Ubercart

Hi j0rd,

Yes we can certainly help you out with this project. With Courier you can get all your item details from QuickBooks, to your client's ubercart setup very quickly. Usually it takes about 5 - 10 minutes! Courier will keep these items in sync with the items as they exist on web, with QuickBooks being the master end of the relationship. Meaning that changes made in QuickBooks will reflect to the web on the next sync. We have an item detail editor module in Courier for use in adding that extra data such as images, and full descriptions to the product data as we know QuickBooks can be limiting.

We have a system setup for automatically generating the item attribute data based on the data found in the quickbooks file. We utilize the QuickBooks subitem structure to dictate what the item's attributes are. This data is processed and sent to your ubercart with the item export.

Courier has a complete addon system that allows us to develop more functionality that can effect many different facets of the workflows, including this item export.
Such as we currently have an excel import addon for importing the the extra extended data(pictures, descriptions). These imported descriptions can trump the ones that exist in QuickBooks also allowing you to use different descriptions, names, etc in your Quickbooks file than you do on the web. The information set in the item detail editor function the same way also.

After your initial setup of the customer's site using Courier the items will be linked to the ones in QuickBooks. On a daily basis the customer's inventory levels for these products will be synchronized with the website's levels.
Purchases made at the store will be downloaded either on a scheduled basis. Or we have a module that can be installed and setup to allow instant downloads of the orders into QuickBooks as they occur in real time!
New customers will also be created in QuickBooks as the Invoices come in.

We understand a lot of customers may have some special needs in their workflows for invoice import or inventory sync or pretty much any setup of this process. Our addon system allows us to hook into various stages of the workflow and adjust the data as it progresses through the system. So we offer this custom addon creation service to our clients on a need basis. We try to be as flexible as possible to accommodate our clients needs.

I hope this helps shed some more light on our system. We would love to show it to you first hand. Please do contact us and we would be happy to help get your client setup.

Thanks so much

Deep Thought Software
www.deepthoughtsoftware.com

I know that they've been swamped lately. They should probably hire additional help to keep from falling behind like that, though. I'll forward your message to see if they can figure out what the problem might be.

As for the independent ubercart-QB integration, that would be great. But I've been holding my breath for 2 years now and it just wasn't feature rich enough to be of use in the particular applications I needed it for.

There are a few other full-feature commercial options available now, though. Just need to explore them.

For what it's worth, I actually ran into these guys at Drupalcon DC and was impressed by their presentation and involvement. The price seems to have dropped significantly, and I actually ran into a guy from the forums using the software.

Worth a look when you're evaluating options, for sure, especially since they're operating through their own desktop application instead of an Intuit provided solution and do some sweet synchronization between the company file and the Ubercart database.

DeepThought sent me a PM and asked me to elaborate on my perspective as a developer. Here it goes.

As for the DeepThought software, Ryan seems to think it would be a good solution, but it's one I haven't explored in much depth. I think the lack of developer focused documentation on their website was the cause of this. I was worried I'd have to install some custom version of Ubercart and that scares me, as I have my own way of doing things. Not sure how it works, so I pretty much skipped it as an option. Also I don't run windows, so I wouldn't be able to easily test it. DeepThought has provided an overview of their software in this post. Perhaps, if they updated their website and explained how to install Courier with Ubercart on their website, things would be less scary for me.

As for T-Hub the integration seems reasonably easy. There's a 1 time fee to get a level 3-4 integration code certified with them. That code could be released into the community and then sub-sequent installs wouldn't have to pay that fee. The CSV integration is free and would be easy to create a menu_hook/function to export the data required to CSV. Soap wouldn't be hard either and would support more features. I like the idea that T-Hub supports many versions of QuickBooks and is a popular solution for other carts. This is important to me, as I don't know which version of quickbooks my future clients will be running.

Also I believe that the T-Hub Syncing Web Services could get re-written and released in open source and use the same API/Feature Set. T-Hub is just a layer of abstraction. This would negate the purchasing of any product to sync QuickBooks with Ubercart (and other carts which use the T-Hub API).

I believed that once I had created an integration which Sync'd with T-Hub..someone (or me) could go ahead and create a level of abstraction using the T-Hub API to replace T-Hub. It would give the Quickbooks integration team a feature set and API they needed to support, thus making the daunting task of integration less scary.

That's just my take on it, from doing a little research. Until someone steps up, the paid solutions are the only "easy" integration options. Courier or T-Hub.

If Deep Thought could elaborate on how one installs Courier into Ubercart, it would probably helps those who find this thread and need to make a decision.