In ServiceM8, an invoice reaches QuickBooks Online at one moment: when somebody approves it.
That's from ServiceM8's own page on how the sync works, and it's the sentence I'd put in front of anyone connecting their accounting for the first time. The approval happens in a list called Awaiting Approval, and until it does, nothing is attempted against the integration at all.
I work on ServiceM8, so weigh what follows with that in mind. The version of this in your software may sit behind a different button. The question underneath is the same one: what has to happen before a finished job becomes a line in your books, and whose job is it to make it happen?
Here's why it goes unanswered.
Complete and Approve are two different controls, and they can belong to two different seats. Complete is the green button on the job's Billing tab, the manager's last action on the job. Approve lives in Invoicing, as a right-click action under Awaiting Approval, and it belongs to whoever runs invoicing. So a job can read Completed and still be sitting in Awaiting Approval.
That produces an odd failure. If nothing has been approved, a connected integration that's never run looks exactly like a broken one: no invoices in QuickBooks, and no failure to find, because no sync was ever tried. Once approvals are happening, the list has a Sent to QBO column (if it isn't showing, add it to the view), and a failed export shows up there as a red marker on the row, so checking takes about a minute.
Three things behave differently from what people expect, even when the gate is working.
A zero-value invoice is excluded. No-charge warranty callbacks and goodwill visits never reach QuickBooks, so that work leaves no trace on the accounting side. Its cost still arrives through payroll and supplier bills, with no invoice to set it against.
An invoice raised directly in QuickBooks never comes back to ServiceM8. The first time someone bills a job from QuickBooks because it was quicker, the job system's picture of what's been invoiced goes wrong, and it stays wrong without telling anyone.
A payment that has synced can't be deleted in ServiceM8. Delete it in QuickBooks and the deletion flows back, so a payment marked in error gets corrected in QuickBooks.
Then there's the company with no sync at all.
ServiceM8 connects to QuickBooks Online, Xero and MYOB. It has no Sage integration in any edition, and no accounting export for a package it doesn't integrate with. Its help article for a non-integrated accounting package is refreshingly plain about what's left: you still invoice out of ServiceM8 with a fully itemised invoice, and "the only information you should need to transfer into a non-integrated accounting package is the invoice total and the customer." The workflow it recommends is to approve each invoice in Awaiting Approval at the point you transfer it by hand.
So the queue becomes the bookkeeper's worklist. That's a sound design when somebody chose it. When nobody did, the queue just fills.
Payroll hours are a separate question, and for Canadian companies a sharper one. ServiceM8's automated timesheet sync supports QuickBooks Online in all regions, and Xero "in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom only." A Canadian company on Xero can have every invoice syncing cleanly and still key every hour into payroll by hand, because the sync that exists for its package doesn't exist in its country. On Sage, invoices and hours both cross by hand.
Ten minutes tells you where you stand. Open Awaiting Approval and look at the date on the oldest invoice in it. If you're on QuickBooks Online, scan the Sent to QBO column for red. Then take three invoices your accounting side shows for last month and find each one in the job system. Any that aren't there were raised in QuickBooks, and ServiceM8 has no record of them.
If you're connecting accounting for the first time and want the approval step owned and the account set up around it before the first invoice crosses, here's how I set that up: https://www.chanautomation.com/servicem8-setup
The thing to carry past this email: the approve step is the one place in a working day where a field record turns into money on the books, and it deserves a named owner as much as dispatch does.
Kevin Chan
The Ops Shortcut by ChanAutomation
https://www.chanautomation.com/servicem8-setup