Import Sales into QuickBooks: Receipts and Payments

Quick Answer: QuickBooks Online's Import data tool lists sales receipts among the transactions it accepts from a CSV, Google Sheets or Excel file under 1,000 rows. Received customer payments are not on that list; on Advanced or Accountant, Spreadsheet Sync can add them, and otherwise you need a third-party importer. Many businesses skip line-by-line imports and post one sales receipt per day from the POS summary.

Importing sales into QuickBooks comes down to three choices: bring in each sale as a sales receipt, bring in payments against invoices that already exist, or post a daily summary from your point-of-sale report. Whichever you pick, the record has to line up with the deposit on your bank statement, or the same income gets counted twice.

What exactly are you importing?

QuickBooks treats a sale paid on the spot and a payment on an earlier invoice as different transactions, and the import options differ for each.

• Sales receipt. The customer paid at the time of sale: a till sale, a card payment on a web order, a cash job. There is no invoice to close.
• Received payment. Money coming in against an open invoice. Importing it without the invoice gives QuickBooks nothing to apply it to.
• Deposit. The bank-side event. Card processors and POS systems usually pay out a net batch, after fees, a day or two after the sales.

Getting this right first saves a cleanup later. A web shop that imports orders as invoices and then imports the processor payout as income has recorded every sale twice.

Importing sales receipts into QuickBooks Online

Intuit's common questions about importing data (read on 27 October 2026) tells you to import lists first (chart of accounts, customers, vendors, employees, classes, locations, products and services) and then transactions "in any order". The transaction list it gives is Bank Data, Bills, Checks, Deposits, Estimates, Expenses, Journal Entries, Purchase Orders, Sales Receipts and Time Activities. Only bills carry a stated restriction, to Advanced and higher in the US.

Practical rules from the same page:

1. Use a CSV file, Google Sheets, or an XLS/XLSX file.
2. Keep each file under 1,000 rows; Intuit suggests splitting a larger spreadsheet into smaller files.
3. Make sure every customer, product and deposit account in your file already exists, because the list import is meant to come first.
4. Check the column mapping before you start the import; a date read in the wrong order moves sales into the wrong month.

Sales receipt rows need a receipt number, date, customer (or a generic walk-in customer), product or service, amount, and the account the money went to. Decide the deposit account carefully: Undeposited Funds if several receipts will be grouped into one bank deposit, or the bank account itself if each receipt matches one bank line.

A sample layout

A sheet laid out like this maps cleanly, one row per line of each receipt:

Repeat the receipt number on each line that belongs to the same sale, keep one date format through the whole file, and leave currency symbols out of the amount column. Before the real import, run a file with two or three receipts and open them in QuickBooks to confirm the lines, the customer and the deposit account landed where you meant.

How do you import payments into QuickBooks Online?

Payments are where the built-in tool stops. They aren't on the Import data list, so you have three realistic routes:

Intuit's Spreadsheet Sync article describes the flow in the Spreadsheet Sync panel: select Create or edit records, choose the company and record type, select Get Template, fill the rows, mark each one Yes in the Post? column, then Sync to QuickBooks and confirm. The same page lists a Purchase & Sales Receipts template, which is an alternative to the CSV import for Advanced users who want to edit records after posting them.

For the importer route, our review of Transaction Pro Importer covers what that kind of tool handles and what it costs to run.

The daily summary approach

Recording every coffee or every web order as its own receipt is rarely worth it when the POS already keeps that detail. Many bookkeepers post one entry per trading day instead, built from the POS end-of-day report:

1. Gross sales by category or tax rate, as income lines.
2. Sales tax collected, to the sales tax liability.
3. Discounts and refunds, as negative lines or a contra-income account.
4. Tips collected, to a liability if they are paid out to staff.
5. Card fees, if the processor deducts them before paying out.

The total of the entry should equal the processor's payout for that day. That is the point of the method: one sales receipt, one bank deposit, one match. You can post it as a sales receipt with several lines or as a journal entry; the sales receipt keeps the income visible in sales reports.

A worked day: the POS shows 2,140.00 in sales and 171.20 in tax, with 74.28 of processor fees taken out. The sales receipt carries 2,140.00 income, 171.20 tax and a negative 74.28 fees line, for a net of 2,236.92, which is exactly the deposit the bank statement shows two days later.

If your sales run through Square, our guide to importing Square transactions into QuickBooks Online covers the payout timing in more detail.

Importing sales into QuickBooks Desktop

For sales transactions in Desktop, the format Intuit documents is IIF. Intuit's article on IIF files lists cash sales and refunds, and invoices and payments from customers, among the transactions IIF can import, through File > Utilities > Import > IIF Files on Windows. Two warnings from that page: back up the company file first, and IIF "doesn't link transactions", so an imported payment still has to be applied to its invoice afterwards.

For Desktop, the deposit side usually runs through Undeposited Funds; our article on reconciling Undeposited Funds in QuickBooks Desktop explains how to clear the balances that build up there.

Will the imported sales match your bank statement?

Before importing a month of sales, put the month's deposits next to your sales file. The deposits are on your bank statement; if you only have the PDF, QuickBankConvert can turn it into spreadsheet rows so you can filter for credits and sort by date. Then check three things:

• Each payout total equals the sum of the sales receipts it covers, after fees.
• No deposit has already been categorized as income from the bank feed. If one has, undo that categorization and match the deposit instead.
• Refunds that came out of a later payout are recorded as refunds, not netted silently.

When those tie out, import the sales, then match each bank feed deposit to the receipts or the Undeposited Funds deposit. Income appears once, and your bank reconciliation stays clean.

Related guides

• Import Excel into QuickBooks Online, for lists, invoices and journal entries
• Transaction Pro Importer review
• Import Square transactions into QuickBooks Online
• Reconcile Undeposited Funds in QuickBooks Desktop