Ask About Your Business Books Through QuickBooks

If your business runs on QuickBooks, you can connect it to your muse and ask plain questions about your books in chat, and have invoices made and sent without opening the accounting software first.

What it does

The QuickBooks connector brings select financial work into the conversation. You can ask for profit and loss or cash flow for any period and get an answer drawn from your real books, not a spreadsheet you exported last month. You can check your balance sheet, see how it compares with similar businesses, and ask which customers and which products bring in the most revenue. When it is time to bill, you describe the work and the muse creates a payment-enabled invoice in QuickBooks and sends it to the customer, who can pay straight from the invoice. It can also track which invoices are overdue and send payment reminders, so chasing money stops depending on you remembering who is late.

How to use it

1. Connect your QuickBooks account in your muse settings and approve the permissions it asks for.
2. Start with a question, not a chore: "How did we do last month compared with the month before?"
3. Ask follow-ups in plain words: "Which customers drove most of that?" or "What is still unpaid?"
4. When you need to bill, describe the job and the amount, then read the invoice draft before you approve sending it.
5. Once a week, ask for the overdue list and approve any reminders before they go out.

What you need

• A QuickBooks account for your business
• Access to Muse for Small Business with the QuickBooks connector turned on
• Permission settings you are comfortable with for sending invoices and reminders

What to watch for

The connector covers select workflows, not the whole of QuickBooks. Payroll, closing the books, and filing business taxes still belong inside QuickBooks itself, and complex cash flow planning does too. The answers are only as current as the records in your books, so a week of unentered receipts means a week of wrong answers. Read every invoice before it sends: the customer sees your business name on it, not the muse. And keep the habit of checking the figures in QuickBooks before you act on them. The muse prepares and drafts, you decide.