How do you take information out of Drupal sites selling widgets and into an accounting programs like Quickbooks?
Business software like TradePoint360 and NetSuite are commercial packages, which are tightly integrated with accounting . . . yet I never see any mention about Drupal and accounting - none whatsoever but this is the very first question I hear form business owners.
Anyway, with respect to TradePoint360, which is what we use, sales made via the website, over the telephone, or by a walk-in customer are reflected in the database immediately. While we're quite keen to test drive a Drupal site absent some way of getting data into an accounting package we're not going to devote the effort.
Surely Drupal isn't suited merely to non-commercial sites, so what am I missing?
Comments
There are a few products out
There are a few products out there that connect Drupal carts (like Ubercart) to bookkeeping software like Quickbooks. Some are more manual than others (think export-import; I think T-Hub works this way). Others are more automated but make more demands of the infrastructure setup, such as making sure your Quickbooks are publicly addressable via the web (password protected, of course, but still scary to some). I have used and represented a product called Courier which syncs Ubercart with Quickbooks (as well as a few other connection pairs). But it also depends on just how complex your products are, how they're organized, etc. Courier worked well for me but they're a small operation and sometimes hard to reach for support.
Interestingly, I always had the opposite problem: I never had many clients who cared about integrating their online sales with their bookkeeping programs. :-P
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Digital Frontiers Media
Courier sounded like just
Courier sounded like just exactly what I need. Unfortunately, my experience with them has been that they are hard to reach for sales as well. I managed to make contact, had money in hand, but couldn't get any product out of them. At some point they simply stopped answering the phone. Very disappointing, I must say.
Switchback might be able to provide an alternative. We shall see.