Connect your Shopify store

Connect your storefront so its sales, tax, and payouts flow into your books:

1. Go to Ledger › Setup › Business.
2. Find the Integrations panel and click Connect more.
3. In the Connect integration window, choose Shopify and type your store name in the Store name box. Only the part before .myshopify.com is needed, so my-store is enough; pasting the whole address, or the admin.shopify.com/store/my-store URL out of your browser bar, works too. Approve access when redirected.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce isn't offered in the Connect integration window yet. We are still testing it, and it comes back once that is done. A WooCommerce store you connected before keeps syncing as it always has, and you can still disconnect it. Until then, a WooCommerce seller can bring sales in from the store's payout reports instead.

When a store needs reconnecting

If Shopify withdraws HQ's access, syncing stops and the store's row under Integrations on Ledger › Setup › Business shows a red line saying so, with a Reconnect button beside it. Click it and approve access again. Your synced history is kept. A temporary problem shows nothing, because HQ retries it by itself.

A disconnected row stays in the list so you can reconnect it. To clear one you no longer need, click the x beside it and confirm. Anything already synced from it stays in your books.

If it is already connected to another HQ account

One store feeds one set of books. If the store you approve is already connected, and still live, on another HQ account, HQ refuses the connection and changes nothing, so its payouts never land in two places. The message says where it is connected without naming anyone else. If it belongs here, disconnect it in that account's Ledger › Setup first, then connect it again here. A store that was disconnected in the other account connects here as usual, and reconnecting it on the account that already holds it is never refused.

Selling somewhere else

HQ connects Shopify as a store today, and Stripe, Square and PayPal as payment processors. Amazon, Etsy, eBay and other marketplaces don't connect yet, and neither do processors such as Clover or Moneris.

To ask for one, open the Connect integration window and click Tell us where under the list. It opens a short form where you tick where you sell and how you get paid, and we write to you when yours is ready. In the desktop app the form opens as a tab beside your books; in a browser it opens in a new tab.

Until then, the money those channels pay you still arrives in your books as deposits on your bank feed.

When the connect finishes, a window says the store is connected and that the first sync has started; click Done. Syncing can take a few minutes, longer when there is a lot of history. An Ecommerce section appears in the sidebar, and HQ starts syncing the store straight away. The first sync brings in your last 60 days of orders, usually within a few minutes, along with your most recent payouts. After that HQ checks the store every 30 minutes for new orders, payouts and sales tax. For orders older than 60 days, use Import history on Ecommerce › Trends.

On the Free plan nothing older than 30 days is brought in, and there is no history import. Moving to a paid plan brings in, by itself, the orders from the 60 days before you connected the store and your payouts from the start of your tax year.

An order paid outside Shopify Payments (marked as paid by hand, cash on delivery, a bank transfer) is recorded as a direct sale when it syncs, unless it is dated before your books start or falls in a period you have locked. See Record orders paid outside your processor for how those are matched to the deposit.

Connecting Shopify also makes cost-of-goods tracking available. Right after the connect, HQ asks whether to set it up: Set up cost tracking opens the switch for your book, and Not now carries on. You can turn it on later from the Books Health offer card or the Setup toggle so your margins are real.

Store connect lives in Setup; the Ecommerce › Stores tab is just a health view that links back here.

Starting from the Shopify App Store

You can also start at the Shopify end. Installing TALISK_HQ from the Shopify App Store brings you back to HQ on a page that names the store you installed from, so there is nothing to type.

If you are not signed in, sign in on that page and HQ returns you to it. Then it opens Ledger › Setup with the Connect integration window already on Shopify and your store name filled in, ready to approve.

Once the store is connected, a plan billed by Shopify is picked on Shopify's own plan page, and HQ takes you there if the store has none yet. That happens again after a reinstall, or when you open the app from your Shopify admin without a plan. If you already pay for HQ directly, you keep that plan and are never sent there. Installing HQ on a second store of yours works the same way: that store picks its own plan, and your account gets the highest plan among your stores.

One thing worth knowing:

• If you are creating an HQ account for the first time, you will be asked to set your books up before you get to Setup. Finish that, then go to Ledger › Setup and connect the store from there.

Connecting from the desktop app

The approval step opens in your normal web browser rather than inside the HQ window, so your saved password and any session you already have with the provider are available. Approve there and the desktop app comes back to the front with the store connected.

You do not need to sign in to HQ in that browser. It only hands your approval back to the app, and the app finishes the connection with your own HQ sign-in, so a link someone else sends you cannot connect their store to your business.

An older copy of the desktop app finishes in the browser instead. If that browser reaches the internet a different way from the app (a VPN, or iCloud Private Relay in Safari), the confirmation page asks you to sign in to HQ there with the same account you use in the app. Updating the app removes that step.

How many stores you can connect

Your plan sets how many online stores you can connect. Solo connects none, Free and Pro connect one store; Business and Partner connect as many as you like.

On Pro, Business and Partner, payment connections are never limited. Stripe, PayPal, Square and your bank connections don't count towards this and aren't capped on Pro, Business or Partner, on purpose: if HQ couldn't see where your money actually arrives, your books would be wrong rather than smaller.

Solo is for one person with no store: it connects no online store and one payment processor, and its bank connections are not limited.

The Free plan is for trying HQ on your own business, so it connects one online store, one payment processor and one bank connection per business. Upgrading lifts the processor and bank limits.

A few things that follow from that:

• The limit counts stores you have connected right now. Disconnect one and it stops counting, so you can swap a store for a different one without upgrading.
• Reconnecting a store you already have is never blocked, even if you are at your limit. That's how you fix a store whose access has expired.

If you're at your limit, HQ tells you so when you try to connect, and you can either disconnect the store you're replacing or move to a plan that connects more.

Disconnecting

You can withdraw HQ's access whenever you like:

1. Go to Ledger › Setup › Business.
2. Find the connection in the Integrations panel.
3. Click Disconnect beside it, then choose what to do with the saved connection.

Either way HQ stops syncing and can no longer read the account, and nothing already in your books is removed: the orders, customers and payouts synced so far are kept, and every journal entry stays exactly as posted. Those are your accounting records, and you need to keep them.

The two answers differ only in what happens to the saved connection:

• Disconnect keeps it, so reconnecting later is one click.
• Disconnect and delete credentials removes the saved key as well, so reconnecting means approving again at the provider. Choose this if you are leaving, or if you think the key may have been exposed.

Keeping it is the default on purpose: a provider can refuse to re-authorize for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and a disconnect you cannot undo is worse than one you can. Neither answer touches your sales history.

Once it is disconnected the row says Disconnected and offers Reconnect instead, with your store name already filled in.

Disconnecting here does not uninstall the HQ app from your Shopify admin. If you want it gone from Shopify too, remove it under Settings › Apps and sales channels in Shopify. Removing it there also marks the store Disconnected in HQ.

If the store keeps sending sales

Disconnecting stops HQ reading the store, but a store can keep sending its new orders to HQ on its own (a WooCommerce store does this through the webhooks you added to it). HQ keeps the orders, refunds and payouts the store sends, so no sale is lost while you decide, and they reach your books when you reconnect. It does not keep the store's customer details in that time: an order is kept without the buyer's profile or email.

About two weeks before HQ would stop, it tells you on the Books Health panel and by email, naming the store and the date: reconnect before that date, or HQ stops keeping what the store sends. The date is 60 days after you disconnected, and never less than two weeks after that notice. After it, the card counts how many events from the store were not kept.

To stop a store sending, remove HQ from it. For WooCommerce that is WooCommerce › Settings › Advanced › Webhooks, because HQ holds a read-only key and cannot remove them itself. For Shopify, uninstall HQ under Settings › Apps and sales channels.

If you reconnect later, even after the stop date, HQ reads the orders and refunds placed while it was disconnected back in. An order it already has is updated, never counted twice.