide, last updated April 8, 2026, is available on select plans and describes something different. Clients, products and services, invoices, payments, refunds, tips and payout reconciliation sync from Jobber into QuickBooks, and so do timesheets, once they have been approved. A one-time, one-way import of clients and products runs from QuickBooks into Jobber at setup, and each QuickBooks account connects to one Jobber account at a time.

Whether hours cross that line is a fact about the product you run, and it is written down in public. The fictional Cobble Creek’s owner was on a system where the answer was no. A business running Jobber and QuickBooks would read the opposite answer on the same kind of page, in the same twenty minutes.

Three ways it turns out

A check like this ends in one of three places.

The first case is that the field list names what you want and the setting is off. Your plan may not include it, or nobody ever turned it on. This is the cheapest of the three to fix, sometimes a plan upgrade, sometimes a checkbox nobody found.

The second case is that the data never crosses, on any plan. This is what the fictional Cobble Creek’s owner found. The fictional sample audit put that re-keying at about $400 a year in owner and office time. No support ticket changes it. Then you can decide whether to keep re-keying, pay someone else to do it, or pay once for a connector.

The third case is that it works and your office manager re-keys anyway. Neither vendor page can tell you about this one, because it lives in your habits. The list says hours sync, the setting is on, and the re-keying continues because a duplicate invoice reached a customer once. That is a training problem, not a software one.

What to do before you file a support ticket

Spend the twenty minutes: find the vendor’s help article, read the field list, note the direction, check the plan requirement. If what you want is on the list and switched off, switch it on. If it is not on the list, stop waiting and put a dollar figure on the manual work instead. If it is on and nobody trusts it, the problem is not the software.

Where this check runs out

Vendors revise these help pages without much notice, sometimes without changing the visible “last updated” date, so a field list that is right today can drift. Neither guide above says how often it is revised, or whether older linked articles are kept current when the main one changes.

Check the help article for your own two systems before you file the next ticket.