Integrating QuickBooks with your e-commerce site

Question

I've recently been tasked with integrating QuickBooks with a custom built e-commerce site. What is the most painless way to go about integrating QuickBooks with my code? Are there any F/OSS or commercial software packages available that will simplify this process? Are there any F/OSS shopping cart solutions out there that include support for a QuickBooks accounting backend, are mature and stable enough for use on a moderately large e-commerce site, and provide all of the support for skinning and customization I may need?

I am looking for PHP solutions specifically, though I would be curious to see what is out there for any language.

Answer 1

First, this is the key: the QuickBooks Web Connector. It's the glue between the web app and QuickBooks.

For Rails, there is Zach Chandler's QuickBooks Integration Plugin. I don't know of any PHP specific ones, but that should get you started!

Edit: I found this tutorial for using the Web Connector with PHP. Doesn't have a lot, but links to some code that should help.

Answer 2

The documentation for qbXML and QB web services is pretty mediocre. The most useful point of reference is this tool on Intuit's developer site. Just a warning: the page takes forever to load the first time you visit thanks to some bloated client-side code.

Answer 3

I have an old export written that uses the Quickbooks iif format (tab delimited). It works, but is quite picky and will fail for some clients. I wish there was more information on the more advanced ways of connecting.

Answer 4

I have been working with QuickBooks integration with our web portal for more than a year. Our web application is in ASP.NET (but it does not matter what the technology is since you can use web services which can communicate with other technologies). I wrote a windows application that runs on the same machine as the QuickBooks installation. This application calls services on the web application and checks if there are new transactions since the last check. If there are any - it imports them into QuickBooks.

The application that imports transactions into QuickBooks is written in .Net/C# and I use it both for importing transactions from the corporate shopping cart and for importing transactions from other systems as well as for bulk imports.

To communicate with QB I use QuickBooks SDK (take a look at it). QB SDK allows you to communicate with QB either with XML (QBXML) or with strongly-typed objects (QBFC). There are some getting-started examples on the intuit developer network site.

I completely agree with AdamTheHutt tha the most useful point of reference is the QuickBooks onscreen reference so donwnload the SDK and take a look at the reference.

HTH

Answer 5

I've made an open-source Visual Basic .NET version of my framework now as well, if anyone is interested: http://idnforums.intuit.com/messageview.aspx?catid=56&threadid=11040