QuickBooks® integration explained

Pioneer StarTech™ integrates seamlessly and powerfully with QuickBooks®, and let us first discuss the roll that Pioneer StarTech™ tries to accomplish with the QuickBooks® integration, followed by the technical details of the integration.

When the architecture of Pioneer StarTech™ was planned, the developers researched the service industry very deeply and found that 85% of service companies are using QuickBooks® to manage their company's financial information; for quite a few reasons. Although it appears that QuickBooks® is limited when it comes to the day-to-day operations of the typical service companies, the simple reason for this is that QuickBooks® was designed to be used in multiple vertical markets. It is however, very intuitive and appealing for the financial part of the application.

This is where the powerful open API (application interface) that the QuickBooks® team has implemented came into play. QuickBooks® has enabled 3rd party vendors like Pioneer Interactive to integrate with the data in QuickBooks®.

There were several goals in designing the integration:

1. User should be able to import their own data themselves in a easy and simple process, and without having to pay extra charges to do so.

2. Information entered into Pioneer StarTech™ should not have to be re-entered into QuickBooks®, but should automatically show up in QuickBooks®.

3. There should be no need to have QuickBooks® open for any user when entering data or viewing data in Pioneer StarTech™.

4. As we have our own billing system, we should not be limited by the QuickBooks® billing procedures, but all invoices and customer payments should show up in QuickBooks® with the same details they show in Pioneer StarTech™.

5. Accountants should have no need to deal with 3rd party software like ours, but rather should be able to get all details directly from the QuickBooks® file, since their clients’ QuickBooks® file would look much the same as they used to be before using Pioneer StarTech™.

We have accomplished all our goals outlined above. Read on for the details...

The integration is typically divided into 2 categories. The first part is the initial import of your existing company's data into Pioneer StarTech™, and the second part is the synchronization of your StarTech data back into QuickBooks®.

When you install Pioneer StarTech™ and create your company file you are prompted, would you like to import your existing QuickBooks® data? If you do so, the only thing left to do is to provide the path to where your QuickBooks® file is located, and that’s about it…. Just sit back and watch how your data is seamlessly imported for you into Pioneer StarTech™, thus allowing you to right away start working with your own data in Pioneer StarTech…., depending on the amount of data and the speed of your network, this process should take about 10-15 minutes!

All of your existing Customers and Jobs will be imported, as well as the following: Customer Balances, Customer Types, Parts, Vendors, Vendor Types, Employees, Employee Pay Types, Ship Via, Tax Codes.

The next part of the integration is when you are already working in Pioneer StarTech™ as your management software, and you would like to keep your QuickBooks® file up-to-date, you will be presented with a form of all transactions that are ready to be exported. With just a few clicks you could have all of the following exported for you: Customer Invoices, Customer Payments, Employee Time Sheets and finally PO Bills.

You will be performing all of the day-to-day operations in Pioneer StarTech™, all your invoicing and Customer Payments, PO Bills and Employee Schedules will be recorded in Pioneer StarTech™. However, in order for you to have your company file updated in order to be able to give your accountant your QuickBooks® file, we have made the synchronization incredibly easy. So for instance, when exporting your Invoice & Payment if the system finds that the Customer to which this transactions belongs has no Customer record in QuickBooks®, it will automatically create it for you (this way there is no double entry). You are now able to properly do your bank deposits from QuickBooks® since all customer payments gets exported for you and are ready to be deposited in the bank. You are also ready to go ahead and print a pay check for your employee (where all completed scheduled slots gets exported as a time sheet record) or vendors (where all PO Bills gets exported as to QuickBooks® as PO Bills).

Please note that all your Invoices will look and contain the same information in QuickBooks® as it appears in Pioneer StarTech!

There is also an additional type of export, where not the actual transactions of the company will get exported to QuickBooks® (or any other software that support data import from CSV or XML files) but rather the General Ledger will be updated with the Journal Entries of your transactions created in Pioneer StarTech™.