Stomping Out Duplicate Data Entry!

Quickbooks Online is rapidly becoming the accounting software solution of choice among small to medium sized businesses. Most companies are using other software in additon to Quickbooks Online to manage sales, CRM, inventory, business intelligence and other operations. It's been our experience that Quickbooks ultimately becomes the final repository for financial data. Unfortunately, this usually results in someone having to export from one system and try to import into Quickbooks online or even worse, someone has to manually enter data from the other system into Quickbooks Online. This may even have to be done more than twice. This is huge drain on resources, error prone and difficult to scale.

Quickbooks online app development has been a growing source of projects for us due to the fact that disparate systems don't have great ways of talking to each other. Quickbooks Online provides us with a robust integration platform to take data from those disparate systems and import into Quickbooks Online. We like Quickbooks online so much, we use it internally and we've programmed our own custom plugins to automate processes within Yye!

The time spent by any employee is expensive. Double and even triple data entry into the core systems that manage your company is a time killer. Thankfully the ecosystem for Quickbooks online is large. Our first suggestion is to visit the plugin store under the data synchronization category, which can be found here. For popular, off-the-shelf software, it isn't uncommon to find a plugin available and that's going to be the cheapest and fastest solution.

In the case of proprietary or legacy software, a custom QBO plugin can be written. The goal for us is to acquire data from those sources and efficiently put this data into Quickbooks Online safely and securely. This typically involves creating a secure endpoint which provides the data in an industry standard way that our Quickbooks plugin can connect to and import your data.

The final step is data mapping. Data mapping involves taking the acquired data and putting it into the exact location within Quickbooks. This is done with an interview process with the stakeholders. With the data map defined, now we get to see the rewards from our efforts.

In upcoming posts, we'll speak about the particulars of how this is accomplished, but for now, we're at the best part of the integration project ... running the QBO plugin and watching the data populate and seeing the reports pop with new depth. The first thing that must be done before the plugin is accessible is that each user that needs access to this plugin, must grant access. This allows you to dictate who gets access and what the plugin can access. Plugins can operate across multiple companies, but must be accepted individually for each company.

Once the plugin has access, typically its a matter of setting a few parameters and clicking a button. There is no exporting, no importing and we always check for duplicate data so that even if multiple people run the plugin, data integrity is maintained.

Yye has been involved in a number of Quickbooks projects over the years. Here are examples of Quickbooks Automation we've performed over the years to save our customers thousands.

• Automated invoicing from time tracking system.
• Created invoices and sales data from proprietary order processing software.
• Syncing up sales tax on transactions from Avalara.
• Created custom business intelligence and other reporting.
• Automated an entire process of billing from a line of business that was currently done on paper.
• Importing inventory and pricing data from a proprietary system.
• ... and more.

No job is too big or small. We've managed to create small, high customized utility plugins as well. Anywhere that Quickbooks is used, we can potentially automate data coming in or out and create additional reports and business intelligence to make Quickbooks work exactly the way you need it to.