Export/Import of Quick Books data and file the file formats

[donomara]

Hi to All,

I work for a small startup company that is marketing a Suppy Chain product and one of our potential customers asked us a question which I don't know how to answer, so I will solicit his question to the forum to hopefully get an answer to him, so here goes.

The question: "Is there a provision in Quick Books to export and import data? And if the answer is yes what is the format? " The reason that I ask this question is because I don't have a copy or understanding of Quick Books.

[gibbo]

The answer is yes, there is. The older format (no longer supported by Intuit) is a tab-delimited text file, which can be used to import data - but not to export. It requires a manual file import from within QuickBooks. It still works, but there are no checking procedures done on the data and it can cause problems. But it is the simplest way to get data in. The newer format is xml-based. The software developers kit can be downloaded free from the Intuit website.this uses xml queries to get data out and xml files to get data in. We are now up to version 4 (for 2005) of the SDK. It has been dveloping over the past couple of years and while still not perfect, has a lot of abilities. We have worked on a program that extracts data from one QuickBooks file and re-writes them for import into another. We have also worked with a number of companies providing the ability to write transactions from data supplied by another system. One client was taking over 3 days a month (and he was growing) to write invoices - it now takes two minutes ten seconds.