There is a ritual that happens in finance teams at the end of every month. Someone logs into a payments dashboard, sets a date range, exports a CSV, opens it next to the accounting system, and starts matching rows. It takes an afternoon. It is done from memory. And roughly once a quarter somebody imports the same file twice and spends the following morning unpicking it.
Magellan now connects directly to QuickBooks Online. You link it once, and from then on your Magellan account activity posts itself into your books as it happens.
One button, no credentials
In the portal there is an Accounting Integrations page with a single button on it: Connect QuickBooks. Press it and you land on Intuit's own consent screen, where you approve the connection against your QuickBooks company. That is the entire setup.
There is no API key to generate, no client secret to paste into a form, no developer account for you to register. The tokens are exchanged server-side and stored encrypted — they never pass through your browser and you never have to hold one. If you manage several businesses from one login, you can connect on behalf of any of them.
Your Magellan balance becomes an account in your books
The moment the connection is approved, we make sure the accounts we need exist in your chart of accounts. A bank account called Magellan, which is where your balance lives from your bookkeeping's point of view. Plus Uncategorized Income and Uncategorized Expense, which in most QuickBooks companies already exist — we look for them first and reuse them rather than creating duplicates.
That is the whole footprint. Three accounts, one of which is genuinely new. We do not restructure anything you already have.
Every movement posts itself
From there it runs on its own. The trigger is our ledger, not a payment notification — the instant a movement is posted against your balance, the corresponding entry goes to QuickBooks. It is not a nightly batch and it is not something you have to remember to run.
Each movement becomes a two-line journal entry. Money arriving debits your Magellan account and credits Uncategorized Income. Money leaving credits Magellan and debits Uncategorized Expense. Refunds and reversals need no special handling — they are simply movements in the other direction, and they post the same way. Every entry carries the transaction date, the description from the ledger, and a memo holding the ledger reference, so any line in QuickBooks can be traced back to the exact movement that produced it.
A word on that Uncategorized offset, because it is deliberate rather than unfinished. We know what happened to your Magellan balance with total precision. We do not know whether a given deposit is product revenue or a customer refund reversal, and guessing at your chart of accounts would produce books that look complete and are quietly wrong. So we post the side we are certain about, park the other side somewhere obvious, and leave the categorisation to you — where the judgement belongs. Your bank feed works exactly the same way, and for the same reason.
It will never post the same thing twice
Every entry is stamped with the identifier of the ledger movement that created it, using QuickBooks' own mechanism for exactly this. If a delivery fails and we retry it, the retry cannot create a second entry. If you disconnect and reconnect, history does not duplicate. If two connections somehow point at the same QuickBooks company, they collapse onto the same entry rather than doubling it.
Failures are retried with backoff, and if something is genuinely wrong — an expired connection, a rejected entry — it is recorded as a failure you can see rather than swallowed.
You can see exactly what happened
Open a connection and you get its health, not just its status. How many entries were delivered in the last hour, the last day, the last week, and what proportion succeeded. When the last success was, and the last failure. The most recent deliveries with their individual outcomes. And the account mappings currently in use, so you can confirm we are writing where you think we are.
If the connection ever expires — QuickBooks authorisations do not last forever — the status says so plainly and reconnecting is the same single button.
Disconnecting is reversible; deleting is not
Disconnect stops the flow and revokes the tokens immediately. Nothing further is sent, and everything already posted to QuickBooks stays exactly where it is. You can reconnect whenever you like.
Removing the connection and its history entirely is a separate, deliberate second step, with its own confirmation. Those two actions should never be one button, and here they are not.
Live today
QuickBooks Online is supported now, and the integration is built so that adding further accounting systems is a small piece of work rather than a rewrite. If you would like your books to keep themselves current, it is one button away in the portal.
Read more about how we think about financial automation, browse the API documentation, or talk to us about getting set up.