QuickBooks Online Contact Mapping

QuickBooks Online Contact Mapping

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Because we hold accounting records it is important that we do our very best not to duplicate contacts between systems. Loft47 connects with many other systems you use in your business everyday, so in order to match as best as we can, we’ve developed a very sophisticated contact matching algorithm. 

Syncing Rules

When a transaction is posted, Loft checks the contact type in both Loft & QuickBooks Online. If the contact doesn't exist in QuickBooks Online, Loft will create the contact in QuickBooks Online and automatically link that QuickBooks Online contact to the "Linked QuickBooks Online Contact" field in the Loft Contact.

During a Sync and Before a Batch Loft will perform the following:
    1. Pull every contact from QuickBooks Online, updating existing contacts and pulling in any A/P and A/R balance in QuickBooks Online.
    2. Push newly paid agents and , if applicable, their Organization contacts.
    3. Attempt to Linked contacts to their respective QuickBooks Online Vendor and *Customer Contacts.

Disable Sync

When you choose to disable the QuickBooks Online Sync in the profile in Loft it will no longer try to match any of the above criteria.  

Contacts/Agents Paid to a Company Name/Organization

If a Contact/Agent is set to be paid to a Company/Organization, Loft will post all bills and credit notes to the Organization name.
Please note: Invoicing in QuickBooks Online should be created with the Organization's name reflecting the syncing rules.

​​​​Agent and Organization Syncing Rule

The agent contact is always the Principal contact that all financials are associated with, regardless if that contact is set to be paid to the Organization. All AR/AP balance in QuickBooks Online will sync to the Agent contact in Loft. If the agent is paid to the Organization, the AR/AP balance in QuickBooks Online will sync to both contacts.

​​​​Linked QuickBooks Online Contact field(s)

Contacts

The 'Linked QuickBooks Online Contact' field must be linked to its respective QuickBooks Online Vendor AND *Customer contact (customer contacts are denoted with an asterisk). Example; if the contact is Ziggy Canmore, the field will display a vendor and customer contact: Ziggy Canmore/*Ziggy Canmore


Contacts/Agents payable to a Company/Organization

Any contacts payable to a Company/Organization, the 'Linked QuickBooks Online Contact' field must be linked to its respective QuickBooks Online Company/Org Vendor AND *Customer contact (customer contacts are denoted with an asterisk) and the Profile Contact's 'Linked QuickBooks Online Contact' field must be blank. Example; if the contact is Ruby Williams is paid to their Company Name Ruby & Diamonds Realty the agent's 'Linked QuickBooks Online Contact' field will be BLANK and their Organization's 'Linked QuickBooks Online Contact' field  will display a vendor and customer Organization contact: Ruby & Diamonds Realty/*Ruby & Diamonds Realty.

Profile Contact
Org Contact


Missing or Blank Linked QuickBooks Online Contacts

Sometimes the 'Linked QuickBooks Online Contact' field will be blank.  This might be due to not having done a hard 'QuickBooks Online Sync' in your QuickBooks Online/Activity page (clicking the blue 'Sync QuickBooks Online' button) for a while!

Blank

The field will have no contact present.
Search and select the contact from the dropdown to relink the contact.

Missing contact

The field will have a red 'Unlink' button present.
If Missing, click the 'Unlink' button 
This will clear the stuck field and make it blank
Search and select the contact from the dropdown to relink the contact. 

Stuck Contact

Sometimes the 'Unlink' button will stick.


If stuck, navigate to your QuickBooks Online/Activity page and click the blue 'Sync QuickBooks Online' button and let the sync fully run. If this does not resolve the issue, please reach out for assistance.

Missing Contacts in Searchable Field

If you can't find your respective QuickBooks Online contact in the search field, this might be due to not having done a hard 'QuickBooks Online Sync' in your QuickBooks Online/Activity page (clicking the blue 'Sync QuickBooks Online' button) for a while or have made a change to the contact on the QuickBooks Online side. Navigate to the QuickBooks Online/Activity page and perform the sync, once it fully runs, please head back to the contact to see if has either auto populated in the field or is searchable. 

Multiple Contacts

If you have more than one Vendor or *Customer contact displaying in your Linked Contact field or in the searchable dropdown, this is a good indication that either the QuickBooks Online contact has been changed, duplicated, or archived in QuickBooks Online.

You will need to head to QuickBooks Online/Contacts and search in both the 'All' tab and 'Archived' tab to see if the contact is present in both tabs. Any duplicate contact present in the Archived tab that has an email associated with it, you will need to restore the contact, remove the email, and merge the duplicates on the QuickBooks Online side. Please note, any change requires a 'Sync QuickBooks Online' operation on the Loft side.

​​​​Contact Matching Algorithm Process

Loft will always match when the email in both apps match.
If the emails do not match across both apps, then Loft will attempt to match and compares sequences/groups of three characters. Two records match when 60% or more of these sequences align.

Preprocessing

The input strings are preprocessed to remove any leading or trailing spaces, and are converted to lowercase for case-insensitive comparison.

Trigram Extraction

The preprocessed strings are then divided into trigrams. Trigrams are generated by taking each consecutive set of three characters from the string, including spaces if present. For example, the trigrams of the string "example" would be "exa", "xam", "amp", "mpl", "ple".

Trigram Matching

The trigrams of the two input strings are compared to find the common trigrams. The number of common trigrams is counted, and this count is used as a measure of similarity. Similarity Calculation The similarity between the two strings is calculated using the Jaccard similarity coefficient, which is defined as the ratio of the number of common trigrams to the total number of unique trigrams in both strings. The formula for calculating Jaccard similarity is: Jaccard similarity = (Number of common trigrams) / (Total number of unique trigrams).

Scoring

The Jaccard similarity coefficient is then multiplied by 100 to get a similarity score as a percentage, with 100% indicating a perfect match and 0% indicating no similarity.

Example of Matching Algorithm

Here's an example of how two words, "example" and "samples", are scored using the trigram algorithm:

Preprocessing

The input words are converted to lowercase and trimmed of leading/trailing spaces: "example" and "samples".

Trigram Extraction

Trigrams are generated for both words: For "example": "exa", "xam", "amp", "mpl", "ple" For "samples": "sam", "amp", "mpl", "ple", "les"

Trigram Matching

Common trigrams between the two words are: "amp", "mpl", "ple".

Similarity Calculation

The number of common trigrams is 3, and the total number of unique trigrams in both words is 5. So, the Jaccard similarity coefficient is 3/5 = 0.6 or 60%.

Scoring

The similarity score between "example" and "samples" is 60% using the trigram similarity algorithm.

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