How to Use These Docs

A quick map before you dive into anything else — what the different kinds of docs here are for, and just as important, what they're not for.

The four kinds of docs

• Subject docs — a focused explainer on one specific topic (how shipping is calculated, how sync works, and so on). Read one of these when you need to understand a specific piece of how this app works.
• Basic / Advanced pairs — some topics have two versions. The basic doc gives you the shape of an idea, quickly, without every detail. The advanced doc goes deep — real examples, real numbers, the actual mechanics. Start with basic; go to advanced when you have a specific "wait, why does it do that?" question the basic doc didn't answer.
• FAQ docs — short, specific question-and-answer pages. Check the FAQ first when you have one specific question — it's faster than reading through a whole doc to find your answer.
• Courses — a curated list of docs for a particular role, in a sensible order. A course isn't new content of its own; it's a reading list someone already put together for you, pointing at the subject docs, basic/advanced pairs, and FAQs that matter for that role.

The most important thing to understand

These docs are not meant to have every answer. That's on purpose, not a gap to eventually fill.

They exist to do two things well:

1. Explain what's specific to this app — the things no one outside this project could possibly know, because we built them: how a calculation works here, why something looks the way it does, what's real versus a placeholder.
2. Get you far enough to ask a good, specific question somewhere else — to ChatGPT, to HubSpot's or QuickBooks' own help, to a coworker — about the general platform itself. These docs won't teach you everything about how QuickBooks or HubSpot work in general; that's a much bigger job than any doc here is trying to do, and general-purpose tools are often better at it anyway. What these docs can do is give you the right words and the right context so that question actually lands well when you ask it.

If you finish a doc here and still have a question, that's not a failure of the doc — check the FAQ, and if it's not there either, treat it as a sign you now know enough to go ask a sharper, more specific question elsewhere.