Every platform claims accounting integration. The differences are real, invisible in a demo, and expensive in month three.
Why this is where evaluations go wrong
Accounting sync is a checkbox on every feature matrix and a genuine differentiator in practice. The reason is that “integration” covers everything from a full two-way sync of customers, invoices, payments and items, to a CSV export someone imports on Fridays.
A demo shows the happy path. The failure modes — a customer that exists twice, an invoice edited on both sides, a payment applied to the wrong job, a tax code that does not map — appear in week six.
The questions that actually discriminate
Which direction does each object sync, and what wins in a conflict?
What happens to an invoice edited in the accounting system after it synced?
Do line items map to your existing chart of accounts, or does the integration create its own?
How are taxes handled across jurisdictions — relevant immediately for Canadian shops, and for US shops crossing county lines?
What is the recovery procedure when the sync fails for three days?
Who should answer them
Your bookkeeper or accountant, after looking at the integration, not the vendor’s salesperson. They will spot in ten minutes what will cost you a month.
This site has not tested any accounting integration and makes no claim about which is better. What it can say is that this is the question most likely to be under-asked relative to how much it costs to get wrong.
Sources
- Workyard — secondary unverified, read
Vendor pricing changes without notice. Every figure above carries the date it was read. If a vendor’s current page disagrees with this one, the vendor’s page is right and this one is stale — and that is a bug worth reporting.
