Is Claude’s Intuit QuickBooks Connector Any Good?

Hey, this is Isaac from Ossa.co, where we help accounting firms support more revenue without added headcount or expensive software. And in this video, I want to share my first impressions on the Intuit QuickBooks connector within Claude. I'll say that I haven't been impressed, but I want to share just some overall thoughts, overall things that I've been trying to get it to do, and at least what it promises, because it's not a lot. At least not right now. For context, this is a desktop app within a Mac, so you might see this differently. But even if you're in chat in browser, you should be able to see this customize feature where you'll be able to see the connectors that you can connect to your cloud account into QuickBooks. I've gone ahead and connected my account. It's an account that has really no data. It's like a demo account, and at least based on what I'm able to see here. There's not a lot that it can actually do, at least right now. It's suggesting that it can update my profile. Wow. And it can import transactions to QuickBooks, which is what I want to at least test today. I noticed that it also has a profit and loss generator, which is something I've gotten to test it for as well. Um, so what I did is actually I went ahead and asked it first, can you get my P&L? Started thinking there, and it says, "Hey, I don't have access to your financial data. Hey, you have QuickBooks connected. Can you try that way?" And it kind of walked me through first, like what it can do with that connector, which we just saw, right? It's like pulling the data directly for the financial reports, comparing against industry peers. That's something that I want to ask it about too. And analysis. There's some analysis it can do from raw data. So. So just, just giving the data, seeing what it does. So I went ahead and decided to give it a CSV for all our transactions last year, see what I was able to come up with. It really struggled. It ran several commands. It had to split it up because it looks like it cannot process more than 999 transactions at a time. And it does seem like something that I like that suggested— I'd be curious to ask it about it— it's suggesting it has a built-in QuickBooks auto-categorization tool embedded into it. So the ultimate was able to put together like a P&L, uh, across a year for this particular account. I do, you know, see that it's suggesting Stripe, a lot of Stripe revenue, which is— isn't that actually helpful? Perhaps I should have also given the Stripe statements to see if with that it would have performed better. Now I do— I'm curious because it suggests that it can pull a CSV into QuickBooks. This is a new account, and perhaps just to confirm, you'll notice that it doesn't have any transactions at the moment. So if I go to bank transactions, there are no bank transactions, there's no transactions connected. If I go to the shadow accounts as an example We should see balance in zero across the board, and I'm wondering if it's actually able to push those transactions into QuickBooks. So this would be the equivalent of an accounting firm or bookkeeper getting the statements here first, perhaps processing them in some way, shape, or form, then it's imported into the the software. More than anything, I'm curious to see if it does it. I don't know if I would recommend this. For a firm at this point, just because of the probability of AI to hallucinate, for data to be lost or missed in translation. Again, as you can see here, it has to split it, but let's see what it does and see if it's actually able to import this in. All right, after what seemed like an eternity, and even Loom failed in the process, This is still like has to chunk it. It had to chunk it down to like 100 transactions at a time. It couldn't actually do 999, and it's taking ages. I did notice, however, that it started you know bringing things in. It has here like a bank account. It has like started populating and categorizing some of those transactions too. I do find it interesting that it didn't put like a payee as an example. Uh, so at this point I'm like, it's definitely not something I would use, but I'm curious to ask it. Uh, why didn't you add a payee to each transaction too? Is that something you can't do? I mean, and at this point, not being able to add invoices, add customers, add bills, sales receipts, like you really have a very limited ability. With it today. Um, and it's, it's actually telling me here right now I can only give it a date, an account name, and an account type. So it's still pretty, pretty limited as to what it can do. I'm excited for it to continue to grow. And actually, as a company now, we're kind of working through how to build a custom connector which would connect with their API and then would be able to have a lot more functionality, although I'm sure they will update their native connector in time. So my assessment here— actually, industry benchmarking, let's try that. Um, can you benchmark my business's profitability or financial performance? Because it's suggesting that it also has now access to some sort of benchmarks, I'm assuming based on the giant database of all the customers it has, and to what degree would it be able to provide some insights from that. That's the last thing I want to test to see if that's anything useful. Interesting that my original peers lose a lot of money. It would seem like. I don't know how accurate that is, although yeah, pretty— I'm pretty small compared to the average software publisher. And I don't know if that's accurate, right? Because we kind of develop, but not necessarily a software company. I think this is probably taking into account a lot of startups running on here in New York, losing money in the process and burning cash to grow and exit. Um, so probably not that helpful, probably because I selected the wrong industry. Um, but there you go. Uh, it's able to pull the average revenue, the average profitability of a particular industry in a particular region, and that's about what it can do for the benchmarking component. Well, I hope that helps. Um, leave me a comment, leave me a like if you like this video, and we continue to test the limits of Claude and what it can do for accounting firms. So follow for more. Have a nice one. Take care.