QuickBooks Errors

When you’re trying to create invoices or connect a new customer to QBO, there can be times when QuickBooks will throw an error if something is wrong. Below are some common errors and solutions:

“QuickBooks: Validation Exception was thrown.Details: Duplicate Document Number Error: You must specify a different number. This number has already been used”

This error occurs when QuickBooks attempts to reuse an invoice number and is caused if the Custom Transaction Numbers setting is turned on. You can turn off the Custom Transaction Numbers setting in your QuickBooks account. Here’s our guide to learn how. Once this setting is disabled, you can try to create invoices again on the Invoicing and Job Records in MaidCentral.

“QuickBooks: Validation Exception was thrown.Details: Business Validation Error: Were sorry, QuickBooks encountered an error while calculating tax. Try reselecting the tax rate or reentering the product/service item and saving the form again.”

This error can happen if QuickBooks is having trouble finding the tax information it needs and is usually related to a syncing issue. First, make sure all your sales tax settings are correct in QuickBooks, and each scope of work, including inactive ones, is set to a QuickBooks Item. For more information about sales tax, click here!

If everything is correct, or you haven't changed anything in your QuickBooks account related to sales tax or your product/services, then you can enable the QuickBooks - Improved Tax Calculation feature by going to Company > Settings > General > Features to help reinforce your sales tax settings. Once that is turned on, try invoicing a couple of jobs first to make sure the tax is applied correctly. Then you can invoice the rest.

“QuickBooks: Validation Exception was thrown. Details: Invalid reference ID: LineSalesItemLineDetail.ItemRef”

This error can appear if the scope of work does not have a QuickBooks Item (these are products/services in QuickBooks) set or if a product/service is inactive in QBO.

First, make sure that all scopes of work, including inactive scopes, have a QuickBooks Item set. Go to Company > Other > Quoting and Scopes > Scopes of Work. By default, only active scopes of work will appear. To show inactive scopes as well, click on the arrows on the top right of the page and select Show Inactive Scopes.

Once you have all of your scopes showing, click into each scope of work and make sure that the QuickBooks Item is set, then click Save.

Once you’ve set the QuickBooks Item for all of your scopes of work, you can go back to the Invoicing and Job Records and attempt to invoice jobs again. If you are still seeing the error, make sure your products/services in QBO are not inactive. The QuickBooks Item setting pulls products/services from QBO. Here’s QBO’s guide on how to reactivate a product/service.

“QuickBooks: Call to the endpoint returned a 500 - Internal Server Error response”

This can happen if there was a brief connection issue between MaidCentral and QuickBooks, typically related to server issues.

First, you’ll want to make sure that an invoice wasn’t actually created. Server issues can cause the invoice to become disconnected from the job. This can make the job appear as not invoiced, and the invoice will say that it’s “read only” in yellow as if it were manually created in QBO. You can go to the Customer Profile > QuickBooks tab to see if there’s a disconnected invoice.

If there is a read-only invoice, you can delete it by logging in to your QBO account, finding the invoice, and deleting it. You can then return to MC and try invoicing the job again to generate a new invoice.

If there isn’t a read-only invoice, then you can just attempt to invoice the job again or at a later time.

“QuickBooks: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

If you are trying to connect a new customer to QuickBooks, you may see this error message. This will appear if there’s either an issue with the customer’s name, if there’s an existing account for a customer in QuickBooks with the same name, or if the email address is invalid. Check out this guide on how to fix this.