QuickBooks AccountQuery - FullName doesn't include parent name

Question

I have an app that syncronizes with QuickBooks using qbXml and the Intuit Web Connector.

I've noticed some unusual behavior when querying accounts. According to the spec, an account's FullName should include the names of any of its ancestors, separated by colons. Like "grandparent:parent:account".

In this one particular case, however, I'm getting a return from AccountQuery where the account clearly has a parent but the FullName does not reflect the parent's name. This only happens for one particular user, QB 2012 Pro.

Is there a setting or circumstance that causes QB to shift gears and not include the parent name in the FullName of an account?

Here's an example of an account with a fishy FullName (some info changed for privacy).

<AccountRet>
  <ListID>800000BD-1328833123</ListID>
  <TimeCreated>2012-02-09T18:20:40-06:00</TimeCreated>
  <TimeModified>2013-02-18T10:49:29-06:00</TimeModified>
  <EditSequence>1361206169</EditSequence>
  <Name>My Account</Name>
  <FullName>My Account</FullName>
  <IsActive>true</IsActive>
  <ParentRef>
    <ListID>80000037-1324501345</ListID>
    <FullName>Parent Account</FullName>
  </ParentRef>
  <Sublevel>1</Sublevel>
  <AccountType>Income</AccountType>
  <AccountNumber>5025.2</AccountNumber>
  <Balance>9.99</Balance>
  <TotalBalance>9.99</TotalBalance>
  <CashFlowClassification>None</CashFlowClassification>
</AccountRet>

That is certainly fishy... did you try maybe being logged in to QuickBooks as another user, and see if it changes? That looks like a QuickBooks bug to me. — Keith Palmer Jr., Feb 18 '13 at 20:59
One of my users has the exact same problem with our application running against QB Enterprise 2013. The same also happens with a CustomDetailReportQueryRq summarized by Account: where other QB editions (including Pro & Premier 2013) return a Fullname it only returns the account Name. If I can't retrieve the Chart of Accounts list, our application is toast. How do we get this reported to Intuit? — Mark Wilsdorf, Apr 26 '13 at 12:58

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 26 '13 at 20:11

This situation is caused by the user having the following Preference turned on in QuickBooks:

Edit > Preferences > Accounting > Company Preferences > Show lowest subaccount only

So you have two choices:

(1) Get the user to turn off that preference, or

(2) Use the ParentRef data to link each AccountRet to its parent Account.

Thanks to Karl Irvin for a heads-up which helped me solve this.

QuickBooks AccountQuery - FullName doesn't include parent name

1 Answers1