Forum Moderators: buckworks
I found Wells Fargo and Chase from QuickBook web site. I wonder if there are any? How do you folks keep your books? How do you "import" online transaction to your accounting software, such as Quicken or QuickBook Pro?
Please advise,
This is followed by my shipping import process where I take said same printed invoices and manually type them into the USPS shipping assistant.
Its a wonderful process - good for the soul.
If anyone has a better way (especially with Mal's), please chime in!
The highlight of my mornings are weighing packages, entering shipping label information into the USPS software and hoping I get it all done before the postman shows up. If I have any international orders, the highlight of my afternoon becomes standing in line at the post office so that they can PERSONALLY rip off the customs declarations form.
The highlight of my Sunday afternoons are processing the returns and exchanges we get into Quickbooks, which understands neither the concept of a return nor an exchange. Quickbook's own instructions for filling out your Federal taxes basically tell you how to hack their reports so you can tell the government what your returns and exchanges were, so that they can get applied against your actual gross sales (rather than what Quickbooks TELLS you that your gross sales were.)
The highlight of my end of month is dealing with reconciling my credit card deposits, bank statements, and settlement reports - since none of them match up. (This is the part where you get to manually enter the settlement report for each individual day + take into account the discount fees that must applied into Quickbooks).
I've looked around, but frankly not seen anything that does much of any automation at all.
My ecommerce venture is really just a hobby that allows me to be a full time accountant for the bank and government.
But, I'm not bitter. ;)
I am a software engineer (aka the lazy species). I always prefer to automate processes dealt with in my daily life.... any other suggestion?
I've built a couple of systems for clients, and I was able to get complete interface spec's from the gateway companies and interface to them with no problem.
The systems I did weren't for QuickBooks, but concepts are the same. I have an assignment to do one for QuickBooks next month.
ray
Then I upgraded to a version of QB that permits third-party integration (QB Premier in my case; I think Pro works too) and wrote a simple wedge that queries the orders out of the SQL database and generates the appropriate sales order transactions in QuickBooks. Took all of about 4 hours to write and test the import app.
When we ship orders, I run through and convert (manually) the sales orders to invoices and enter the payments - some of that can be automated, but it's not a pressing concern.
The next step will be to automate the credit card batch settlements report - I can get a report from AuthorizeNet that tells me what orders were in which batches, so it'll be a no-brainer to automatically enter the deposit transactions into QB.
The only significant piece of the puzzle I haven't automated is getting shipping address data out of our web server and into the Stamps.com software - they were supposed to be working on an API several months ago but I haven't heard any more about it.
I found a couple programs sold in QuickBook's marketplace: MonsterBook and ccRecon. They are plug-ins of QuickBook and cost less than $200. What they do is to import transactions from Banks/Gateways to QuickBook. I did not test them yet. But apparently this could be an off-the-shelf solution. Anyone had experience using these plug-in before? any feedback?
I am still researching on this topic right now. My goal to use one interface (either QuickBook or other packages, or even Web solution) to handle inventory control, sending online invoices and order status email, and bookkeeping at once for e-commerce retailer.
It seems like there is no such off-the-shelf product
yet. This could be a good business opportunity for software developers.
--jC
