Quickbooks data integration into RDBMS

[Jason]

Does anyone have any experience with migrating (exporting and importing) data from a quickbooks database into another non-quickbooks database or RDBMS?
I have a requirement where I need to generate reports based on data from several different sources, one of which is Quickbooks.
My goal is to develop some migration procedures in order to move data into a central RDBMS repository which can then be used to create the desired reports.

Thanks in advance,

--Jason

[nbessmer]

Nicholas Bessmer, Dominion Services, Inc. www.dominionservices.net

My firm specializes, amongst other things, in custom integration for QuickBooks. This can be with an RDMS, for example ORACLE. It is important to understand the basic requirements:

(1) Are you using the Online version of QuickBooks?
(2) Are you extracting (querying) information from QuickBooks to populate tables in the RDBMS? Or is the traffic bi-directional, whereby QuickBook's also loads relevant information stored in RDBM's tables.

Clearly the distinction between batch jobs which may are run on a schedule or event-driven messaging needs to be made. If a requirement is to update a record in QuickBooks or in the RDBMS based on some event such as modification to a record, event-driven, asynchronous messaging is required.

The solutions Dominion Services builds use qbXML for messaging following the QuickBooks SDK. We develop our code using an extremely powerful programming language called PYTHON which allows for rapid application development. It excels in parsing XML messages and formatting of data.

[sjescher]

I've done some exporting of QB data to Excel. It's not that difficult. You just need to try it out and manipulate the parameters to what you want.

Importing seems to be more cumbersome, as apparently each transaction needs to be sparsed.

Steve

[royg]

One technique I have used in the past when importing data from Excel to QB:

Start with some dummy entries in QB that match what you hope to end up with.

Export these to Excel.

Import them back to QB, to check that they are moving correctly.

Now you have a "template" in Excel to be sure your entries will be accepted into QB as you expect.

Roy

[sjescher]

Good idea!! I'll try it.

Steve