Great QuickBooks Solution/Skirting FileBooks Link

[DanBrill]

Hey Everyone,

You may have seen the thread on FileBooks Link and QuickBooks Pro that I started a few days ago. Thanks to some prompting and offline discussion with Charles Delfs, I've found that you can pull out all the data you need from QuickBooks Pro without having to use FileBooks Link. If your solution requires full interactivity with QuickBooks, then FileBooks Link might still be the way to go. (Though maybe not.) In my case I only need to pull data out of QB into my FM solution. I can do that without FileBooks link. This will end up saving me a $5,000 developer's liscense!

What you need to use is a little-documented program that comes with the QuickBooks Software Developers' Kit (SDK). Many, many thanks to Charles for pointing this out to me -- its stuck in with some C++ examples and I never would have noticed it. It's called SDKTest.exe, and runs from a command line. The syntax is

sdkTest.exe qbfile.qbw inputfile.xml outputfile.xml

Where qbfile.qbw is the QuickBooks company file, inputfile.xml is an xml file that contains the request to be sent to QuickBooks, and outputfile.xml is the xml file that is created by QuickBooks. You can call this from a batch file. Another possibility is to use an open url script step. I haven't tried this yet, but Charles has had success.

The path names can all be set by user input and/or status(currentfilepath).

Once you have the outputfile.xml, you can import it into FM via an xslt.

This isn't any more work than with FileBooks Link because you have to do all of the heavy lifting with FileBooks Link anyway -- namely creating the input xml and the xslt's.

I think this is a great solution and will make integrating FM and QuickBooks fast and cheap for just about everyone.

Good luck,

Dan

[rogermax]

What about pushing data to QB from FMP? Will the same thing work...and, more importantly, how?

[DanBrill]

I haven't tried or needed to post from FM to QB. But it can be done. If you change your xml input file you can issue commands to QB. It all depends on the xml commands -- there are query, add, modify, and delete commands for just about every object. I'd play around with the xml input and the Intuit sdk onscreen reference to build the needed xml input.

Good Luck,

Dan

[kennedy]

And will this work with QuickBooks 5.0 for Mac, or will this only work on Windoze?

[BobWeaver]

Also, to go from FM to QB you can export a .iif file from FM--it takes a bit of formatting--and read it into QB. I've done this with QB version 4. Version 5 should be able to do this too.