Moving From QuickBooks Desktop
QuickBooks Online has no Inventory Assembly item, so when you move from QuickBooks Desktop, Partsemble takes over the assembly side: your bills of materials and your builds, beside QuickBooks Online rather than in place of it.
Why It Matters
On QuickBooks Desktop, an Inventory Assembly item held the recipe, and Build Assemblies turned components into finished goods. QuickBooks Online has neither, which is where many Desktop migrations stall. With Partsemble, you keep QuickBooks Online as your books and run BOMs and builds in Partsemble. Each build lands in QuickBooks Online as an entry, so your accountant still sees everything there.
What Moves and What Stays
What moves into Partsemble: the components you build with, the sub-assemblies in between, and the finished goods you assemble. Their bills of materials, and opening counts from the day you start. For most shops that's a small part of the item list.
What stays in QuickBooks Online: everything else. The rest of your item list, customers, vendors, invoices, bills, payroll and the chart of accounts. QuickBooks Online remains your books, and how you invoice doesn't change.
Nothing in your QuickBooks history is rewritten. Partsemble reads your item list, your chart of accounts and, with sales tracking on, your invoices and sales receipts. It writes the entries you export, plus any product or supplier you choose to push as an item or vendor. It never edits or deletes transactions already in QuickBooks Online.
How It Works
1. Connect QuickBooks Online and bring in your items
Connect your QuickBooks Online company, sync your items and import the ones you build with as Partsemble products. You can also create products by hand or import them from a file. See Connecting QuickBooks Online and Importing Products.
2. Replace each assembly item with a BOM
A BOM lists the components and quantities one unit of a product takes, which is what a Desktop assembly item held. Quantities are decimal to four places on every plan, so a coating formula of 12.5 g per unit goes in as 12.5, not as a rounding. Builds record quantities to the same precision. See Creating BOMs.
Desktop assembly items never carried labour or overhead. In Partsemble, BOMs and planned builds can carry labour and overhead cost lines, on the Pro plan and above. See Cost Lines.
3. Start from opening counts
Pick the day you start running builds in Partsemble, count what's on hand, and enter those counts that day: Partsemble dates them the day you enter them. Enter them in the product import's initial quantity column, or with Adjust Stock on a product's page while Receiving is off. From that date on, builds and receipts move stock in Partsemble. QuickBooks history before that date stays as it is.
4. Choose how builds reach QuickBooks Online
A build replaces Build Assemblies. When you export one, it posts back to QuickBooks Online in one of two shapes, set by your Export mode:
Journal entries — Partsemble carries your assembly inventory, and each build posts a journal entry with Partsemble's amounts to the accounts you choose. The usual choice when your components were never QuickBooks inventory items.
Inventory adjustments — each build changes item quantities in QuickBooks Online (components down, finished good up), and QuickBooks prices the adjustment from its own item costs.
Either way, each build exports one entry, in the shape your Export mode sets. A rejected build with a loss exports a separate waste entry instead. See Export Mode.
Units of Measure
QuickBooks Online has no unit of measure: an item is stocked in the unit you buy it in, so a gallon you buy and the grams a BOM consumes can't be one item.
In Partsemble, a conversion says that one container of an external item yields a known quantity of a product, and a transfer applies it: the containers leave your QuickBooks stock and the material arrives in Partsemble's assembly inventory, in one step, with lots priced from the container's cost. For example, Larkspur Coatings Co. buys Acrylic Enamel Base, 5 gal pail, in QuickBooks Online, and its conversion yields 23,100 grams of Acrylic Enamel Base per pail, the unit its BOMs consume.
Transfers are on the Advanced plan, and need a QuickBooks Online connection, Receiving turned on, and Export mode on Journal entries. Your containers and yields are particular to your shop, so set them up as part of moving over.
What the Trial Shows
The 14-day trial has the Advanced plan's features, within Maker limits: 50 builds a month, 500 products and one user. You can build BOMs, run builds and export them to see what posts in QuickBooks Online.
Example
A shop that made coatings on QuickBooks Desktop kept each finished colour as an Inventory Assembly item. After moving to QuickBooks Online, those items arrived without their recipes. They connect QuickBooks Online to Partsemble, sync the items and import the bases, tint pastes, cans and finished colours as products. They enter a BOM for each colour, count stock on the first of the month and enter those counts, and leave Export mode on Journal entries. From then on, each build exports one journal entry to QuickBooks Online, and invoicing carries on there as before.