Ideas

Hi QuickBooks, I'm CiviCRM. Can We Be Friends?

CiviCRM does a good job at managing fundraising, members, event planning and more.  It contains information on money collected from sources such as online donations, event fees, membership fees, online purchases and fees for service. Many nonprofits use QuickBooks to provide an overall picture of revenue and expenses; however, QuickBooks doesn't offer the freedom to manage relationships the way CiviCRM does.  The need arises for income captured in CiviCRM to flow to Quickbooks. Currently this can only be done with a manual process that is time consuming and error-prone.

The Goal

To write a module that allows CiviCRM contributions and contact information to be inserted into QuickBooks (2009 Premier Non-Profit, since that's what we use) eliminating the manual process. At the very least CiviCRM should be able to communicate with QuickBooks in the following ways:

• Map sources of income in CiviCRM with accounts in QuickBooks.
• Handle Donations, Deposits and Payments.
• CRUD contacts/customers.
• A seamless process that requires little management from the staff.

The Choices

Intuit provides two mechanisms for communicating with QuickBooks:

1. RDS (Remote Data Sharing) client/server.
2. QBWC (QuickBooks Web Connecter).

QBWC seems to be logical choice, since it works across the network, doesn't require client software, and the connector is installed as part of a normal QuickBooks installation. In addition, QBWC uses XML and the schema can be validated against all versions of QuickBooks.

The Solution

Since CiviCRM and Drupal are both written in PHP, it would stand to reason that any integration with QuickBooks should also be in PHP.  Not really a requirement, but it sure makes things easier.

Keith Palmer (Keith57 on IDN) wrote a PHP/QBWC SOAP server that implements most of the functionality QBWC.  His code is open source, actively developed and supported.  He responds quickly to questions via e-mail/chat/forums and he "eats his own dog food" by supporting four production sites who use his framework. The advantage to using his framework, is that he's simplified the process of error handling, creating/destroying the server, authentication, messaging, objects that map to QuickBooks resources, etc.

QBWC is a thin SOAP client (QuickBooks) configured by an XML file to connect manually, or at defined intervals, to a SOAP server (Keith's framework/CiviCRM).

The implemented SOAP server (a single PHP file ~100 lines) grabs items that are on the queue, prioritizes them and passes them to the SOAP client once it connects (a REQUEST).  The SOAP client processes the request and passes a response back to the SOAP server (a RESPONSE).

So, you're asking, "If Keith's framework is so great, why isn't the CiviCRM/QuickBooks integration already done?"

The framework only provides the structure to create the server, add items to the queue, authenticate a client and build valid (and sometimes invalid) XML messages.  These "hooks" need to be customized to work with CiviCRM data; additionally some code needs to be written that implements this framework within CiviCRM either as a module or as part of core.

Next Steps

PHPUnit is being used to help flush out the capabilities of the framework and find bugs. Our first task was to write some unit tests that exercise his framework and work with QB objects. We contributed those tests (over 1800) back to and they are now included in nightly builds. This process proved invaluable since it uncovered several bugs and landmines.

At this point, we've spent ~40 hours in R&D and testing and countless talking QuickBooks with other nonprofit CiviCRM users. We are looking for funding to prototype, test, solicit community feedback and turn it into a CiviCRM module.

Why does Dharmatech care so much about CiviCRM and QuickBooks?

We are a nonprofit, we're developers and we "eat our own dog food." We use Drupal/CiviCRM and QuickBooks Premier 2009 to manage our organization and outreach.  In CiviCRM, we store grant income, fees for service, and income collected online from donations.

Double data entry is not in our blood and we want to avoid the manual process of exporting from CiviCRM and importing into QuickBooks. Staff time is our most treasured resource.  Since we are preaching enterprise-level open source systems for nonprofits, we feel that we should embody that value and philosophy.