How to Generate UK Dividend Vouchers from QuickBooks Online

If you run a UK limited company on QuickBooks Online and pay yourself in dividends, every payment needs a dividend voucher behind it.
QuickBooks records the money leaving the bank. It does not draft the voucher, the board minutes or the resolution — so those documents tend to live in a Word template, a folder on someone's laptop, or nowhere at all.

This guide explains:

• what a compliant dividend voucher needs to include
• why manual voucher workflows break down
• how Dividendly connects to QuickBooks Online and posts each dividend with the voucher attached
• the QuickBooks-specific details worth knowing before you connect

If you use Xero instead, read the Xero guide — the workflow is the same, the accounting mechanics differ. For the full reference — what is read from QuickBooks, back-fill, delete behaviour and FAQs — see the QuickBooks Online integration guide.

What should a UK dividend voucher include?

A voucher should clearly show:

• company name and registration number
• registered office address
• dividend payment date
• shareholder name
• number and class of shares
• dividend per share and total dividend amount
• tax year and financial period
• a unique voucher reference

GOV.UK's legal minimum is shorter: the date, the company name, the names of the shareholders being paid and the amount of the dividend. The rest is good practice that makes each voucher easy to check against the minutes and the books — the dividend voucher explainer goes through each field.

For official context, see HMRC's guidance on tax on dividends and running a limited company.

The problem with manual voucher workflows

Most manual systems fail the same way:

1. Re-typing: company and shareholder details are copied from QuickBooks into a template by hand.
2. Drifting figures: per-share amounts go wrong when shareholdings change.
3. Documents produced late — or not at all — then reconstructed at year-end.
4. No link to the books: the voucher sits in a folder; the purchase sits in QuickBooks; nothing ties them together.
5. Time: each voucher takes far longer than it should, and an accountant with a client book feels it ten times over.

Connecting QuickBooks Online

Dividendly connects to QuickBooks Online through Intuit's OAuth flow. A few things to know:

• It is a connection, not a sign-in. You sign in to Dividendly with a magic link (or Sign in with Xero), then connect your QuickBooks company from inside the app. There is no "Sign in with Intuit".
• One scope. Dividendly requests a single QuickBooks scope, com.intuit.quickbooks.accounting. It does not read payroll or payments. The full list of what is and is not read is on the security page.
• Confirm your financial-year end. QuickBooks only stores the month your financial year starts, so during connect you confirm the year-end date. Dividendly uses it to place each voucher in the right financial period.
• One provider per company. A Dividendly company connects to one QuickBooks company (or one Xero organisation). To switch, disconnect one and connect the other.

Once connected, choose the bank account dividends are paid from and the dividend equity account they are posted against.

Mapping shareholders to vendors

QuickBooks has no "shareholder" record, so Dividendly maps each shareholder to a QuickBooks Vendor. Pick the existing vendor for each shareholder; if there isn't one yet, add it in QuickBooks first (QuickBooks UK may list vendors as suppliers). From then on, every dividend posted for that shareholder lands against the right payee in your books.

Add each shareholder's shareholding once. Per-share amounts are worked out from it on every run.

Running a dividend

Plan a payout, allocate it across shareholders by shareholding, and Dividendly does the rest in one go:

1. Drafts a voucher for each shareholder with the fields above.
2. Generates board minutes and a dividend declaration (interim) or shareholder resolution (final), according to the document defaults you set per company.
3. Posts a Purchase (an expense with a "No VAT" line) to your chosen bank account and dividend equity account in QuickBooks.
4. Attaches the voucher PDF to that Purchase.
5. Emails each shareholder their documents once the e-signature step is done.

The audit trail ends up where your accountant already looks: on the transaction in QuickBooks, not in an email thread.

Catching up on dividends already paid

If dividends have gone through QuickBooks without vouchers, Dividendly can back-fill them. It reads past Purchases in a date window you choose, and drafts a voucher for each one you select. You preview the PDF before generating, and every voucher is kept in voucher history.

Historical back-fill needs a connected provider — it reads from QuickBooks or Xero — so it is not available in documents-only mode.

Two QuickBooks-specific behaviours to know

Deleting a voucher from an upcoming run permanently deletes the Purchase. QuickBooks has no void for Purchases, so when you delete a voucher whose payment Dividendly posted, it removes the linked Purchase and its attachment outright. The in-app dialog says so before you confirm. (In Xero the equivalent transaction is voided rather than deleted.)

Reconnect roughly every 100 days. Intuit's refresh tokens last about 100 days. Dividendly tracks the expiry and shows a reconnect prompt before the connection lapses — a couple of clicks, no re-setup.

Security and data handling

Your QuickBooks connection tokens are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), and generated voucher PDFs live in private storage behind short-lived signed links — no public URLs. Access is default-deny and scoped to your company. You can revoke Dividendly's access at any time from Intuit's "Manage connected apps", and the app disconnects itself if you cancel.

Final take

If your books are in QuickBooks Online, a dividend voucher should not be a separate chore. Connect once, map shareholders to vendors, and each dividend goes out as a posted Purchase with the voucher, minutes and resolution attached and emailed.

Integrations are included on every Dividendly plan — connecting QuickBooks costs nothing extra. See the features page for the full workflow, or the pricing page to pick a tier.