Keep QuickBooks. Add the marine layer it was never built to have.
$200 refundable deposit. $499/mo for life.
QuickBooks Online is great accounting software — and a poor fit for marine inventory, trades, flooring, and service. HelmDMS adds those layers natively and posts clean entries back to QuickBooks. Your accountant keeps their tool. You stop the journal-entry workarounds. The boats finally have hulls, the trades stop overstating revenue, and the parts counter gets a real POS.
Not opinion — documented from Intuit's own community threads, QuickBooks help docs, and accounting consultants who specialize in dealer accounting.
QBO inventory is SKU-per-item. It can't prevent users from picking the wrong serial, and it has no fields for HIN, engine serial, or trailer VIN. Intuit's own help thread and accounting consultants confirm the gap.
A boat dealer on Intuit Community documented exactly this: a $100K sale with an $80K trade hits the P&L as $100K revenue because there's no native trade-swap workflow — only journal-entry workarounds. See the thread.
Dealers ask Intuit how to enter manufacturer-billed boats covered by a finance company. The accepted answers are bespoke journal-entry workarounds — no payoff, curtailment, or floor-plan-interest tracking. Community thread, plus long-form write-up from a QB consultant.
QBO has no Concern / Cause / Correction structure, no tech assignment, no status board, and no way to consume parts against a specific WO. Documented limitation. Most dealers use a paper notebook and transcribe to QBO later.
QuickBooks Pro/Premier capped at 14,500 items, and marine parts catalogs across multiple OEMs blow through that fast. Price changes are one row at a time. Reference.
No barcode scanning, no native Stripe Terminal, no parts-counter checkout flow. QBO invoicing isn't a POS, so dealers run a separate POS or rekey totals into the card terminal.
QuickBooks has no concept of a public listing, photo set, or feed URL. Marine dealers end up paying separately for syndication tools (Marine Logic, BoatWizard) on top of QBO — and then maintaining inventory in three places.
QuickBooks is the right book of record. It just isn't a marine DMS. Keep what works. Add what's missing.
QBO sees a $90,000 boat the same way it sees a $4 hose clamp — a line item. There's no HIN field, no engine serial linkage, no trailer VIN, no ownership chain, no service history. The Intuit community is full of marine dealers asking for serial-number tracking and getting pointed at workarounds and third-party apps. HelmDMS adds the unit record QB is missing — every boat as a first-class object with all its identifiers, prior owners, and service history — and pushes the eventual sale (with proper revenue and COGS) back to QBO.
The Intuit community is full of marine dealers asking how to record trades without inflating revenue. The canonical thread walks through the problem: $100K sale, $80K trade, P&L shows $100K revenue. HelmDMS handles the swap natively — used boat into inventory at the agreed ACV, new boat out at gross — and posts clean journal entries to QuickBooks so your accountant doesn't have to chase clearing accounts at month-end. The number on the income statement is the number you actually earned.
Track each unit's floorplan payoff, curtailment schedule, and interest accruals against your lender. When the boat sells, the payoff fires and the GL entry lands in QBO automatically. No more spreadsheet of which boats are still owed against which lender, and no more journal entries copy-pasted from consultant blog posts. The bookkeeper sees a complete, reconciled flooring sub-ledger in HelmDMS, with the corresponding entries already in QuickBooks.
Concern / Cause / Correction work orders. Tech time clocking. Multi-vendor parts catalog (one part, three vendor SKUs, three prices). Barcode scanning at the counter. Stripe Terminal. SMS "your boat is ready." Caller ID popup. Every dealer Frankenstein add-on — replaced by one system that posts to QuickBooks at the end of the day. You stop paying a separate POS, a separate SMS bolt-on (Kenect, Podium at ~$300/mo), and a separate scheduler.
Inventory in HelmDMS syndicates to Boat Trader, YachtWorld, Boats.com, your branded dealer site, and your Facebook Marketplace listings. QuickBooks does none of that. Marine Logic and BoatWizard charge separately for it — we include it. Update the price or the photos in HelmDMS once, and the feed updates everywhere within minutes. The accounting still happens in QBO. The marketing stops being a manual job.
That's the point. The folks at the front desk and in the service bay work in HelmDMS. The bookkeeper opens QuickBooks Online and sees clean, reconciled entries — sales receipts, invoices, item-level COGS, vendor bills, customer payments — already posted. No retraining. No CSV imports. No "what's this clearing account for?" emails. Your existing CPA workflow keeps working exactly the way it does today.
No — and on purpose. HelmDMS complements QuickBooks Online. We sync sales receipts, invoices, customers, vendors, and items to QBO automatically. Your bookkeeper keeps working in QuickBooks exactly like they do today.
QuickBooks Online (Essentials, Plus, or Advanced). We connect via the official Intuit API. If you're on QuickBooks Desktop, we'll help you move to QBO as part of onboarding — most marine dealers we talk to are planning that move anyway.
We map HelmDMS to your existing chart of accounts during onboarding. New boat sales, used boat sales, parts revenue, service labor, floorplan interest, trade-in clearing — each goes to the GL account you already use. Your CPA reviews the mapping. Nothing surprises them at year-end.
The deal in HelmDMS captures the new-boat sale price, the trade-in ACV, the financing, and any cash difference. We post the new-boat revenue at gross, the trade-in onto the books as used inventory at ACV, and the customer's net payment — all to the right accounts. No clearing-account cleanup. No journal-entry workarounds.
Yes. Per-unit payoff balance, curtailment schedule, and floor-plan interest accrual — tracked against each lender. When a unit sells, the payoff posts automatically. You can reconcile your floor-plan sub-ledger to the lender statement without exporting to Excel.
2–3 weeks from agreement to first live transaction. We pull customers, items, and vendors from QuickBooks Online directly, and we import your unit (boat) and parts data from wherever it lives — usually a spreadsheet. You don't touch a CSV.
15-minute demo, with your own QuickBooks data on screen. Or reserve a founding-dealer slot — $200 refundable deposit, $499/mo for life.
$200 refundable deposit. Locks in $499/mo for life.