Programmatically pushing data to Quickbooks Online?

Question

Our company uses Quickbooks Online to track our books. When our application bills a customer, it would be nice to have that information recorded automatically in QB rather than logging in to QB Online to fill in the info.

Is there a way to accomplish this using Quickbook's APIs? The Intuit developer information is very confusing; it is mainly oriented towards extending the desktop version of Quickbooks or developing apps to publish in Intuit's app store.

Have you successfully created a web or other service-side app that was able to pull data to or from QB Online?

Answer 1

If you're building a one-off application, the QuickBooks Online qbXML gateway is the way to go. It's a pretty simple POST-your-XML-requests-over-HTTP sort of interface that gives you access to a large chunk (but not all) of the functionality within QuickBooks Online.

If you're building a SaaS application, then you should be looking at the Intuit Partner Platform instead. It sounds like you're building a one-off app for your company, so we'll focus on that:

If you look on my QuickBooks integration wiki there are some example qbXML requests to show you how to sign on, and how to POST qbXML requests to the QuickBooks servers.

You don't specify a language, but if you're using PHP, then try out my open-source QuickBooks PHP DevKit (look at docs/example_online_edition.php and docs/example_raw_online_edition.php in the .zip nightly builds).

You'll want to use the QuickBooks OSR for qbXML reference. The QuickBooks SDK also has 40+ pages specifically about QuickBooks Online Edition that you should probably review.

The Intuit Developer Forums are another good resource.