Accounting and Quickbooks integration thoughts?

Business
1

  1. How important is quickbooks integration to ecommerce software?

  2. Would it make more sense to have accounting built-in to the ecommerce software, or to have the have the accounting software on the same server so you don’t have to mess with web-services?

  3. Seems to me that QB integration would be tricky. There are several versions of QB, including online versions, and they change every year. It is hard for me to image that the enterprise version would work the same as the pro version.

  4. As I understand it, outside the USA and Canada, QB is not that popular.

  5. I know that QB is popular, but there are so many other accounting systems, I wonder if it might make more sense to download data into an excel spreadsheet, or something?

  6. Do any free ecommerce applications really work with QB? I think ubercart, and zencart, sort-of works with QB. Does OSCommerce really work with QB?

2

it is very important to have an integrated quickbooks and ecommerce module for your internet business. Not only it saves you from usual hassles but also is effective in saving a lot of time and money.

there are several providers in this space bu one i have been using for four years now is real time data services http://www.myrealdata.com

for a home based accounting professional like me it’s the best solution.

3

QB is a tricky integration which is why
so many application simply avoid it.

For many folks, QB is a starting point
to evaluate an ecommerce platform so
if you don’t have it, you can elimiate these
people from being potential customers.

FreshBooks is an easier integration and
has some really nice features as an
alternative to QB

4

If you need advanced Quickbooks integration, I recommend Quickbooks eCC module from Webgility http://www.webgility.com

> Do any free ecommerce applications really work with QB?
> I think ubercart, and zencart, sort-of works with QB. Does
> OSCommerce really work with QB?

In many free and fee-based e-commerce applications, it is possible to export orders to Quickbooks format .IFF

5

I purchased it in December and haven’t started using it until just about a week ago. Depending on how complex your store is, eCC can be a good thing. For example, I didn’t realize that it didn’t handle multiple deposit to accounts on sales receipts. e.g., If someone pays with Paypal, the sales receipt should deposit directly to the paypal bank account in QB. But if someone pays with a visa card directly, through authorize.net, the sales receipt should deposit to undeposited funds for settlement at the end of the day.

Another thing I found annoying was that you have to process your orders in the order of the steps they show (1. Process Payment, 2. Ship, 3. Post to QB, 4. Post to store) Well, if you’re like us and you record your sales receipt as the first step, print it to include IN the package, and do your settlements at the end of the day, then you can see how this workflow doesn’t work. They say that they’re going to introduce override ability in the steps in the next version.

Whatever you do, absolutely do not buy it until you are ready to start using it because they are a real pain when it comes to support after the 30 days after you purchase it. They want you to purchase the $300 annual support plan even if your support question is related to a bug. I think of the support plan as something you purchase if you need help with the features of the software, not when your license file suddenly stops working, or shipping labels don’t print correctly.

I will say that when I point this out to them, they do help, after trying to push the support plan. I will purchase it when the next version comes out.

All that said, it’s really nice to just click a button and see the sales receipt appear in quickbooks without any copying and pasting, etc. So in the end, when everything is working, it’s well worth it. I’m still working my way to that point. Other simpler shops seem to have no trouble based on what I’ve read…

6

Have you set this up yet? I have Interspire shopping cart and something like eCC is seriously needed at this point. We are manually printing shipping labels and doing accounting in excel. This seems very time consuming. First thing I need to do is use and learn about quickbooks i think.

7

There are a number of relatively new accounting products that are purely web based. I would expect that integrating one of those with other web based processing would be far easier than trying to integrate a separate application.

Another consideration is that accounting software is country specific since accounting requirements vary from one country to another (mostly in terms of what recording needs to be done to be able to extract info for tax reporting).

8

  1. Not really that important IMO. you really just need to record your end of the month total sales in QB. (Unless you want to have all customer info in QB for whatever reason)

  2. I would have them seperate. Its cleaner. Unless you are a large corp and need seemless integration. But then you would be looking at an ERP for several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

My 2 cents

9

Did you ask this before? If not, someone else asked the same questions some months ago. Not important or useful to me, maartenvr’s got the idea.

10

I’m (still) planning to use eCC (webgility.com) with LiveCart (livecart.com) It should be a good match :slight_smile: