I am sorry for the poor quality of the screen cast. I've never done one, and I used "wink" to do it. I'll probabley update the "how to" later down the road.
So, I made a screen-cast of my quickbooks module. It's very pre-alpha, and the screen-cast is not the best. But I did it quickly. I've been getting a few inquiries, and I figured this would be the easiest way to explain it. I'll be releasing it to the cvs by the end of this week so hopefully I can some collaboration on it.
Link to video: http://earnestberry.com/node/7/play
Currently what it does:
- Brings in customers
- brings in invoices and as the invoices come in, links them to customers
- displays information
- prints invoices as PDF's on the fly
- allows a company logo to be uploaded and printed on the invoice
- allows mapping of QB customers to drupal users (you can map more than one QB customer to the same drupal user)
- re-syncs without losing customer-drupal_user maps
Things that will need done (off the top of my head):
- double-check syncing
- double-check multi-page invoices print correctly
- "queue" for new invoices so that they need to be approved before letting the end user/client view them
- more "stats"
- better UI screens for viewing customers, their jobs, etc.
Cheers
Comments
I tried to take a look at
I tried to take a look at this video, but I did not have access.
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Gordon Heydon
Fixed
Thanks, fixed the permissions on it.
Nice
We could use that to mass migrate customers from quickbooks to erp with a bit of tweaking I reckon.
When do you plan to release/make it available?
Actually, I'm interested to see how you did the printing as well. I'm not happy with the way we do it in erp at the moment.
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http://singularo.com/
FPDf
Are you using FPDF to print your PDF's? I personally an not a fan of FPDF. ezPDF is a much better, easier to use, faster to market (meaning less programming), and easier to maintain PDF implementation.
Very nice. : ) I'd love to
Very nice. : ) I'd love to test it to see if we can use RDS on our setup or not. We were having some issues trying to get it to fly in the past... partially I think because our QuickBooks company file was on a file server and not on the computer running the RDS? Maybe not.
Great work, though! It looks like a lot has gone into this already. I'd love to see your work integrated with e-commerce and Ubercart in the future. There would be no question about which CMS to choose to host your store then!
Thanks
Thanks. I'm hoping to release this by the end of the week.
My main goal to get this "rock solid". This is financial accounting and business we're dealing with, so having any issues in the "bug" queue for this module is unacceptable.
After is stable and reliable in managing quickbooks, then start Phase II, which is tieing it into Uber, E-commerce, and ERP. I'll probably create a hook system for that, and work with the module maintainers to make that happen.
I'll also need help making "parsers". When it's released, I'll try and put together the architecture of the module; and you'll see there are currently 2 parsers that use the SAX style parsers to parse the XML files returned from QB. The next 2 big ones that are needed are an item parser and most importantly, and GL parser to bring in the GL/Accounting classes from QB.
There are some programming notes also. I use "strong type" where I can in this module. Although PHP doesn't enforce this, it is good practice to use "strong type" and stay away from side-effects. I think this will lead to a more reliable module. It also uses transactions. Further, when it integrates with E-com, Uber and the like, the other modules should understand and facilitate "application transactions". Meaning if there is a module for E-Comm, and during the hook invocation, one of the hooks fail, the other modules should have some way of knowing this, and ROLLBACK and FAIL the transaction. This application cycle is something I'll probably discuss in more detail on my blog, but def. something that is needed when running an e-commerce site IMHO.
As you can see, in the end this is going to be a large, but hopefully well maintained, stable, and most importantly, well-documented module. It should have a lot of use.
Anyway, I'll post on there when I get a chance to release it and after it's released.
Quick outline, what it does?
Can you provide more of an outline re what this module is aiming to do? It presents an interface to quickbooks data and synchs updates between quickbooks and the module? The wink thing was unwatchable, too chopped up.
Also, the quite that mentions .net, where is that from? You wrote that? Or some other group is working on an hookup to AE?
I found this writeup which
I found this writeup which goes a ways towards explaining what the project is about, or at least what it was hoped to be.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/1935
Just posting this here in case someone else runs into this thread and wants to find out a little more about the project.
Similar
Hello. Yes, the only reason I mention .NET is for AE (Microsoft Accouting Express/Microsoft Account Professional). The goal is the same and the QB goal in the link that the other person posted;
We are trying to incorporate an accounting back-end seemlessly into Drupal E-Commerce front-end (E-Commerce and Uberkart). I feel this is the one final step missing from a full on E-Commerce system for Drupal.
Let me know if you have any more questions. I hope to making more commits and more explinations about the project soon.
Released
For those interested, it's been released:
http://drupal.org/project/quickbooks