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Issue link: https://cpapracticeadvisor.epubxp.com/i/76159
SUCCESSFUL SMALL BUSINESS CONSULTING Integrating Ecommerce and Shopping Carts with QuickBooks... How Hard Could it Be? I s it too much for me to ask for a well-integrated shopping cart for our QuickBooks clients? I'm on a mission to find a well-inte- grated shopping cart solution for our QuickBooks clients. In The Sleeter Group's blog (www.sleeter.com/ blog/2012/01), Jim Savage, our ecommerce expert, recently posted about "Ecommerce, Shopping Carts and QuickBooks. " In that post, he dis- cusses several shopping cart solutions and he gave great tips on how to choose a shopping cart. Check out the article if you want to look through the available solutions in the market. But as you search for the best solution, consider the big picture of how your ecommerce store needs to integrate into your entire business operation. In my opinion, a shopping cart is prety useless – no mater how good it is with building web pages – if it fails to provide a completely stream- lined way of bringing customer orders into the business operation. Tis includes integration with inventory, pick/pack/ ship, sales tax reporting, and of course accounting. Many of the solutions out there come close on some of these integrations, but let's look closely at the things I have yet to find solutions for. Note that while some shopping carts Doug Sleeter Mr. Sleeter is the founder of The Sleeter Group, a national group of accounting software consultants who serve small and medium-sized businesses. He is the host of the Accounting Solutions Conference and the author of several books including the QuickBooks Consultant's Reference Guide, and the leading market college textbooks "QuickBooks Fundamentals and QuickBooks Complete." For more information, call 888-484-5484 or visit www.sleeter.com. Doug can also be reached at Doug.Sleeter@CPAPracticeAdvisor.com. have direct QuickBooks integration, others use some type of "middleware" solution to download orders and popu- late them into QuickBooks or other back-end systems. Each of these two approaches has trade-offs, but our goal is to find a web shopping cart application that can connect directly (in real time) to the back end, whether that's Quick- Books desktop, or any other desktop or online accounting product. At The Sleeter Group, we have very specific criteria for evaluating integration features in shopping carts. While the criteria we discuss here are focused on QuickBooks, keep these criteria in mind no mater which back end accounting system you're trying to connect to. Here are the things we look for: What connection method does the solution use to sync data with QuickBooks? Tere are many soſtware packages out there that claim to integrate with QuickBooks, but their "integration" methodology is via the IIF file import. Any solution that uses IIF will disqualify it from receiving our recommendations. See Charlie Russell's Practical Quick- Books blog article for more details about IIF. Does it use the QuickBooks SDK (Software Development Kit) or the 22 August 2012 t www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com Intuit Web Connector? The Web Connector has been plagued with issues and is not widely supported by Intuit. Does it use the IPP platform, and therefore the sync manager to sync data with QuickBooks? Although the IPP platform has had struggles to provide developer with the functions they need, it is finally geting to the point where all developers should be using IPP and Intuit Anywhere to connect to Quick- Books desktop or QuickBooks Online. Does it enter sales receipts and/ or invoices or sales orders? Can you specify which transaction types are entered for certain transactions? For example, if the web store allows for a payment type of "Purchase Order, and coordinate the batching of daily sales with Intuit Merchant Services or authorize.net? What about sales tax? Tis is the " will it create an Invoice? Similarly, if the order is a completed sale (paid by credit card or PayPal), can you specify that it should enter a Sales Receipt in QuickBooks? Does it handle credit memos and refunds or order cancella- tions? How does it handle payments? Will it import merchant transactions most difficult part of integrating with QuickBooks for developers, and none so far has goten it right. Tere are two parts to sales tax. Te first part is charging the correct tax on each sale in the shopping cart. Te second part is pro- viding full sales tax tracking such that sales tax reports and sales tax returns can be created. Although we often recommend solutions such as Avalara, which provides both parts of the sales tax functions, there will be many clients who don't need or won't afford the extra costs of Avalara's AvaTax service. So in order to provide full integration in the sales tax area, the shopping cart needs to provide full sales tax data in QuickBooks. Tis means the solution needs to send correct sales tax items (tax rates) and codes (taxable status of customers and items) into QuickBooks to provide accurate sales tax liability