Connections & Integrations

What Kantivo links to, how the link actually functions, and why your accounting records stay on your own hardware regardless.

Overview

Because Kantivo installs on your machine rather than running in a browser, people expect a manual experience. In practice your bank activity turns up by itself, clients settle invoices by card, contractor filings are submitted electronically, and an entire QuickBooks history can be carried over in a single operation.

The distinction from web-based accounting is which way information travels. External data comes inward. Your ledger does not go outward.

Finding them: Everything described below is configured under Settings in Kantivo. None of it costs extra or sits behind a connector add-on.

The Mechanics

Worth knowing before you decide what to link:

Requests originate on your side. Kantivo goes out and asks for data. Nothing external opens a connection to your computer, and no router configuration is needed.
Sign-ins happen at the provider. Linking a bank sends you to your bank's own authentication screen. Those details are never entered into Kantivo, never retained by us, never routed through our infrastructure.
Only the activity returns. Dates, amounts, descriptions and balances come back and are written into the PostgreSQL database on your drive.
The books never travel. Entries, reports, client records and invoices remain in that local database. No vendor holds a mirrored copy of your accounts.

Live Connections

Everything in this section ships in the current release. If something isn't here, it isn't available yet — check Still Being Built.

Bank Activity

Attach your operating account, savings and business cards and let each day's movements appear without you going to fetch them. Kantivo proposes a category and the matching account for every line, so the task becomes approval rather than typing.

Setup steps, rule creation and diagnostics are covered in Bank & Statement Import.

Institution not covered? Import the statement file instead. It is a legitimate long-term way to work, not a consolation prize — see Reading Statement Files.

Getting Paid Online

Put a payment button on your invoices so clients can pay by card or through PayPal. Kantivo does the bookkeeping: the receipt is applied to the invoice, the processor's commission is posted to an expense account, and the net figure agrees to what actually reaches your bank.

That separation matters more than it sounds. Businesses that take payments outside their accounting system routinely record income net of fees, which quietly understates both revenue and expenses on the profit and loss.

To configure: Settings → Payment Gateway Settings → Add Gateway. Paste the API keys from your processor account, nominate the deposit account and the fee expense account, then run Test Connection before you switch it on for real customers.

Rehearse it: Both processors issue sandbox credentials. Push a test payment all the way through and inspect the resulting entries before moving to live keys.

Contractor Filings

Kantivo already holds what you paid every contractor during the year. The 1099 tool builds the forms from those figures and transmits them through our electronic filing partner, removing the January ritual of retyping totals into separate tax software.

You review every amount on screen before submission. Contractor identification comes from your supplier records, so maintaining tax IDs and addresses as you go makes filing season dramatically shorter.

Moving In From QuickBooks

Carry over your accounts, customers, suppliers, staff records and historical transactions from either QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online. Kantivo proposes a mapping for each field and waits for your confirmation before committing anything.

Social Security numbers are intentionally skipped. QuickBooks Desktop export files are unencrypted text and tend to get emailed between people during a changeover. Kantivo ignores the SSN column entirely — add those from the Employees screen afterward, where the value is stored encrypted.

Reading Statement Files

Where you would rather not maintain a live link, or the institution isn't supported, hand Kantivo the statement. CSV, spreadsheet and PDF formats are all accepted, and PDFs are properly interpreted into transactions rather than filed away as an attachment.

A meaningful share of customers work this way indefinitely, keeping no standing bank connection whatsoever.

Payroll Results

Continue processing payroll with whoever handles it now. Export the register from Gusto, ADP or any provider that produces one and import it, so gross pay, deductions and employer contributions reach the right accounts.

Stated plainly: this imports the outcome of a payroll run. It is not a live two-way link to a payroll provider. Direct synchronization is planned but is not in the product today.

Shopify

Link a Shopify store and its takings, refunds and settlements are written into your books for you. The first move happens on Shopify: install BizBooks Pro from the Shopify App Store, pick the store you want linked, and approve it there. Shopify hands you a short connection code once that is done.

Return to Kantivo, open Settings → Integrations, press Connect on the Shopify card, and type in the code. Nothing else is needed — your store address never has to be entered by hand, and approval happens a single time. Codes stay valid for 72 hours; should one lapse, reopen the app from your Shopify admin to be given another.

Nominate your accounts first

Nothing is written until Kantivo knows where it should go. Press Accounts on the linked card. We propose accounts from the chart you already have, but nothing takes effect until you confirm — an error here misstates income quietly rather than raising an error, so it earns a moment's attention.

Product takings and delivery charged to customers — income accounts
Sales tax collected — a liability, never income
Shopify processing costs — an expense account
Clearing account and the bank account settlements arrive in — explained below

The reason a clearing account exists

Shopify settles as one payment covering many orders, less the cut it kept. Recording the orders and the settlement would count the same income twice. Orders therefore land in a clearing account which the settlement then empties:

Per order: clearing is debited with everything the buyer paid, apportioned across takings, delivery and tax.
Per settlement: your bank is debited with what genuinely arrived, the platform's cut is expensed, and clearing is credited with the gross.

After everything settles the clearing account sits at zero — which turns its balance into a standing check on the whole arrangement. A balance that will not clear is telling you something.

Refunds

Full and partial refunds are written as separate entries that unwind the sale and hand the tax back to the liability account. They travel through clearing too, since Shopify recoups the money from a later settlement rather than lifting it from your bank.

How often does it run? Shortly after Kantivo opens, and every quarter of an hour while it stays open. Anything that happened while the machine was off is held for you and written up next time you launch. There is also a ↻ Sync now button on the card.

Anything not written up

Where an order contains something Kantivo cannot account for with confidence, it declines to record it instead of guessing. A held order is a question you can settle; an incorrect entry is a damaged ledger. Typical causes:

Tax was taken but no tax liability account is nominated
The order is denominated in a currency your books do not use
A gratuity, duty or adjustment appears with nowhere assigned for it
The figures do not reconcile to what the buyer paid — usually gift cards or store credit

Held items are listed on the Shopify card with the reason and can be retried once the cause is dealt with. Glance at this now and then: quietly absent orders are the one thing capable of making your books wrong without complaint.

Repeat notifications are dealt with. Shopify frequently sends the same order more than once. Kantivo writes each order a single time, so income is never doubled — including when a backlog arrives all at once after the machine has been off.

Currency Rates

Bill international clients in their own currency from fifteen supported options, with the rate retrieved for the date the transaction occurred. A converter is built in for quick checks, and your home-currency reporting is reconciled behind the scenes so the statements remain accurate.

Privacy Position

Specifically:

Card numbers never enter our software. Payment capture uses the processor's own hosted fields, which is what keeps you outside PCI scope.
We do not hold banking credentials. Authentication occurs at your bank via the connection provider.
Sensitive stored values are encrypted with a key belonging to your installation alone, created on first launch and never shared.
Your ledger is not transmitted. Connections pull information in; they do not push your records out.

More detail lives in Bank Connection Security.

Still Being Built

The following are under development and not usable today. They are listed for transparency about direction, not to suggest availability.

Zapier and Make — link Kantivo to thousands of other tools without writing code.
Developer API with event hooks — documented endpoints and subscribable notifications for custom work.
Square — counter takings, gratuities and card costs as itemized entries.
Sector-specific links — Clio for legal practices, Buildertrend and Procore for construction, dotloop for brokerages, Donorbox for charities.

Asking For One

What we build next is decided by what customers request. If your essential tool isn't covered, submit it via the form on the Integrations page and it enters the priority list. Submissions are read by a person, not a queue.

When Something Breaks

A linked account stopped bringing in transactions

Banks force periodic re-authentication, especially after a password change or a security update on their side. Re-link the account from the bank feed screen — transactions already imported are untouched.

Test Connection won't pass

Check that the key pair matches the mode: sandbox keys with test mode, production keys with live mode. Mixing those is far and away the most frequent cause. Also make sure the key was pasted in full without a trailing space.

Payments post but no fee appears

A fee expense account has to be nominated in the gateway configuration. If it is empty, set it under Settings → Payment Gateway Settings and subsequent payments will split properly.

An import created duplicates

Almost always either the same period was imported twice, or an account has a live feed and a manual import overlapping the same dates. Review that range, remove the duplicate batch, and settle on one method per account.

Not resolved? Get in touch through Contact and mention which connection and roughly when it stopped. That is normally enough to pinpoint it on the first response.