If your business isn’t using Quickbooks for accounting, you’re in the minority. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. But it’s a fact. Most businesses use Quickbooks, making it a popular and essential part of their daily processes. Therefore, integrating Quickbooks with both custom and other prepackaged software solutions is very common.

One of the most powerful features Quickbooks offers is the relative ease with which it can be integrated with other applications – both mass market and in-house or custom – to help automate otherwise time-consuming data entry and reporting functionality while ensuring the security and accuracy of important financial data.

As a result, creating Quickbooks integrations for custom software has become one of our specialties here at CSPreston, and it’s a service we often recommend to our new and existing clients as a means of adding value to new development projects.

What can integrating Quickbooks do for you?

As noted above, automation, security, and accuracy are the key value adds offered by Quickbooks integrations.

For example, integrating Quickbooks with your company’s order processing system of choice can eliminate time-consuming data entry on either the billing or sales sides because customer contact details that occur in one system can easily be duplicated in the other. This same integration can also help reduce the possibility of human error because the data is only entered once.

Likewise, custom integrations make it possible for changes made to customer and vendor records to be limited to the individual user’s security clearance. For example, the salesperson who learns of a change of address for one of their customers probably doesn’t need full access to your accounting program. With a custom integration in place as described above, they can update Quickbooks without ever accessing the program at all.

These integrations can be much more robust and complex than simply duplicating an address change, however.

For example, a connected system of integrations thats commonly put in place involves invoicing:

• A salesperson closes a deal inside a custom application used in-house.
• Upon saving the completed deal, the custom integrations can automatically:
  • Update Quickbooks to reflect the deal on the customer’s individual records as well as the company’s broader financial records
  • Initiate an invoicing process through Quickbooks or another program
  • Dynamically fill in the necessary invoice information without requiring duplicate data entry
  • Generate an automated email to send the invoice to the customer, or…
  • Generate a printed copy (including mailing label if necessary) and send it through the necessary mailing process

And, it’s important to note that all of these steps can likewise take place based on actions taken within Quickbooks and reflected in other systems. Quickbooks integrations can work with Quickbooks as master or slave, or both (although that does complicate matters a little bit.)

In short, custom Quickbooks integrations can save time and money for any company that currently uses Quickbooks to manage their accounting system, and they can often be incorporated into a custom development project economically while adding tremendous value to the finished product.

Our team at CS Preston specializes in complex backend web applications and custom software, and at both the SMB and enterprise level we find Quickbooks integrations to be both popular and highly effective. If you’re already enjoying the benefits of Quickbooks, contact us about integrating your backend system to more fully take advantage of those benefits.