Our most requested feature is a Quickbooks sync. We’ve been promising this feature for over 18 months, but to date we’ve failed to implement it. The reasons for this are many, but mostly it’s because Intuit (makers of Quickbooks) have encouraged new integrations to use a method which wasn’t quite baked. As a result, they’ve changed their business model many times over the past several years which has cost many firms a lot of money as they’ve had to recode their sync applications multiple times.
I’ve wanted to avoid that and so each time we did the research, it seemed it was better to wait.
This time however we are ready to go as the integration specs seem to be somewhat stable and our own requirements much more clearly outlined. We’ve spoken with at least six vendors and interviewed many others and we feel we have a real good idea on what needs to be done and how to do it.
The one issue we have come up against is that the integration cost varies significantly from vendor to vendor. I haven’t really figured out why and no one has really been able to give me any great reasons why one vendor can charge $10,000 upfront with no future monthly residuals and another requires nothing upfront but $1,500 a month in monthly access fees? I even found one enterprise vendor that wanted $30,000 a year!
To get a better handle on the challenges, costs and potential hit on the support side of things, we are going to develop a prototype internally using Intuit’s REST API and see how that works when attempting to import invoice, guest and payment information into quickbooks desktop and quickbooks online.
This process has already started and we remain committed to getting a Quickbooks sync feature out the door this fall.
