Blogs

Just a short rant about how horrible it is to work with the Quickbooks API and Miva to syncronize our product sales data.

First of all Quickbooks is not so bad … my main problem is that they make it really quite difficult to access the API, in particular, from a .NET web server. I guess that living primarily in the world of .NET shields one from registering COM components and this sort of thing - it generally just works. But with the Quickbooks API you have to run some exe and change DCOM permissions plus a few other things and even then you are lucky if it works. If you read the forums there are lots of questions and the answers are few and far between. Once you are able to access a Quickbooks company file from a web server (which can break if you look at it wrong) I was happy to see that their API used simple XML messages to communicate - I like this very much. So I used xsd.exe to create some classes based on the sample xml messages that our company would be using so that we did not have to worry about all the other features we would not use. Of course it did not like my XML. In the end I discovered that their version of “XML” requires that all tags have a specified order … ummm yeah thats really nice. So having had several other small setbacks I am finally at a stage that I can add customers, invoices, products and payments through the API. I am not my khakis.

The other half of this was getting the sales data out of our Miva store. We were using our own storefront before but its a long story. This was not so hard because I simply (once I found out where / what database the data was in) had to use our FTP Sync product to get the DBase files and query them from a .NET application. The part that annoys me is that everyone builds Miva components to sell them … I mean even though we have a Miva store we have to spend more money to get a proprietary Miva Script compiler just to write simple scripts! I don’t quite understand why everyone loves this product when you have to pay to do more or less anything! We should probably be using OSCommerce.

The ultimate goal of this whole process was to get our product sales from our Miva store integrated into our Quickbooks. There is a product that we could have purchased to do this for about $500 (USD) + whatever amount of time it took to install and test (I am not sure if it would have supported our coupon module) but instead I have spent about 30 hours doing the integration myself and it seems to be working well. So lets say the price was about the same for a slightly less “finished” (maybe?) product.

I will be sure to put up my code + quickbooks and miva instructions / tips so that others can possibly benefit from my pain
And next week I will put up my thoughts on integration with our new accounting software - MS Office Small Business Accounting