Bringing QuickBooks reports into Excel, with 1 click sync

Overview

Spreadsheet Sync is an Excel add-in that talks to QuickBooks Online Advanced both ways. Accountants build reports from QuickBooks data, refresh them in one click, edit in bulk and post changes back.

My role

UX research and product design

Company

Intuit, QuickBooks

Platform

Excel add-in, B2B fintech

Impact overview

Workflow

1 click to refresh a report or post edits back to QuickBooks

Market

5 reporting tools compared: NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Xero, Fathom and QuickBooks Online

Research

3 personas: a fractional CFO, a consultant and a bookkeeper

The 30 second version.

Summary

How I designed a two-way bridge between Excel and QuickBooks for finance teams.

Spreadsheet Sync builds reports and tables from QuickBooks data, refreshes them in one click, lets teams post and edit in bulk, and consolidates multiple companies, including multi-currency.

I worked through discovery, design and validation: research, competitor analysis, journey and flow maps, wireframes and the final prototype.

The challenge: make Spreadsheet Sync a reason to choose QuickBooks Online Advanced.

The challenge

Bigger companies with in-house accounting needed two things: file and list cleanups, and bulk edits of existing transactions. Smaller companies had few reasons to use a separate tool to work with data in Excel.

Some accountants already used tools with similar features that worked on every QuickBooks company file, so they didn’t see Spreadsheet Sync alone as a reason to upgrade to QuickBooks Online Advanced.

The goal: a reporting and data entry flow simple enough for any accountant, and strong enough for multi-company consolidation.

Research

I followed three phases: discovery, design and validation. In discovery I ran qualitative research to answer the how, why and what behind reporting problems, and built three personas from it.

$Three personas: Andy Kaplan, fractional CFO; Scott Hukriede, consultant; Mithu Mehta, bookkeeper and accountant$

Empathy map: says, thinks, does and feels

Empathy map for the fractional CFO

Key insights

Four quotes summed up the pain.

“I cannot consolidate entities and departments.”
“I cannot produce a management report easily.”
“I cannot close the books on time because it takes me so long to aggregate the data and create management reports.”
“I cannot access the data I need to help me make decisions.”

Four customer insights shown as icons with quotes

Market and ideas

To win customers we had to understand their alternatives. I compared mid-market reporting needs across NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Xero, Fathom and QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks only partly covered management packages, multi-company reporting and spreadsheet integration, and had no business intelligence or FP&A.

Table comparing NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Xero, Fathom and QuickBooks Online on nine reporting needs

Competitive landscape for mid-market reporting

Brainstorm board with sticky notes for problem areas, current experiences, guiding principles and ideas

Brainstorm: problem areas, current experiences, guiding principles and ideas

Journey and flows

The journey had three stages: getting started, building reports, and editing and posting them back. Emotions dipped lowest when users built reports from custom templates, which pointed to the biggest opportunities: one login for all companies, pre-defined QuickBooks templates, filters to fetch the latest data, and a one-click way to send edits back.

User journey map

User flow map

Wireframes

Final designs

The final prototype lives inside Excel as a ribbon tab and a side panel.

Excel with the Intuit sign in panel — Sign in once with QuickBooks to reach every company

Excel with the Spreadsheet Sync panel asking what you want to do — Choose the type of report to build

Profit and loss filter dialog with date range and filters — Pull data with filters, and save them as presets

Profit and loss report in Excel with a report synced successfully message — Sync edits back to QuickBooks and keep a log

Validation

Users liked what they saw. One said: “This is a cool feature and here we will get the actual custom report that we don’t get out of Quickbooks now.” Another, after editing a trial balance in Excel: “This is great, can I have it now?”

They also pushed back. Several said the tool should be available on every QuickBooks Online plan, not only Advanced, and that tying it to one plan would limit its use for firms that manage many smaller companies.

What I learned

A feature people love can still fail as an upgrade driver. Packaging is part of the experience.
Mapping emotions across the journey showed exactly where to focus: building reports from custom templates.
Comparing competitors need by need made the gaps, and the opportunity, easy to explain.