Customers, Contracts, or Invoices with Replaced Invalid Characters

Maxio's QuickBooks integration dashboard can surface three separate alerts: Customers With Replaced Invalid Characters, Contracts With Replaced Invalid Characters, and Invoices With Replaced Invalid Characters. Each one lists records where Maxio replaced a character it couldn't read with a placeholder instead of rejecting the record outright. This is Maxio's own behavior on receiving the data, and it's different from an active sync failure where QuickBooks Desktop itself refuses a record for containing an unsupported character.

Why Maxio replaces the character instead of rejecting the record

An application connected to Maxio, most often QuickBooks Desktop, can use an older character set and send Maxio a character that isn't supported in modern web applications. The origin of these invalid characters is typically a legacy Windows-based product where different character sets have been supported over the years, which is also why the bad character is nearly impossible to spot by eye on the source computer: it looks fine there. Maxio decodes the QuickBooks Desktop data it receives as UTF-8, and when it hits a byte it can't decode, it substitutes a distinguishable placeholder, =`=, for that byte and accepts the rest of the record rather than failing the whole sync.

Example: a Customer named Universidad de Cañón, sent with invalid versions of the accented letters ñ and ó, arrives in Maxio as Universidad de Ca====n.

The ñ itself is a valid character. What's actually invalid is a similar-looking but different byte, stored in a legacy system such as QuickBooks Desktop, that can display like the same accented letter without being one.

Maxio checks for this placeholder across Customer, Contract, and Invoice fields synced from QuickBooks, including name, address, contact, and email fields, which is why the alert can appear on any of the three record types.

Correct the character in QuickBooks Desktop and resync

Because Maxio only mirrors what QuickBooks Desktop sends it, the correction has to happen on the QuickBooks Desktop side.

To clear a Replaced Invalid Characters alert

1. Open the flagged Customer, Job, or Invoice in QuickBooks Desktop and find the field containing the placeholder text.
2. Delete the affected character and retype it directly in QuickBooks Desktop.
3. Save the record in QuickBooks Desktop.
4. In Maxio, use Sync Now, or wait for the next scheduled sync, so Maxio pulls the corrected value.

Related information

For the active sync failure that happens when QuickBooks Desktop rejects a record outright instead of accepting it with a placeholder, see QuickBooks Desktop Sync Issue: Invalid String. The String may contain unsupported or illegal chars.