August 31, 2007QuickBooks - 1 ShoppingCart conversation
My bookkeeper and I have been struggling to integrate our 1shopping cart with our QuickBooks accounting program. It’s been a long discovery journey and I want to share the results for three reasons:
1) Save those of you who use these from the nightmares we experienced
2) Provide a forum in case there are some fixes we haven’t heard about and to, 3) Encourage the users to encourage the vendors to make these programs more compatible.
This QuickBooks article resulted from our inquiry. If you use these programs, read on.
In this article, Sandi details the limitations of importing data from the cart to QuickBooks. I pasted my bookkeeper, Kim’s response below. Kim does not consider the import to be worth the trouble. She transfers the orders by hand. Others import to Excel, but we haven’t found anyone who imports directly to QuickBooks. Because of this, I think it is misleading to say that these carts are QuickBooks compatible. Yes – it gets the info over there, but not in a format QuickBooks can interpret.
Sandi offers some suggestions for the cart developer that could resolve these issues in the future. Perhaps we could inspire them to make these changes.
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From Kim:
Sandi’s article pretty much sums up the problems I have found. The marketing features that KickStartCart has for Meryl outweighed the advantages for the bookkeeping end and she has decided to stay with KickStartCart rather than go through one of the carts that utilizes QuickBooks Merchant Services.
So I have adapted and personally enter every order by hand. I do not import. It was not cost effective with my time to a) “correct” the sales receipts, b) find the orders and correct those that were declined/refunded/general errors, c) find the orders that just did not import at all (i.e. duplicate names do not import), d) cleanup the out-of-control mess importing made of our inventory, e) clean up the out-of-control mess importing made of our item list, and f) try and match up orders in the Undeposited Funds with the actual deposits made into the checking account. It is faster to enter each order by hand, and saves a lot of headaches in the long run.
When I enter by hand, it does help that Meryl works with two screen monitors. On one screen I pull up KickStartCart orders, on the other screen I enter the order into a Sales Receipt - one by one. Then I pull up our bank checking account and match the deposits with the sales receipts by date (3 day delay). If I have a question in matching the orders to the checking account deposits, I sometimes need to pull up Authorize.net (our Gateway) and print their deposit transfer information for the time period in which I’m working. I’m getting the process down fairly quick, but the process is still time consuming. I can not imagine the work it will take should Meryl’s orders continue to increase the way they have lately.
Personally, I don’t think these shopping carts should market that they integrate with QuickBooks. They do not. I’ve been a bookkeeper for about 25 years, have worked with QuickBooks for the last 5 years, and KickStartCart is not QuickBooks compatible.
Sandi summed it up very well at the end of her article in saying if you have a very high volume of online transactions, one of the six shopping carts that use QuickBooks Merchant Services is a better solution. I agree 100%.
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So that’s where we are. We’re staying with the cart, but we wish the cart and accounting programs were truly compatible. What kind of experiences have you discovered?
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