I know lot of people may be facing the issue of integrating QuickBooks SDK correctly using PHP. QuickBooks SDK basically used their own xml format qbXml to pass and retrieve data from QuickBooks. And if you have a website or an online store that need to create invoices automatically in QuickBooks, then you should create a SOAP web service to process these request.
Unlike other API’s around for different application, QuickBooks synchronization is is initiated from QuickBooks Web Connector (An application provided by Intuit to connect to the websites web service). This is mainly for security purpose. Once the QuickBooks Web Connector connects to the web service, the web service should pass qbXml requests for the corresponding tasks you want to achieve. The QuickBooks Web Connector will process the same and will send a qbXml response data to the web service, which can be processed by the website if required.
The PHP QuickBooks Framework can be found here at https://idnforums.intuit.com/messageview.aspx?catid=56&threadid=9164
This link also will be helpful to you. http://www.consolibyte.com/wiki/doku.php/quickbooks
The difficult part in these are it is difficult to debug the code when an error occurs. And when you start using this you will initially have lot of issues dealing with the correct qbXml format. If you have QuickBooks SDK installed in your system, a qbXml format document can be found under the Intuit installation directory. (For example, in my PC it is located at D:\Program Files\Intuit\IDN\QBSDK8.0\doc\qbxmlops80.xml). Always refer this document and make sure you don’t missed any required options while creating the qbXml request. You can also find a helpful an Xml Validator for qbXml in the “Start Up > Program Files > Intuit SDKs > QuickBooks SDK 8.0 > Tools > XML Validator“.
Luckily Keith Palmer has already spent time creating an open source PHP QuickBooks Framework ready to use for you. Thanks to him for creating that helpful framework for the PHP community. But still the above tools and info I mentioned may be helpful for you.
Feel free to post me if you have any questions, I will try my best to answer your queries.
Prabhul Sankar
South Ocean Solutions
Devendra Chhaiya
April 4, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Thanks for help in last article. Please provide example of quickbook integration with core-PHP. I tried to understand “Keith Palmer” php framework but it seems to be complex and I didn’t understood how to start with it. Please help me. Thanks in advance.
Devendra Chhaiya
April 1, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Thanks for nice article for quickbook information. I found this basic info after lot of googling.
I want to integrate Quikbook with activecollab, will it work with activecollab? Please suggest..
prabhulsankar
April 1, 2011 at 7:02 pm
QuickBooks framework from Keith Palmer is a very good one. You will probably have to place it in some folder inside your root directory. Integrating with activecollab can be done. All you have to do is to use the function “enqueue” to adding a particular contact or order in activecollab. And obviously you will have to handle the code in the server soap file to retrieve the corresponding record values from queue.
$queue = new QuickBooks_Queue($datasourcename);
$queue->enqueue('InvoiceAdd', $order->order_id, 10);
In the above code it adds a queue task for Quickbooks Web connector to look up when it connect next time. It will look for the function InvoiceAdd handling in the server file set and the order_id passed will be available in the function as a parameter which can be used to retrieve the data from activecollab database. The last parameter “10″, set the priority in which the data is synced with quickbooks. This will ensure situations like the customer info is synced first before syncing an order.
You may still have to play around a bit to tackle activecollab specific coding if any, as I never used activecollab before.
Hope this helps.
Jeff Ryan
October 22, 2010 at 9:14 am
Hi. Thanks for the great information on this site. I’m building an app in Cakephp, and I’m attempting to have it interface with QuickBooks via Webconnect. Do you have any experience merging the two? I’m working through the php quickbooks framework, and I’ve got it connecting fine with the included examples, but it seems to be quite another beast getting it to work with cake.
Any thoughts? Thanks,
-Jeff
prabhulsankar
October 22, 2010 at 9:31 am
Hi Jeff,
I didn’t use CakePHP and Quickbooks together before. But I am sure you will have to go through some workaround to get it working with CakePHP, because of the strict nature of CakePHP. I am slowing moving from web design and development to 3D design, vfx and animation, so I don’t think I will get a chance to work on it. But I agree with you that it will be another beast getting it to work with CakePHP. I think you should try posting to the CakePHP community forum.
Good luck with it.
- Prabhul