WooCommerce FreshBooks Updated to v3.6.0

We’ve got a quick update to start the week off for you 🙂 WooCommerce FreshBooks has been updated to version 3.6 to add an important feature for merchants syncing payments between WooCommerce and FreshBooks.

Merchants can now map their WooCommerce payment gateways to FreshBooks payment methods, which will tell FreshBooks how to track payments made from your WooCommerce store.

Mapping Payment Gateways to FreshBooks Methods

For the most part, WooCommerce FreshBooks guessed pretty well at which FreshBooks payment method to assign to invoices paid via WooCommerce. However, the mapping didn’t work perfectly for every merchant and every payment gateway (for example, eChecks gateways were sometimes miscategorized), so we’ve built in a UI for you to map gateways manually.

The WooCommerce FreshBooks settings will let you determine which FreshBooks payment method to label on an invoice based on the WooCommerce payment gateway used to pay for the order.

Mapping FreshBooks Tax Rates

We’d also looked into mapping tax rates with WooCommerce FreshBooks, as we frequently gotten some version of this question:

The integration is creating the tax as a separate line item on the invoice, as opposed to applying tax to existing line items. Can we apply the tax to existing line items so users can generate reports on this information?

We spent a lot of time looking into compatibility for FreshBooks tax rates in this release since the way WooCommerce and FreshBooks handle taxes is different.

WooCommerce allows you to set up multiple tax rates, while FreshBooks only allows a maximum of 2 taxes per line item. Realistically, many WooCommerce stores will have more than 2 tax rates configured, and thus we can’t just force them into line item taxes.

Based on a recommendation from the FreshBooks team, we tried to set the tax line item, then tie this to the FreshBooks rate. Basically, we’d pass the tax total and the plugin would say, “Hey, this is the total to use for XYZ tax rate on this invoice.”

However, FreshBooks tries to apply the rate to this line item total instead of using the total for the tax. There’s no way for us to override this from the plugin side to force FreshBooks to recognize this as the right tax amount, so until FreshBooks supports more than 2 rates per line item, the plugin will continue to handle taxes as individual line items.

Upcoming for FreshBooks

You’ll see another update for FreshBooks shortly, along with all of our other WooCommerce plugins, as we’re starting WooCommerce 2.5 compatibility this week! We’re in the beta 2 phase for version 2.5, so it’s a great idea to start testing if you have a staging site and report any issues.

Once we’ve deployed extension updates, please be sure to update all extensions before WooCommerce itself! We’ll be deploying these updates after the Christmas holiday and prior to the release of WooCommerce 2.5 in January.