QuickBooks AI: Ask Your Books Questions

You can ask QuickBooks questions in plain English. The difference between a right answer and a wrong one is whether the AI reads QuickBooks reports or guesses at the ledger.

You can ask QuickBooks questions in plain English, such as gross margin by month, which expense accounts grew, who owes you the most, and which vendors you spend with. The answer is right when the AI reads the same reports QuickBooks produces and wrong when it improvises from a loose export. This post covers what to ask, the one ledger trap worth knowing, and how to check the answer. It describes what the reports show and is not tax or accounting advice.

Start from the reports, not the transactions

QuickBooks already summarizes your books in a few standard reports: Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, the general ledger, and the A/R and A/P aging reports. They apply your report basis and account structure. An AI that reads those reports starts from figures you can reconcile. An AI that rebuilds profit from raw transaction lines has to re-derive account classification, and small differences become large ones.

By hand, you would run the Profit and Loss by month, export it, and compute margins in a spreadsheet; then rerun it for the prior year to compare. The questions are simple. The repetition is the cost.

Questions worth asking

• What was our gross margin by month this year?
• Which expense accounts grew the most compared with last year?
• How does net income year to date compare with the same period last year?
• How has our cash balance changed month by month?
• Who owes us the most, and how overdue is it?
• Which customers brought in the most revenue last quarter?
• Which vendors did we spend the most with this year?

The first four use the Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet. The fifth uses open invoices. The last two use the ledger, where the double-entry structure matters.

The double-entry trap

In the general ledger every transaction appears once per account it touches. An invoice produces an Income line and an Accounts Receivable line, and both carry the customer. If you sum the amount column for a customer across all lines, you count the invoice twice. The correct calculation filters to income accounts: revenue by customer is the profit effect of income-account lines, grouped by customer.

Two further details. The customer field is filled only on customer transaction types, and the vendor field only on vendor types, so journal entries and deposits sit in neither. Totals by customer can therefore be lower than Revenue, and that is a property of the data, not an error. Second, spend by vendor means cost of goods sold and expense accounts grouped by vendor, not every line a vendor appears on.

How Quiriz reads QuickBooks

The QuickBooks connector brings in five datasets: [QuickBooks] Profit and loss, [QuickBooks] Balance sheet, [QuickBooks] Ledger, [QuickBooks] Open invoices and [QuickBooks] Open bills. The Profit and Loss is one row per account per month and matches the QuickBooks report. Defined metrics include Revenue, Cost of goods sold, Gross profit, Gross margin, Operating expenses, Operating income, Net income, Net margin, Cash balance, Open receivables, Overdue receivables and Open payables.

Because these are defined once in Company Context, gross margin means gross profit over revenue every time, and the answer shows the dataset, filter and period behind the figure. The ledger metrics for customers and vendors apply the income and expense filters described above, so the double-entry trap is handled in the definition rather than left to whoever asks. Connectors are read-only, refresh daily and are included in paid plans. For one angle in depth, see QuickBooks profit and loss by month and the AR aging report.

A worked example: who are our top customers

Take the question which customers brought in the most revenue last quarter? A careless answer sums the amount column by customer across the ledger and double counts every invoice, once on the income line and once on the receivable line. The careful answer restricts to income accounts and uses the profit effect, which is positive for income, then groups by customer.

Say that gives 120,000 for Customer A, 85,000 for Customer B and so on (an illustrative example). The total of all customers may be lower than Revenue on the Profit and Loss, because journal entries and deposits carry no customer. A good answer says so, rather than leaving you to wonder where 14,000 went. That difference is a feature of how QuickBooks stores customers, and an answer that explains it is more trustworthy than one that quietly ties.

Limits

• Three fiscal years. The datasets cover this fiscal year and the two before it, re-read in full daily.
• Ledger cap. A very large ledger may start later than three years; the dataset note tells you to check the earliest transaction date.
• Aging is today only. Open invoices and open bills are snapshots of today with no date filter, so you cannot ask what was overdue last March.
• Balances are points in time. Never add month-end balances together; compare them.
• Books, not the store. If you also connect an ecommerce platform, its sales figure is the store's view and the books' Revenue is the accounting view. They are allowed to differ.
• One company per connection, chosen on the Intuit consent screen.

Checking an answer

Run one month of net income and compare it with the Profit and Loss for that month on the same basis. If it ties, the definitions are aligned. If it does not, check the basis (cash or accrual) first, because that is the common cause. The same discipline of tying a number back to its source is in why your team gets different numbers.

Frequently asked questions