Syncing any program with Salesforce can have some headaches. We’ve dealt with several Quickbooks sync programs for Salesforce and will share our advice and experience.
The first thing we like to consider when someone tells us they want to sync Quickbooks with Salesforce is to first check out what they are using Quickbooks for. In some cases, businesses are using Quickbooks on a pretty basic level to just track payments and invoices, etc. In this case, sometimes it makes sense to just add some custom objects and customizations to their Salesforce to replace the functionality of Quickbooks. Sometimes accounting is really simple and just tracking numbers, etc. Salesforce can be pretty good at that.
If you need to sync Quickbooks with Salesforce then you need to know what you need to sync specifically, in what directions, and what edition of Quickbooks you have. In all cases, you will need the Salesforce API which means professional edition, force.com edition, or enterprise, or unlimited. In the professional edition, you can purchase the API separately.
The cheapest solution right now is the new Salesforce app that was developed by Intuit. They actually bought the app from Pervasive. It’s an out-of-the-box solution to sync Quickbooks with Salesforce. It syncs only with standard objects: Accounts, Opportunities, Products, Opportunity Products. It’s not awesome but it does work fine as long as the way it’s syncing works for your business. You can’t modify it. We’ve done some workarounds before using fields that do sync to indicate other things in Salesforce. That costs $45/month. Their support is actually pretty good right now. Way better than what Pervasive was doing years back.
The next step up from that is DB Sync. They have a basic edition and an enterprise edition. The basic edition will sync with all standard objects: Accounts, opportunities, products, opportunity products. You can even map some custom fields as long as they are on the standard objects. It’s about $900/year. Not too bad. Their support is good, but they are in India, and it’s hard to work in different time zones and geographies sometimes. Their enterprise edition allows you to sync with any custom object. You can do full custom sync. Their application for customizing is not super user-friendly and I would not recommend someone to just try to figure it out. You can pay them to customize it for you or pay a consultant like us. The key here is understanding your objectives and business process to make sure that you are setting up data syncs and integrations in the way you need them. We typically understand that first, then create a mapping document to outline how we need to sync the data from Quickbooks to Salesforce, then set up the mapping. This program costs about $1500/year.
You also need to consider the first-time migration of data from Quickbooks. You can use this program to do one-time migrations too. This is a different process.
We have heard horror stories from many clients about other QuickBooks syncing programs and we also have our own. Unfortunately, we would not say there is a simple solution that is awesome for everyone. We are considering developing our own app for Salesforce to Quickbooks sync.
