Sync Quickbooks to Salesforce

Question

Has anyone, anywhere, had any success syncing Quickbooks to Salesforce?

Our company tried two solutions that were failures on various levels (InterWeave, which never worked at all... Zuora, which was very limited on what it could actually do for us plus the insane complexity and cost... and now Avankia, aka DBSync, which was my choice and is the closest we've come, but have yet to see a solution that stays working consistently).

The CEOs/etc are anxious to see Invoice information per customer in Salesforce so they can report on it at will. It would be read-only. DBSync was the best hope (and far cheaper than complicated Zuora) but for some reason, they can't keep it working day to day for us. They have a ton of positive reviews, but the ONE negative review recently posted is 100% indicative of what we've gone through - it makes me feel that perhaps they lost key personnel in the past few months or something.

We just want to be able to sync invoices from Customer:Job to PersonAccount:Opportunity (so a child of Opp) so they are reportable.

If anyone has been using a working solution, please let me know. Thanks.

UPDATE 2013-02-25: We're still working with DBSync, and are still getting random results (no sync, partial sync, full sync, missed syncs). Still hoping someone may come along and offer an alternative they know works fully. :-/

UPDATE 2015-04-10: We're moving towards Accounting Seed, it appears, as our current accounting staff seems comfortable with such a shift, away from Quickbooks, and into Salesforce-specific code. I'm mostly excited about this. Financial Force is just too big and we'd disappear into their customer base, just like with SF itself, and others were not integrated fully or native. Here's to the future!! :-)

Answer 1

I've been working to implement the Quickbooks for Salesforce app for a few months. It has been very challenging, to say the least. As a consultant, I could have blown out my budgeted hours for the whole month in the first week. I have, however, cobbled together a working solution for my client. Thankfully, they did not witness the sausage-making process. My client used QB for manufacturing v13 (for now!).

Here is what I found:

You must be running the desktop version of QB. You must provide a separate PC with QB running on it This PC (no MACs) must logged in at all times for the sync to work. Welcome to the '90s!

Numerous technical-documentation errors:

• The core data mapping doc was rife with flat out errors, and I don't mean typos.
• The App upgrade doc, which was published in the last month, was incorrect. It didn't show accurate screenshots of the required steps
• The upgrade doc required me to update validations rules which were supposed to have been created during the app upgrade, and yet were not ever created.
• You cannot test any updates in a sandbox

If you print sales orders - neither the Account name nor the Opp name can be added to the printed page. Since printing is by a (fairly locked down) template, there is no way to add the fields to the template for Account or Opp name.

At each sync, QB will overwrite standard field values you've entered. These fields include:

• Ship date: The sync date replaces the entered (client-requested) ship date. Ship date was a vital count-backward field for the production calendar. Support's advice: "..Just create a custom field [which do not sync]." Fine, except we NEED that info in QB.
• Close date: The sync date replaces the calculated close date (used by production). That is horrible for us - as we have a 30-day production cycle and key it off this date.
• Opportunity Stage: This one is maddening. Every Opp synced and every Sales Order (originating via the website) had it's stage set back to prospecting. This started after the app upgrade. It was not in the documentation. I specifically pushed the support people to state if there were any (other than given) ramifications to the update. They said "none". They said they were sure. Within a day of the App update, we reached our hourly limit for processing workflow time triggers.
• Ship method. The field is overwritten with whatever is on the account or default on new accounts in QB (i,e, the first value). Again, our customer has selected the ship method per-order and the salesperson enters it in salesforce. Intuit support fully expect you to *manually change the ship date and ship method on every single Opp synced to QB*, if you don't like their arbitrary entry. We have a dozen ship method across all carriers, countries, rates.

A partial solution: I used workflows, concatenations, and formulas to cram all the needed info into the 'product description' field which does sync.

Here are a few pieces of logic: We needed to add back in the Ship Date, Ship Method and a Production Code (customization code) to item-specific line items:

Rule trigger:

OR(ISCHANGED(PRODUCTION_Code__c),(NOT(ISNULL(PRODUCTION_Code__c))))

[Add Ship and Code to line item desc:]

IF( PricebookEntry.Product2.Name = "SHIPPING", 

"Ship date: " & (TEXT(Opportunity.Shipping_Date__c)) + (BR()) & "Ship Method: " 
& (TEXT(Opportunity.Ship_Method__c )), 

PricebookEntry.Product2.Description  + (BR()) &   PRODUCTION_Code__c)

Since QB would overwrite the line item desc on each sync cycle, I set up a dummy field to pass info back and forth, So it the field changes, copy back ie info.

IF(OR(ISCHANGED(PRODUCTION_Code__c),(NOT(ISNULL(PRODUCTION_Code__c)))),
PricebookEntry.Product2.Description + (BR()) & PRODUCTION_Code__c ,
(BLANKVALUE(PRODUCTION_Code__c, NULL)))

Answer 2

I don't have a perfect solution for you since as far as I'm aware all the current Quickbooks integration tools have various limitations and drawbacks. Beyond what you've already tried I would recommend:

1) Sesame Software Relational Junction: It is quite capable and they will do all of the configuration for you but it's not cheap. I believe it was around an $8K annual subscription fee for a client who implemented this.

2) Propelware Autofy: This is fairly bare-bones but should be fine for a simple integration.