Mothernode CRM lets users sync their Invoices, POs, and Quotes, along with Customer and Vendor information, with QuickBooks Desktop (QBD) and QuickBooks Online (QBO). While the process is generally seamless and is easy to do, there are a few issues that can interrupt the syncing service that are most commonly caused by records that include special characters not permitted by QuickBooks products. The following article helps you eliminate and avoid complications caused by special characters.

Avoid Copying and Pasting Special Characters

One of the most common culprits of adding special characters into Mothernode CRM is the process of copying and pasting information from an external document, such as PDFs or Word Documents into a Mothernode transaction field, most often in the Item Name or Description. Sometimes the characters being added may not be obvious (i.e. ® or ™, further adding to problems when diagnosing the issue.

Avoid Importing Special Characters

Mothernode customers who resell vendor products often like to import their vendor product lists into their Motehrnode Inventory for the sake of convenience. When doing this, users should import any spreadsheets in a CSV format and make sure the source documents are free of any invalid characters before importing.

Special characters the appear in a customer’s name could also be a result of an import into leads and opportunities that went unchecked after the record was converted to a customer account.

Where to Avoid Using Special Characters

While special characters should be avoided in all Mothernode fields, it’s most important to avoid using special characters in fields that are used to sync information from Mothernode to QuickBooks. The following fields should not include any fields that are subject to character limitations.

• Customer Name
• Vendor Name
• Contact Name (s)
• Products and Services (Item Names and Descriptions)
• Inventory (Item Names and Descriptions)
• BOM (Item Name and Descriptions)
• Free-form (Item Name and Descriptions)
• Pricing Calculator (Item Name and Descriptions)

Special characters with limitations should be removed from the following records that may directly or indirectly contain data that could be used to sync with QuickBooks.

• Customers
• Contacts
• Leads and Opportunities
• Quotes
• Orders
• Invoices
• Purchase Orders
• Work Orders
• Cases
• Inventory
• Products and Services
• Outlook/Gmail (Mothernode Add-in)
• Mothernode Mobile

Acceptable Characters

QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online will Accept the following special characters

• Alpha-numeric (A-Z, a-z, 0-9)
• Comma (,)
• Dot or period (.)
• Question mark (?)
• At symbol (@)
• Ampersand (&)
• An exclamation point (!)
• Number/pound sign (#)
• Single quote (‘)
• Tilde (~)
• Asterisk (*)
• Space (  )
• Underscore (_)
• Minus sign/hyphen (-)
• Semi-colon (
• Plus sign (+)

QuickBooks Character Limitations (QBD and QBO)

When entering data into Mothernode CRM, comparable fields in QBD and QBO may have character limitations that will cause Mothernode to truncate data when synced to QBO or QBD. This means that some data may be clipped in order to transmit successfully. Mothernode will automatically truncate transaction data in order to successfully transmit records to QBD and QBO. This is a QuickBooks requirement when syncing data. The following list displays fields with character limits in QBO and QBD.