How to manage contracts in Quickbooks

Contracts and invoices both play a crucial role in capturing revenue for a company.

But, unfortunately, they’re often managed separately using inefficient processes. While accounting platforms like Quickbooks are great for creating and sending invoices, they’re not designed to manage the contracts that come with them. 

Fortunately, there’s a way to make contract management easy and accessible to Quickbooks users. Read on to find out more. 

What is Quickbooks?

Quickbooks is a piece of accounting software designed for small businesses. It’s commonly used by finance teams to manage a variety of tasks, from invoicing to accounting and even managing payroll for employees.

But given that contracts and invoices often come hand in hand, how does Quickbooks fare when it comes to contract management? Let’s find out. 

Why is managing contracts painful for legal and finance teams? 

It’s common for legal and finance teams to collaborate on contracts. Yet, for most businesses, the process remains inefficient. 

Legal teams are typically tasked with drafting commercial contracts. This typically happens in Microsoft Word by copying and pasting sections of an existing template. This template is them populated manually by entering the deal information from a sales CRM like Pipedrive or Salesforce, for example. 

Once the contract is drafted, it’s sent back and forth internally for review and approval. After that, it’s typically shared with the counterparties (usually via email), before being redlined in Word. 

But it’s post-signature where a lot of the friction exists for finance teams. Once a contact has been signed (either in wet ink or electronically), the values within it need to be tracked. This often means manually extracting all of the data within a contract and inputting it into a contract management spreadsheet of some sort. 

This data is also used to populate invoices, which finance teams will either create manually or using a tool like Quickbooks. Even if they do have an invoicing tool on hand, finding the right version of a contract and extracting this data can be a painful process. It is also one which can result in various mistakes. 

But what if you could automate contracts and invoices using just two tools? Read on to find out more.

Is it possible to manage contracts using Quickbooks? 

Fortunately, it is possible to automate and manage contracts in Quickbooks. This is achieved by integrating the platform with a contract management tool, like Juro.

In fact, Juro and Quickbooks can be integrated in minutes, with no code required. This is achieved through Zapier, which connects the two tools seamlessly.  

Let’s explore how this integration works and what it enables users to do next. 

How to manage contracts in Quickbooks

Firstly, finance teams can automatically create contracts when new customers are added to Quickbooks. This can be achieved by setting up a simple trigger to automatically create a new contract when a new customer profile is added to the Quickbooks system. 

That way, when a new customer profile is added, the integration will create a contract in Juro using an automated contract template. This will then be populated automatically using the data stored in Quickbooks. 

By integrating Juro and Quickbooks Online, users can also update the information kept in Quickbooks, and automate bills and invoices according to the contract’s terms. This eliminates the need for finance teams to manually extract this information from every contract and input it into the Quickbooks system to create and send an invoice. 

Instead, legal and business teams can set up the integration so that an invoice is automatically created when a contract is signed by all signatories. This ‘signing’ will count as a new event for the contract, prompting the creation of a bill or invoice. 

But that’s not all. Finance and operations teams can set up a variety of triggers when integrating Juro and Quickbooks. For example, they can also automate the creation of a new sales receipt when a contract is created and signed, or create a new time activity. 

By managing contracts in Quickbooks using this integration, legal and business teams can automate contracts and also set up workflows whereby invoices and sales receipts are automatically created once contracts are signed. 

This reduces the need for back and forth between legal and finance teams about which data needs to be captured and where. It also eliminates the need to draft contracts manually, which can quickly become time-consuming as volumes increase. 

The benefits of managing contracts in Quickbooks 

There are also a few more, specific benefits of managing contracts using Juro’s integration with Quickbooks. These include:

• Greater data accuracy: rather than relying on manual data extraction and entry processes, managing contracts in Quickbooks means contract data moves between the systems seamlessly, and without the need for human input.

• Reduced admin for legal and finance teams: by automating the creation creation of contracts and invoices, legal and finance teams can reduce the time they spend on manual admin tasks.

• Faster invoicing: Juro’s integration with Quickbooks means that all of the key terms and contract data is pulled directly into invoices for executed contract. This prevents delays and results in faster invoicing, as parties don’t need to wait around for invoices to be populated manually. 

Find out more about integrating Juro with Quickbooks 

To find out more about how Juro’s integration with Quickbooks, fill in the form below to speak to a specialist.  

Frequently asked questions

Does Quickbooks manage contracts? 

Quickbooks does not have the native functionality required to manage contracts. However, Quickbooks can be integrated with a contract management solution like Juro which enables Quickbook users to manage contracts within the platform. 

Can you send contracts through Quickbooks? 

Unfortunately, it is not possible to send a contract through Quickbooks alone. Instead, users will need to integrate the accounting software with a separate tool like Juro.