QuickBooks. It’s a household name. As one of the biggest hitters in small-to-midsize business accounting, it’s no question that QuickBooks simplifies accounting processes for businesses. But what if easy accounting could get even easier?
One of our goals at We Write Code is to help your business succeed by utilizing technology to the fullest. For the uninitiated, QuickBooks is a software package focused on efficiency, streamlining the accounting experience to make time-consuming tasks such as invoicing, reconciling bank statements, product management, and reporting less of a hassle. Leveraging the QuickBooks Online API, We Write Code can build custom-tailored workflows to move data to and from QuickBooks automatically—looping in other business systems or creating extracts of accounting data for use in performing advanced financial analysis.
With an API integration of your QuickBooks, there’s so much more you can do to customize and streamline the accounting process. We Write Code’s first QuickBooks API integration was with client Brewd, an innovative brewery management platform. Since many breweries were already utilizing QuickBooks Online, Brewd founder John Jackovin realized there was an opportunity to deliver significant value to Brewd’s customers. “Accounting: It may not be sexy, but it’s important,” Brewd (rightfully) states on their website, outlining the numerous benefits of their API integration: Customized inventory and ordering management, direct invoicing and payments, no more double entering data.
Brewd was the first client we had done a QuickBooks API integration for, but we had experience using QuickBooks for our own business accounting—so we understood the terminology and workflows. After some exploration and discovery, we were able to sync customer data between the Brewd platform and QuickBooks, then added orders, and products as the integration points and possibilities evolved. Beer orders placed in Brewd are translated into Quickbooks invoices automatically, saving breweries a lot of time.
Accounting automation might be one of the biggest time and mistake savers for small businesses. It’s possible to have an external application update your cloud-based accounting system, so you don’t have to input things twice, which is a common occurrence for many small businesses.
QuickBooks provides a suite of standard accounting reports—sales, income statements, balance sheets, etc. These are all standard views of accounting data, but because we have access to the source reporting data, we can create custom views and data flow automation. These help us not only to optimize your business workflow, but also to view and predict trends. For example, by running processing on customers who have been late with payments in the past, we could predict who might be late in the future. This allows opportunities for automated communication—reminders, follow-ups, etcetera. The possibility of forecasting behavior, creating financial modeling, and identifying ”what if?” scenarios to make predictions will only better your business.
One final note: when you start the process of your API integration, it is much easier for us to do API integrations with QuickBooks Online. The desktop version of QuickBooks isn’t readily available from the cloud, making it much more challenging to work with—but it can still be done.
Interested in optimizing your businesses accounting flows or creating a new platform to interact with QuickBooks? We Write Code and our team of API integration experts are here to help!
