Resolving Hassles Related to Gmail in QuickBooks

While working with QuickBooks desktop, you can have several options for email integration such as QuickBooks E-mail, WebMail, and Outlook.

However, if you are using Google Gmail, then you want to select the Web Mail option, but some users not able to work with Gmail easily. Here’s a way to resolve that problem for most Gmail users.   

    

Setting Up Google Gmail in QuickBooks

Before talking about the issues that you may run into with your QuickBooks and Gmail, let’s talk first about how to set up it.

If you want to use Gmail to send your forms and reports from QuickBooks desktop products, then you need to select Edit which is in the main menu, and then click on Preferences.

Now, click on the 'Send Forms' preference, and then click on My Preferences tab. Now you have to choose the Web Mail option, and then click on the Add button.

Now let’s talk about issues:-

QuickBooks Gmail issues

Unfortunately, in some cases, one may get an error dialog window. On the very first thought, you may feel it is a dummy and misspell the password, and so you may have to enter it again.

Sometimes you may get in a situation where the only thing you can do is, click on the Cancel button, which gives you warning message saying-  'QuickBooks is unable to send your e-mails.

At this point, the next thing most of the people do is to go back to the 'Send Forms preferences' to look at the settings of Gmail. If you customize the settings, then you are allowed to edit the server name, SSL/TLS, and port setting.

Most of the people have no idea what they should change here. But, you should be glad that Intuit added a Reset Default button to restore it to the original values.

Nothing that you can change there and seems to make any differences. Most of the people can’t get Google Gmail to work with QuickBooks desktop. There are a lot of people complaining about this issue.

What's going on?

Fixing QuickBooks Gmail issues

Why QuickBooks with Gmail works for some people but not for others?

Here is a clue. In some cases, you might get an e-mail from Google, which says about an app that 'doesn’t meet modern security standards.'

This message does not say that it was Gmail which was a part of the problem. It also does not say that QuickBooks had anything to do with it. But it does mention that the time that this problem occurred, and it might be helpful for some people.

Most of the people rarely pay attention to what time they were running a particular program when they ran into an error, which is quite cryptic.

But, it does give a clue. An 'app' tried to sign in to your account. In that case, maybe, QuickBooks trying to log in with your Gmail account information?

So, let’s fix this issue.

First of all, you have to go to https://myaccount.google.com/intro to log in to your Google account. On the My Account page, click on the link for Connected apps and sites.

There will be a section titled Apps connected to your account, and there you might see Intuit QuickBooks listed.

A little further bottom of the page you will find what you want and you have to note that Google may rearrange this page at any time. You have to allow less secure apps. It is set to 'OFF'. Then, you have to click on that button to set this to 'ON'.

It may sound a bit backward, turning 'less security' to 'on'. Usually, you would expect to be turning higher security 'on', but that is not how Google set this up.

Now, go back to QuickBooks and try again to send that invoice using your Gmail. Success!!!

By changing the 'Allow less secure apps' setting 'ON' in Google account settings is generally the way to fix this issue in QuickBooks. In every case where you've seen this issue first-hand, then this has fixed the issue.

Definitely, there is some concern here. Here, you are lowering the level of security that you have with your Google account. Not just your Gmail account, but your entire Google account, since there is only one login to your account.

After that, you will get a warning message from Google says -  'Please be aware that it is now easier for an attacker to break into your account'. 

You may don’t know how many apps that you use with your Google account are affected by this setting. You can use QuickBooks desktop for your company’s accounting but can use Microsoft Outlook for sending forms and reports.

You don’t need the lower security for your QuickBooks. You should prefer to have a higher level of security for your Google account.

However, you have other apps that are connected to the Google account, such as Outlook, QuickBooks Online, Notability for your iPad, and many other Google apps.

 If you change this setting back to a more secure level, then there are several apps that you use require a lower level security setting in Google.

As the companies like Google work to improve security, other developers have to catch-up to modify their integrated products in order to match the changes and that can take time.

Intuit is fully aware of this issue and is addressing it too. Although they have not provided any specifics on when a change occur, or which QuickBooks products will update.

In the meantime, at least there is a workaround to get your Gmail working. We hope this helps!

Apart from that, you can also avail a number of benefits from cloud hosted QuickBooks and work smoothly. You can access your QuickBooks in the cloud, while on-the-go from any internet enabled device such as laptop, smart phone, tablet etc. It also assured the uptime of the dedicated servers that allows anytime accessibility to accelerate the collaboration.