I have expressed my interest in a Quickbooks integration that works in realtime with the software or a huge mod for cs-cart that does what Quickbooks does so that we can get rid of Quickbooks all togther.
Here are the messages between myself and cs-cart support:
[quote]Hello,
I either need cs-cart to work simutaniusly with quickbooks premium 2007 so that if someone buys products from my site it automatically goes into quickbooks… or I need cs-cart to have all the same features as Quickbooks… or at least most of the features.
How much would a mod like that cost?
Does your other software do that?
Thank you,
Josiah Wallingford[/quote]
Support response:
[quote]Dear Josiah,
Thank you for interesting in our custom development service.
Default CS-Cart allows manually exporting orders and customers information from the store to QuickBooks.
And actually, I’m not sure if it is possible to integrate QuickBooks with CS-Cart so it recieves all orders information from the store in a real time.
Could you please confirm that you are interested only in such integration and manual loading new orders data from the file created by CS-Cart won’t suit you?
I’m looking forward to hear from you.
—
Thank you[/quote]
My response:
[quote]Dear Vladimir,
Yes I am only interested in real time integration from our store to quickbooks. If not it would be even better if cs-cart worked just like quickbooks however I can understand how much of a major mod that would be. But if it were done I think it would be a great selling point as most small business owners out there need what very large corporations have… a fully integrated system that does it all.
Thank you,
Josiah[/quote]
Their response back:
[quote]Dear Josiah,
After thorough investigation we found that yes, it is possible to integrate web application with QuickBooks to update data in a realtime.
And from what we’ve seen, this is quite a complex task and it will take us more than a month of custom work to create such communication module. And in case we will do this work in terms of custom development service, its price will exceed $2000-$2500.
As for raising money from CS-Cart users who are interested in this mod as well, yes it is a good idea and we do not see any obstacles for that.
Please let me know your thoughts.
—
Thank you[/quote]
My response back:
[quote]Dear Vladimir,
I would really like cs-cart to do what Quickbooks does so that we can get rid of the program all together but I can understand why you wouldnt want to do that as it would be a HUGE project. I think that the quickbooks in realtime integration would be great and I would like to raise the money for it. I will talk to some of the forum members and see if they are interested in raising the money, although I think that they would be much happier to raise more money something that does what quickbooks does. Please give me an estimate for the price… im guessing $3000 by the sound of you last reply, and I will see if there are enough people that will donate enough money to have this done.
Thank you,
Josiah Wallingford[/quote]
I am waiting for a response back with the exact quote but I need to know if enough people are interested in this.
So first of all please let me know if you would be interested in this mod and if you would be willing to chip in for it.
Quickbooks is an accounting software and it really makes no sense to have full accounting software in your ecommerce platform. Accounting software would be a whole different product.
An automatic connection between them makes much more sense. But trying to squeeze everything into an ecommerce platform is not a good solution.
ok so it sounds like the best rout to go would be to have a real time integration with quickbooks… or perhaps all accounting programs. I wish it could all be in one tool and I suppose it could if you had a companie file that you kept secure and that cs-cart accessed much like it would with quickbooks.
Would you be interested in real time integration with quickbooks and maybe other financing programs as well?
that’s a hefty price tag when you can already export and import at the end of the day…if business is going well enough for realtime transactions your better off getting a complete CRM system, however that would be a pretty awesome mod.
I’d like to understand exactly how you define ‘real time’ Josiah.
I use QuickBooks too, and like you would like to find a better solution. The needs of e-commerce sites certainly haven’t been very well considered by the QB developers. But I agree at least final accounting is best left to accounting software, and I wouldn’t want my financials to be online. For now anyway, Quickbooks is one of few options available.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘real time’. What I’d love is better integration, and I’d hope would be far less costly than what you are proposing. BTW, QB is notorious for breaking itself and it’s cooperation with other software like it’s own UPS shipping interface (a version of shiprush), so the simpler the better (which might also ensure the integration is more readily maintained by CS-Cart).
I think currently you have to either:
export orders from CS-Cart, import into QB, process orders, then manually update order status in CS-Cart. or
Process orders in CS-Cart, then export, then import completed orders into Quickbooks (I haven’t tried this, there may be more steps).
Either of these options is more cumbersome than they could be. (I plan to do option 1 because I feel CS-Cart needs to manage things like partial orders w/ backorders, etc. before I will choose it over QuickBooks for order processing).
Quickbooks does offer 3rd party development support and full access to the QB database. QB’s import capabilities via iif file (which CS-C uses) is no longer supported by QB, though the ability remains because so many people use it.
What would be nice is to have the ability to click a button in CS-Cart and have selected data transferred to the QB database either as completed transactions or transactions ready to process. This could even potentially be handled via a cron or scheduled job for active sites, even every 15 minutes … pseudo real-time.
I’d be willing to consider chipping in for better integration, but not at a $3K pricetag. Define exactly what your needs are, trim the fat and see if a useable solution can be had for a modest development fee, then I’ll think about it
As far as working with Quickbooks in “real time” I mean that when a customer places an order or you change the status of the order it will automatically add that to Quickbooks as well as allow you to enter sales manually through cs-cart that will automatically update into Quickbooks without having to import or export anything manually.
Well, I doubt the price tag will get any smaller unless you can make some compromises between your ideal solution and what we have now … i.e. find a workable but affordable solution. Not everyone uses QB, so the pool of donators is smaller than it would be for a number of other mods.
What I’m suggesting is that rather than true ‘real-time’ integration, would a streamlined export/import function that you initiate from w/in CS-C meet the need? i.e. push a button, or schedule sync times, to have transactions transferred to QB.
I’d very much like to see the steps reduced to one, but will be willing to live with less than 24/7 real-time syncronization if that is possible for a more modest price.
I would have to agree that integration with Quickbooks would be nice. I’m just not for sure we would need it on the same level.
The main thing I would suggest is the ability to import/export more items.
For example, while 1.3.5 does allow more things to be imported, it still doesn’t appear to allow the ability to be able to import UPS/USPS tracking numbers.
Full integration just seems like it would be overkill for us. I would also have to agree that I would rather keep our accounting system offline.
I’d be willing to chip in for this, automation is key. I’m seriously willing to put in up to 1k for the project. Send me a PM, maybe we can work something out.
I’m all for getting rid of quickbooks and as always is willing to chip in, it’s probably one of the worst pieces of software, besides the money you have to spend on a QB upgrade you could get a killer CS mod that would take it’s place, what we want and what we expect needs to be summerized as there’s alot being asked for. Theres already a QB functionality, maybe it needs improved I don’t know because I don’t use it, however it appears there needs to be another solution. What I think there needs to be is a addon with limited accounting capabilities then a way to export this information into an offline system like QB, Sage, Peachtree ect…
I posted this in another thread, but thought it may help. I currently export from my shopping cart to Stoneedge to manage orders and then everything gets processed to Quickbooks. Works like a charm. Our monthly reconciling has been drastically reduced:
You’re actually better off exporting the orders into an order manager like Stoneedge and then using that to manage all your orders. you can then export from Stoneedge to Quickbooks and be very accurate day to day. it even keeps track of your estimated bank deposits from the credit card companies to track for any missing batches.
there isn’t an export from CSCart to Stoneedge currently, but I will be eventually writing my own script and will share it once I have it done.
that’s what I do with my current cart and it works really well. for those using fulfillment companies, you can send order lists to your company directly from stoneedge. or you could also modify the email template in cs-cart to xml and send that to your order company as well in realtime
T-HUB is another nice solution for quickbooks importing. It automatically imports the orders from the cart. Then you can review the orders in T-Hub and import them into quickbooks. It works with quickbooks in Multi-User mod also. They recently added CS-Cart support.
When I first got into e-com I wanted similar integrated software connectivity - I thought it would make things simpler.
If and when a one building shop expands, there are several factors worth considering. There is a difference between Accounting, Inventory Control, Customer Relations, E-Commerce, Document Management, etc.
For my day job, the solution has been cron jobs and web services that relay information using xml. Part of the challenge is that people have been doing these things in business for years before the hefty nametags above were ever dropped.
Our biggest challenges are timely updated from the warehouse floor to accounting to the web store. Every sector believes they are the heart of the organization and that is something that you need to prioritize if you are going to run a smooth operation.
Adding QB functionality to an E-commerce package is simply not possible. You don’t want to have to create a chart of accounts before you can even set up a simple e-commerce store. You also ideally don’t want the same person being the accountant, the shipper, the pick/pack, the technical expert, the catalog manager, the buyer, etc. That is a phase that you really want to outgrow as quickly as possible. You want to get to a point where you are COO and have people who work for you.
If you want an integrated system along those lines, then your best bet is going to be spending a few grand on Great Plains and frankly, I don’t think most people want to spend 100x what they have spent on CS-Cart.
I work full-time for a national non-profit and we started our operation as a drop-shipment e-commerce store. The challenge of finding a single e-commerce package that would do invoice splitting, etc. and was code accessible was a huge challenge. We found that.
Then we realized how much money was being lost in shipping. We stepped up to partnering with a company who let us piggyback on their outsourced warehousing facility. Their facility runs Great Plains for ICM, and internally they use GP for accounting.
We set up an XML-based web service to transmit orders, retrieve order status and shipping information, retrieve product inventory levels, setup updates, etc. This has worked very well for us, however there is STILL a lag in updates between the work done on the warehouse floor, and the updating of accounting numbers, and the updating of the web service. Even with a highly automated system there is still a very necessary human factor to keep things running smoothly.
The danger of a completely automatic system is that when one piece fails, the entire system fails. Case in point, we had a product come into the warehouse that went OOS and it was a high demand item. The notification list for it coming back into stock was quite long.
A warehouse employee keyed the wrong inventory for the popular product - the next day I was staring down 25 orders for a product we didn’t have. Not fun, because I wear the Customer Service hat too…
Storytime is over, but if you are looking for integrated solutions, the best thing to do is see what other people use. Here’s what we use at my day-job… which is www.orthodoxmarketplace.com
E-Commerce platform: X-Cart (soon to be CS-Cart)
Accounting: Quickbooks
Warehouse Operations: GP
Helpdesk: CerberusWeb (soon to be live)
Blog: Textpattern (soon to be live)
Other clients who do everything in house (including fulfillment) have used this combo:
E-Com: Creloaded
Inventory: Stone Edge
Helpdesk: CerberusWeb
There are a lot of packages out there - just understand that scaling up your automation generally comes with increasing your operation size and your personnel (this is not intuitively obvious, but trust me it’s true. I thought that if we automated everything I could babysit all of the processes on my own. You cannot do that and run a business.) - you don’t want to try to cram all of your business logic into one package - my hope with CS-Cart is that they learn just enough about what other tools do to be able to INTERFACE easily… being able to access order, product, and other types of data via clear API or XML streams (like RSS) is absolutely critical to modern business processes - and many packages are able to import XML - meaning instead of a programmer having to learn two different APIs or data structures and write to each of those, they are able to write an XML translator to interface between the two and tweak as necessary…
One of the beautiful things about smarty - and I believe we will still do this when shifting to CS-Cart - is that you can create an entire .tpl presentation layer that is RSS compliant! Almost any web page you can see on the site can be retooled on the presentation level to display data as an RSS or ATOM feed.
[quote name=‘rlobianco’]T-HUB is another nice solution for quickbooks importing. It automatically imports the orders from the cart. Then you can review the orders in T-Hub and import them into quickbooks. It works with quickbooks in Multi-User mod also. They recently added CS-Cart support.
I was just checking out the “T-Hub” software you were talking about. This software looks AWESOME! Not only would it help with importing CS, but it would import Amazon, Ebay and others. Plus it would help eliminate the error from CS that deletes my cost of inventory every time I import from the shopping cart! We are going to try it out and see how it works. I believe this would help solve many other issues some have posted in this forum.
T-Hub is awesome, It’s saves a BUNCH of time. I don’t use it for Ebay, Or even for UPS shipping. Just to get the orders from CS-Cart into Quickbooks. I’ve used it for a while with OS-Commerce and when I made the switch to CS-Cart it was nice to be able to use the same software.
The nice thing about T-Hub is that it also works with Quickbooks in Multi Mode. You don’t have to switch to single user mode like when you are importing transactions from the cart using the CS-Cart quickbooks export options.
[quote name=‘rlobianco’]T-Hub is awesome, It’s saves a BUNCH of time. I don’t use it for Ebay, Or even for UPS shipping. Just to get the orders from CS-Cart into Quickbooks. I’ve used it for a while with OS-Commerce and when I made the switch to CS-Cart it was nice to be able to use the same software.
The nice thing about T-Hub is that it also works with Quickbooks in Multi Mode. You don’t have to switch to single user mode like when you are importing transactions from the cart using the CS-Cart quickbooks export options.
Hey Ralph, did you really pay $500+ to be able to use T-Hub? Their price just seems high. Not to mention you have to use the Microsoft Access program to get their program to work so they didn’t even write their own software.
So T-Hub wants to charge you $200 more for each store it connects to. Even Amazon and Ebay. Here is their response…
[quote]
T-HUB Standard license is $250 for one online store.
$200 per additional store. Amazon and EBay will be considered additional
stores.
You do not have to pay for MS Access, there is a free runtime available from
Microsoft.
Manish
[/quote]
If you want the part that talks with UPS you have to pay another $250. So just to connect to CS and a simple Yahoo and Amazon account your going to pay $1000.
I guess I just find it very funny that they are using a “free” program from Microsoft Access to then charge high fees.
Again, while we are still trying to find a work around to the CS-Cart bug that zaps the cost of inventory when we import in to Quickbooks, I really can’t imagine paying for this myself.
Is there anyone else who has paid these high fees?
Right now we still use the UPS shipping plugin that www.shippingkit.com created. While it is a little slow, it still works great. And even though the plugin they created for USPS was a joke, we love the UPS version! The only downfall we have found with te UPS plugin from Shippingkit.com is they need to find a way to delete all of the images being created without having to zap the other important shipping information.
So the main thing we are trying to do is be able to import our orders from CS-Cart into Quickbooks. I am getting ready to demo the software from webgility.com to see if it does the trick.
Has anyone else tried anything else. While we do not want to ‘get rid of Quickbooks’ we would like to make it work along side or more automated with our online world better…including CS-Cart.
The price is $297 and that includes all of our shopping carts. The only additional price I pay is if I need a “custom” script written. At that point they quoted me $99 which is much better than the $200 for each additional shopping cart that t-hub wants to charge you for.
I know that t-hub works a little different in how it pulls in the orders, but I have no problem exporting the orders from the sites to a file on my computer and then importing them into our accounting software. Since I would need at least a 5 site license it would cost me $500 for the initial, $150 for support, setup & training and then ANOTHER $800 for sites like ebay and Amazon that I sell next to nothing on but list as a form of adverstising. So it would cost me $1,450 to be able to do the same basic thing that I can do for under $300 at writeitonce.com
The other nice part about writeitonce.com is it can add all of my orders under the same customer! This means I will not max out Quickbooks every year because of the annoying 14,500 limit that they put in their database. Basically, all of my orders imported will only use up 1 field in the database!
