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We are looking at providing Quickbooks integration into a BI tool we have developed that analyses a third party system. (we've never used Quickbooks before)

The basic requirements are to export the GL information by GL Account, Amount, Customer, date, transaction type etc and load this information into a SQL DB.

This product will be installed on potentially thousands of customers from many different businesses with various versions of Quickbooks both desktop and online etc...

I'm wondering given licensing considerations and other issues what would be the best way forward and what problems you might foresee.(I'm foreseeing many :))

Options I'm aware of:

Use qbXML Use QBFC Use Third Party tools ODBC wrapper tools.

Any advice would be awesome.

Thanks

bmargulies
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chuck
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1 Answers1

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Let me start by saying I work for one of the third party companies mentioned below so make what you will of my bias.

QuickBooks is a fairly specialized application and if it is not the core of your product I would recommend using one of the third party tools. They are all royalty free and for the price range $300 - $700, they offer considerable value in the support and ease of use they provide.

The easiest to use will be the RSSBus QuickBooks ADO.NET provider or QODBC (ODBC wrapper around QuickBooks) or since they present QuickBooks as a relational database, which is the easiest for a new developer to grasp and work with. Since you intend to load this information into a SQL db anyway, you further benefit from their work in modelling QuickBooks data as tables.

QODBC: http://www.qodbc.com/schema.htm RSSBus QucikBooks ADO.NET Provider: http://rssbus.com/ado/quickbooks/

Scott T
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  • Thanks for your help Scott. I've managed to get all the info we require for now using QBFC however I'm not sure how well this will work in the real world with multiple versions of quickbooks etc. I'm still considering changing what I have done and use the ODBC wrapper. To me it sounds more future proof. Are there many difficulties in deploying the ODBC driver and setting up the connection? We want the installation and setup aimed at non-tech finance/account users and want it to be unassisted. Is that realistic? Thanks again. – chuck Jun 24 '11 at 03:26
  • You should be aware that the QuickBooks ODBC wrapper uses the QuickBooks SDK, so any compatibiliy issues you would run into with QBFC would still be present with the ODBC. Setup issues with the ODBC driver are identical to the authorizations that must be performed with an SDK application. You haven't mentioned the Intuit Partner Platform - I would definetly take a look at that option if I were you. – Paul Keister Jul 08 '11 at 05:04