If your books live in QuickBooks Desktop, your customer list is already the most complete record you have: names, billing addresses, contacts, often a sub-customer for every building you service. A QuickBooks Desktop customer import lets you reuse that list instead of retyping it, as long as you know which route to take and what to check before you press go.
Tidy the list in QuickBooks first
Whatever you import will look exactly as messy as it does in QuickBooks. A short cleanup there pays off everywhere:
- Make inactive customers inactive. Accounts you haven’t served in years don’t need to come along.
- Merge obvious duplicates. Two spellings of the same property manager become two customers anywhere else.
- Decide what sub-customers mean. Many service companies use sub-customers for buildings or service addresses. Others use them for jobs or projects. Know which you have before you import.
- Check ship-to addresses. For field work the service address matters more than the billing one.
Two ways in: Web Connector or a list file
Sentra Scheduler reads QuickBooks Desktop customers in two ways, and both end in the same review.
The Web Connector. Intuit’s Web Connector is a small program that runs on the PC where QuickBooks Desktop is installed. You download a .qwc file from Sentra Scheduler, add it to the Web Connector, and run it. It reads customers, sub-customers and service items from the company file. Later runs bring changes for customers you’ve already linked.
An IIF list file. If installing the Web Connector isn’t an option, export the lists instead: in QuickBooks Desktop, File › Utilities › Export › Lists to IIF Files, then upload the file in Admin › Import data › QuickBooks list. A CSV with the IIF column names works too. Large files are read in the background, so you don’t have to keep the page open.
Either way, nothing in QuickBooks is created or changed. It’s import only.
What comes across
- Customers, with their contact, an alternate contact, fax and QuickBooks customer type.
- Sub-customers and ship-to addresses as sites. A “Parent:Child” name becomes a site under the parent customer, so each building a property manager owns becomes its own service location. You can bring sub-customers in as separate customers instead if that fits how you work.
- Service items, with their type and income account. Items are read along with customers; in the list-file route they apply straight away.
The review step
Customers don’t go straight into your account. They land in a review with three groups: matched, new and to check. A likely match, say a customer you already added by hand, is shown side by side, and you decide to link it, create a new one or skip it. Nothing new is created until you say so.
Linking matters. Once a customer is linked, later Web Connector syncs keep it up to date from QuickBooks, and only genuinely new records come back for review. An import history lists every sync with what was created, updated and skipped.
After the customers: the recurring work
Customers are the foundation, not the whole house. Once they’re in, the recurring work can be attached to them: from the job spreadsheet import if you plan the year in a workbook, or by setting up recurring jobs one at a time. Rows in the job spreadsheet are matched to the customers you just imported, and sites are added under them. If you are still planning in a workbook, our guide on moving from a spreadsheet to scheduling software covers that part.
What it doesn’t do
To be clear about the edges: the sync reads from QuickBooks and never changes it on its own. Since October 2026, done visits can go back to QuickBooks Desktop as invoices in an IIF file you import; see time clock and billing. If you use QuickBooks Online instead of Desktop, connecting by sign-in gives you the same review; see QuickBooks import.
Keeping both systems in step
After the first import, decide where customer changes happen. The simplest rule is that billing details change in QuickBooks, because that’s where your bookkeeper works, and service details like gate codes, site contacts and access notes live in the scheduling system, because that’s where crews look. If you use the Web Connector, run it on a regular day, for example every Monday morning, so new customers added in QuickBooks show up for review before anyone needs to schedule them. If you used a one-time IIF file, add new customers directly in the scheduling system from then on, or export a fresh list when a batch has piled up.
A checklist for import day
- Back up the QuickBooks company file.
- Mark old customers inactive and merge duplicates.
- Decide whether sub-customers are sites or separate customers.
- Choose the Web Connector if you want later syncs, or an IIF file for a one-time move.
- Work through the review: link what matches, create what’s new, skip what doesn’t belong.
- Spot-check a few large accounts and confirm each building shows up as a site.
A careful QuickBooks Desktop customer import takes an afternoon, and it means the names your crews see match the names on your books.