how do integrate custom applicaiton with quickbooks?

External Since: Sep 29, 2006 Posts: 1

I know quickbooks has an API but I have not done this type of work before.

My application, among a variety of things, generates invoices. My client
prints invoices from my application but uses quickbooks to keep their books.
I want to "move" a record of the invoices from my system over to their
quickbooks. Quickbooks does not need to take any action, I just want to
record the invoice with it's data in their quickbooks.

How do I go about doing this?

Is this an involved project?

Any articles, tutorials, links you can recommeend to get started?

Many thanks!

External Since: Oct 18, 2003 Posts: 43

"Notgiven" :
>I know quickbooks has an API but I have not done this type of work before.
>
> My application, among a variety of things, generates invoices. My client
> prints invoices from my application but uses quickbooks to keep their
> books. I want to "move" a record of the invoices from my system over to
> their quickbooks. Quickbooks does not need to take any action, I just
> want to record the invoice with it's data in their quickbooks.
>
> How do I go about doing this?
>
> Is this an involved project?
>
> Any articles, tutorials, links you can recommeend to get started?
>

You have 2 options -- IIF import or QB SDK.

IIF import is easier to implement, since it is just a specially
formatted text file. The drawbacks are that it has been rumored
for quite some time that Intuit will drop it from QB in the future,
requires imports to be initiated from within QB by the user,
and it has very little error-handling. But once setup correctly is
quite reliable. Here's a link to a good simple sample IIF file:
http://www.qtools.com/files/QBimport-sample2.iif

The SDK is much more tedious to implement. But it requires
less intervention by end-users, and has very robust error-handling.
6 years in, the SDK is still frustratingly incomplete, but you won't
run into any problems just pushing in invoices. The forums at
http://developer.intuit.com are a good place to search for answers
and post questions. The SDK download includes lots of samples
and reference.

Good luck!