Job shop software that works with QuickBooks

QuickBooks is accounting software. It's very good at invoices, bills, payroll, tax and the reports your accountant asks for. Intuit keeps adding to it; QuickBooks Online Advanced recently added reorder points with low-stock alerts and sales orders tied to purchase orders.

What it isn't built to do is run a make-to-order shop floor. It doesn't know that a part goes through the saw, the press brake and the welder, how long each step takes, which machine is free on Thursday, or what a job really cost against what you quoted.

That's the gap most shops fill with spreadsheets. Tangle is built to fill it instead.

QuickBooks keeps	Tangle runs
General ledger and chart of accounts	Quotes and estimates
Accounts payable and receivable	Routings and work orders
Payroll	Scheduling by machine and department
Tax and financial reporting	Shop-floor time and job tracking
Bank reconciliation	Inventory and purchasing
	Job cost against the quote

Tangle connects to QuickBooks Online out of the box. The connection runs one way, from Tangle into QuickBooks, so QuickBooks stays the single home of your ledger.

• Invoices raised in Tangle are pushed to QuickBooks.
• Purchase orders raised in Tangle are pushed to QuickBooks.
• Payments recorded in Tangle against those invoices go across too.

Each document goes across when it's pushed, so nobody keys it in twice and the books match what happened on the floor.

What gets set up first: before anything posts, we map each type of Tangle record to the right QuickBooks account with your bookkeeper. Until that's done, Tangle holds the document rather than guess where it should land.

An illustrative example, not a feature list.

Meridian Welding has 40 people, QuickBooks Online and a quoting spreadsheet that only one person fully understands.

• The estimator builds the quote in Tangle from the routing, so labor, machine time and material are priced the same way every time.
• The shop floor clocks time against the job on a tablet. The foreman sees which jobs are behind before the customer calls.
• The office invoices from Tangle when the job ships. The invoice lands in QuickBooks without retyping.
• The owner sees what each job made against what was quoted, while there's still time to do something about the next quote.
• The bookkeeper keeps working in QuickBooks, the same as before.

• Only one or two people can produce a quote, and everyone waits for them.
• You find out a job lost money weeks after it shipped.
• The schedule is on a whiteboard, and changing it means walking the floor.
• Purchasing happens when someone notices the rack is empty.
• Someone retypes the same order into two or three places.

If two or three of these sound familiar, it's probably time for an ERP. That doesn't have to mean replacing QuickBooks.

Off Ramp moves a shop off its legacy ERP with a live sync and a staged go-live. The old system keeps running while Tangle fills up with your parts, customers and open orders, and QuickBooks stays put the whole time.

How Off Ramp works

Every shop invoices a little differently. Milo, Tangle's built-in AI engineer, builds new fields, forms, reports and workflows from a plain-English request, and you preview every change before it goes live. So if you want a job-cost report laid out the way your accountant likes it, you describe it and approve it.

How Milo works