RemitParse is built to be running the same day you sign up — no implementation project, no sales call, no lengthy onboarding. This guide walks through every configuration step so your first remittance posts to QuickBooks correctly from the start.
In this guide
1. Sign up and start your free trial
Every plan starts with a 30-day free trial — no credit card required. Go to remitparse.com/signup, enter your name, company, email, and password. You'll be in the app in under two minutes.
During signup you'll choose a plan — Starter, Growth, or Pro. If you're not sure, start with Growth. It includes direct QuickBooks payment posting, Auto-Coding, and invoice matching, which are the features that save the most time. You can change plans anytime from your account page.
Once you're in, RemitParse will send a confirmation email with a link to invite additional team members. Invite links are scoped to your company account — anyone who signs up via your link is automatically added to your workspace without needing a separate signup flow.
2. Connect QuickBooks Online via OAuth
Go to Settings → QuickBooks and click Connect to QuickBooks. You'll be redirected to Intuit's login screen, where you authorize RemitParse to connect to your QBO company.
Why this is secure: RemitParse uses Intuit's official OAuth 2.0 authorization protocol — the same standard used by major accounting integrations like Gusto, Shopify, and HubSpot. RemitParse never sees or stores your QBO username or password. You grant access through Intuit's own login screen, and you can revoke it at any time directly from within QuickBooks under Settings → Authorized Apps. For more on how RemitParse handles your data, see our security page.
After you authorize, RemitParse pulls your QBO customer list, Chart of Accounts, Products/Services, Classes, and Locations. This data is used to populate the dropdowns in your profile configuration — nothing is written to QBO until you explicitly post a payment.
QuickBooks Online connection is required for Growth and Pro plans to use invoice matching and direct payment posting. Starter plan users can still configure profiles and export ready-to-import CSVs without a live QBO connection.
3. Create your first customer profile
A customer profile is the core configuration unit in RemitParse. It maps a distributor or retailer's remittance identity to your QBO setup, and saves all the defaults you'd otherwise have to re-enter every cycle. You create it once; RemitParse uses it automatically on every upload for that customer.
Go to Settings → Customers and click New Profile. The key fields:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Remit Customer Name | The name that appears on the remittance PDF or Excel file — e.g., "United Natural Foods, Inc." RemitParse uses this to auto-select the right profile on upload. |
| QBO Customer | The matching customer in your QuickBooks Online account. This is who the credit memo, invoices, and payment are posted against. Populated from your live QBO customer list. |
| Credit Memo Prefix | The prefix applied to credit memo DocNumbers in QBO — e.g., "UNFI-" produces credit memos numbered UNFI-338499. Keeps QBO records easy to trace back to the source remittance. |
| Deposit Account | The Cash or Other Current Asset account in QBO where payments from this customer land. See section 6 for more detail. |
| EPD % | Your early payment discount rate with this distributor. When set, RemitParse auto-calculates the EPD line on each remittance rather than you entering it manually. See section 8. |
Profiles are saved per company account and are available to all team members. If you work with multiple distributors — UNFI, KeHE, Walmart, Kroger, Target — you'll create one profile per customer. Most teams have 3–8 active profiles.
4. Map deduction types to QBO Products/Services
Every deduction you code in RemitParse needs a Type — Scans, Shortage, MCB Chargeback, Early Payment Discount, Retail Ads, and so on. Each Type maps to a specific Product/Service in QuickBooks, which determines what GL account the deduction hits on your P&L.
Go to Settings → Deduction Types. RemitParse ships with a default set of common CPG deduction types already configured:
| RemitParse Type | QBO Product/Service | GL Account (example) |
|---|---|---|
| Early Payment Discount | EPD | Sales Discounts |
| Scans | Scans | Trade Spend - Scans |
| Shortage | Shortage | Chargebacks - Shortage |
| MCB Chargeback | MCB | Trade Spend - MCB |
| Retail Ads | Retail Ads | Trade Spend - Retail Ads |
| EDLP | EDLP | Trade Spend - EDLP |
The default types are a starting point — the QBO Product/Service names in the right column need to match the actual Products/Services in your QuickBooks account. If your books use "Trade Promotions" instead of "Scans," update the mapping. You can also add entirely new types to match your specific trade spend vocabulary. These mappings are company-wide and apply across all customer profiles.
Why this matters for your P&L: The deduction type mapping is what routes each deduction dollar to the right line on your income statement. Getting this right from the start means your trade spend reporting is clean and consistent without any manual journal entry cleanup at month-end.
5. Enable Class & Location coding
If your QuickBooks company has Class tracking or Location tracking (called "Department" in the QBO API) enabled, RemitParse can apply Class and Location to every deduction line on the credit memo.
In each customer profile, you'll find Class and Location dropdowns populated from your live QBO data. You can set a default Class and Location per profile — for example, all UNFI deductions default to Class: Grocery and Location: West Region. Defaults apply automatically on upload and can be overridden row-by-row in the grid before posting.
Common ways CPG brands use Class and Location in this context:
- Class by channel — Grocery, Natural, Conventional, Club, Drug. Lets you see trade spend by channel without a separate spreadsheet.
- Class by product line — if you track multiple SKU families under the same QBO company.
- Location by sales region — West, East, Central, National. Particularly useful for UNFI where deductions originate from different distribution regions.
- Location by retail banner — some brands track deductions at the retailer level using Location rather than Context field.
If Class or Location tracking isn't enabled in your QBO account, those fields simply don't appear in RemitParse — no configuration needed.
6. Set deposit accounts by customer
When RemitParse posts a payment to QuickBooks, it needs to know which bank account (or other asset account) the cash lands in. This is the Deposit Account field in each customer profile.
The dropdown is populated from your QBO Chart of Accounts and shows all Cash and Other Current Asset accounts. Select the account where ACH payments from each distributor are deposited. For most brands this is a single operating account, but if you route different distributors through different bank accounts — or use a clearing account for matching purposes — you can set it individually per profile.
Common setup: Most brands use one operating checking account for all distributors. Set the same deposit account on every profile and you're done. If a payment ever lands in the wrong account in QBO, the first place to check is the deposit account setting on that customer's profile.
7. Turn on Auto-Coding Growth & Pro
Auto-Coding is the feature that makes remittance processing genuinely faster over time. It's available on Growth and Pro plans and can be enabled per profile under Settings → Customers → [Profile] → Auto-Coding.
Here's how it works: after you export a remittance, RemitParse stores the deduction coding decisions you made — Type, Context, and the invoice number patterns associated with them. On the next upload for the same customer, it uses that history to pre-fill Type and Context on matching rows before you even open the grid.
The matching logic uses a composite scoring approach — it looks at invoice number structure, deduction description text, retailer context, and amount patterns. It gets more accurate with each cycle because it's learning from your actual decisions, not a generic rule set.
In practice, the first time you process a UNFI remittance you'll code all deductions manually. By the third or fourth cycle, most rows come in already coded. Reviewing and confirming a pre-coded grid takes a fraction of the time of coding from scratch.
When to enable it: Turn Auto-Coding on after your first successful export for a given customer. It needs at least one export to learn from. Once enabled, it applies on every subsequent upload automatically — there's nothing to retrigger.
8. Advanced features: Sub-Customer and EPD %
Sub-Customer assignment
Some distributor payments cover invoices that belong to more than one customer in QuickBooks. Two common situations:
- Walmart + Sam's Club on one ACH — Walmart Stores and Sam's Club Stores often pay on a combined ACH, but your QBO tracks them as separate customers (or a parent with sub-customers). RemitParse lets you assign individual rows on the remittance to the correct QBO sub-customer so each invoice posts against the right record.
- UNFI regional sub-customers — some brands track UNFI East, UNFI West, and UNFI Central as child customers under a parent UNFI record in QBO. A single UNFI remittance can include deductions from multiple regions. Sub-customer assignment lets you route those rows to the right child rather than lumping everything under the parent.
Sub-customer is configured row-by-row in the grid before posting. A sub-customer column appears in the grid when you enable it on the profile — select the appropriate QBO sub-customer from the dropdown on each row that needs it. The rest of the rows default to the primary QBO customer set on the profile.
Early Payment Discount (EPD) percentage
Many distributors offer an early payment discount — a small percentage reduction on the invoice amount in exchange for paying before the standard net terms. UNFI's EPD, for example, shows as a separate line on the remittance (or embedded in the discount column) rather than as a per-invoice deduction.
When you set an EPD % on a customer profile, RemitParse uses it to auto-calculate the EPD line on each upload. Instead of manually entering the discount amount each time, the calculation runs automatically against the eligible invoice balances and the result appears as a pre-coded deduction row — already typed as Early Payment Discount, already balanced in the reconciliation formula.
This eliminates one of the more tedious manual steps on remittances where EPD is calculated on gross invoice amounts rather than stated explicitly. Set it once in the profile; RemitParse handles the math on every upload.
Your setup checklist
Before you process your first remittance, make sure you've completed these steps:
Related guides
Once you're set up, these guides cover the actual remittance workflow in detail:
- UNFI Cash Application with RemitParse — Full Walkthrough
- KeHE Deductions Explained — Supplier Guide to Remittance Processing
- How to Process UNFI Remittance Advice in QuickBooks
- Journal Entry Import for QuickBooks Online — upload a CSV or Excel file and post journal entries without re-keying
- CPG Deduction Software: TPM vs. Cash Application — do you have a planning problem or an accounting problem?
- How RemitParse Works — full product walkthrough
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