If there is one request that seems to get asked more than anything else here at Snapptraffic Consulting, it is integrating Salesforce.com with Quickbooks. We have implemented the Quickbooks to Salesforce integrations over and over in lots of different ways for years. Our typical integration is custom; meaning, it it unique to the way the client has Salesforce.com configured.
There are third party applications that can integrate Salesforce and Quickbooks using the standard opportunity and product objects in Salesforce, but we find that most of our clients have a some small issue that renders those options not desirable. For example, maybe they aren’t using the Salesforce.com products database.
In order to have maximum flexibility of objects on the Quickbooks side and Salesforce side, a custom solution ends up being the only way to go.
Building a custom utility as described below, allows us to pull any Quickbooks data, including Estimates, Invoices, Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, or Payments. It also gives us the ability to write this to any Salesforce object - Accounts, Opportunities, Products, Custom Objects, etc.
In one of our recent integrations we wrote a C#.Net utility that pulls data via the Quickbooks Webconnector. We could have also pulled data directly from the Quickbooks API (this choice depends on how Quickbooks is hosted.)
The same utility sends the data to Salesforce via the API if the client is on Enterprise edition of Salesforce.com. If they are on a lower edition of Group or Professional, then we can use Jitterbit to pass the data into Salesforce.
The utility can reside on the same server that Quickbooks resides on, or be put on another server. The server must be a .Net Framework 4 installed, with SSL.
This is just one of the many ways we’ve found ourselves integrating Quickbooks and Salesforce.com.
Are you facing a Salesforce.com to Quickbooks integration? Want some help? We’d be glad to have a conversation about your project and tell you your options and likely costs to make it happen. For more information about how Snapptraffic Consulting can help you implement a solution like this, feel free to contact us at www.snapptraffic.com
