Curious how many use Quickbooks for their business accounting, and of those, how many use a systematic integration between Shopify and Quickbooks. Is Quickbooks the best place to determine profitability (by running their Profit & Loss reports)?
Hi @sfn!
Great question. 
QuickBooks can be a very strong place for overall accounting and P&L reporting, especially when merchants need a clean financial view for bookkeeping, taxes, and monthly business review.
For Shopify merchants, I’d usually think of profitability in two layers:
- Accounting-level profitability — where QuickBooks is very helpful for overall P&L and financial reporting.
- Store-level operating profitability — where merchants may want to review profit by order, product, channel, campaign, shipping cost, fees, and COGS inside their Shopify workflow.
So it doesn’t have to be either/or. Many merchants can benefit from using QuickBooks for accounting and a Shopify profit analytics tool like GoProfit for more day-to-day visibility into what is driving profit inside the store.
The best setup depends on how detailed the merchant needs the reporting to be and how often they want to review profitability.
Interesting take as I know lots merchants use Quickbook. I used Quickbook myself before getting an accountant.
The biggest issue is segmenting data in Quickbook so it returns the proper “profit” data.
I used to have multiple credit cards as a messy founder, sometime accidentally add business expenses to my personal cards, and vice versa. If i link these cards in Quickbooks, it’ll pull in everything and sometime there are just too many transactions to categorize, and I can no longer trust the final profit number.
We see this a lot at MyWorks since we build Shopify to QuickBooks integrations. QuickBooks is still the most common accounting platform for ecommerce businesses in the US by a wide margin, but the number actually syncing their store data into it systematically is much smaller. A lot of merchants are still doing manual entry or lump sum journal entries at month end.
On your profitability question, QuickBooks is a great place to run P&L, but the report is only as good as the data flowing in. If orders, fees, refunds, and COGS are coming over accurately and consistently, your P&L gives you a real picture of profitability. If you’re entering summaries by hand or skipping things like Shopify payment fees, the report will look cleaner than reality.
One thing worth noting is that QuickBooks shows financial profitability well, but it won’t tell you profitability per channel or per product unless your data is mapped that way going in. That’s where syncing at the order or product level (instead of daily summaries) makes a difference.
Happy to answer questions on the integration side if anyone’s working through this!!