Has anyone had success using Lotus Notes to read/write to Quickbooks via an API?
I’m looking to build a simple practice management application and to have Quickbooks take care of the billing, invoicing, etc.
Thanks
Subject: quickbooks integration
Richard, I too need to integrate QuickBooks with Domino as part of a workflow application.
So far, I have gotten the QBSDK3.0 qbXMLRPC2.listener to accept qbXML messages and return responses, which works very well for a particular type of integration architecture. There a MANY ways in which Domino and QuickBooks COULD be integrated, so it comes down to the user’s application requirements.
This simple task is actually moderately complex, in part because you have to make the QBW32.exe program function as a QB application server, similar to working with any other application server.
It would be ideal to come up with a LEI for QB, but we’re not there yet.
A lot depends, of course, on the architecture and requirements of your application. You might want to check-out using BOTH the Domino API and the QBSDK API, developing a single C/C++ application that would do what you want.
Another approach might be to use the XML capabilities of both Domino and Quickbooks as the data-passing method. I like this method for batch updating of QB data, because I like having my accounting data under a little tighter control than, say my sales lead data. Since you are working with billing information, it might be worthwhile to consider this batch update via XML approach.
Of course there are other integration approaches, such as using the QODBC driver, which provides for treating the QB database as an ODBC data source and using SQL commands as you would expect. One application I am working on will use this approach to integrate a web browser, Apache HTTP server, PHP, MySQL and QB 2004 premier US edition. I could have substituted Domino for Apache, LotusScript for PHP, left out MySQL, and had a similar result, except that the client did not want to use Domino, yet. This application only involves web-based customers doing a “self-serve” sign-up, triggering a light-weight workflow and updates to several operational systems, then creating the customer record in QB, along with setting up the recurring billing records and recurring credit card charge information, and generating the paid invoice for the initial service. (This is an ISP, by the way, but it could be just about any industry service line).
Be careful whatever you do, as the QBW32.exe has quite a few “stored procedures” and “triggers” that are activated when data is changed in the .QBW database. These are not well documented and can only be reverse engineered by experience in working with the QB application.
Contact me directly if you wish.