QuickBooks WooCommerce Integration by CartSpan
Higher capability, better value, better support!
While there are low-cost (and some free) tools that can be used to simply ‘get your orders into the accounting system’, a well-designed (and supported) commercial integration can better support how your business records General Ledger transactions and actually help you sell more product; thus paying for itself in an extremely short period of time. Support for this assertion can be found in the following paragraphs.
If you are a developer that has been tasked with sourcing an eCommerce integration for a client, it is highly recommended that you confer with your client regarding the following criteria. Business owners tend to be more concerned with the continuity and capability of their operations than trying to save a few hundred dollars. Failing even one of the following criteria can turn the money/time your client spends on a lesser product, into a sunk-cost.
There are no safe assumptions when evaluating integrations
Are these capabilities important to your business?
- Recognizes G/L accounts of individual items?Many businesses classify sales of individual items by specific G/L accounts. This helps them better perform financial analysis of their product lines.
- Rule-based creation of customer names?Businesses often have a very specific naming convention that they use for their customer names. Changing this convention can be very disruptive to the user experience.
- Updates using Invent. Avail. vs. Qty. on-hand?What businesses have on-hand is not necessarily what they have to sell. Open orders in the accounting system reduce this availability, potentially leaving the company exposed to over-commitments of stock.
- Phone orders trigger inventory updates?New phone orders and purchasing receipts are constantly changing the inventory landscape and a good integration keeps the inventory picture up-to-date in near real-time.
- Detailed feature-list to aid your decision?The old saying that, "The devil is in the details," could not be truer than in the case of eCommerce/accounting integration. Ensure that the intended solution appropriately meets well-defined business requirements.
- Try before you buy! No money up-front.Companies confident in their offering should be willing to let you try their product before requiring any financial commitment on the front-end.
- History of positive reviews?Do your due-diligence and research the product's reputation in the marketplace. Even if there are limited positive reviews in the market, you should avoid products with a documented presence of negative user-experiences.
- Money-back Guarantee?How confident is the solution-provider in their offering that they are willing to eliminate financial-risk altogether?
- Phone number indicated on website?How accessible is the company to you before and after the sale?
- Support for Assembly-based products?Make sure the tool you use supports not just basic inventory items, but also the extended product types that your QuickBooks system offers.
- Support for QuickBooks Group-Item products?The Group-Item is a heavily used item type in QuickBooks that allows merchants to easily offer 'kit' type offerings to customers.
- Recognizes CC used in transaction?Stores processing hundreds of transactions on a daily basis need visibility of detailed payment method to efficiently support bank reconciliation.
- Keeps customer info current?When your customers update their billing contact information in the shopping cart, a good integration will update their contact information in the accounting system accordingly.
- Support for Coupons/Discounts?A good integration should offer native support for order-level coupons and discounts applied in WooCommerce. NOT supporting discounts/coupons in a clean and efficient manner will severely reduce your marketing opportunities.
- Pull orders by multiple status'?Many businesses need orders imported into the accounting system before they are classified as 'complete' in WooCommerce.
- Fast efficient synchronization?The way an integration is architected has a great bearing on the timeliness of stock updates.
CartSpan
- CartSpan recognizes the G/L Sales, Asset, and Cost-of-Goods-Sold accounts configured on the accounting side.
- CartSpan offers sophisticated naming capabilities to match the convention that a business has been using successfully for years.
- CartSpan factors open orders in the accounting system when updating stock availability in the shopping cart; ensuring that the company does not over-commit inventory.
- CartSpan actually 'watches' for activity in the accounting system for transactions affecting specific inventory and will update it in a timely fashion.
- CartSpan offers you an exhaustive list of product features with which to make a decision. If the information provided isn't enough to answer your questions...we're always available by phone.
- CartSpan not only offers a free 10-day trial, but we will assist you in getting the trial started at not cost to you. You pay nothing until you are happy with the way your orders are being imported into the accounting system.
- CartSpan has been in business doing eCommerce integrations since 2010 and has an A+ rating with the Better Bureau that is accompanied by many positive reviews. Most integration providers, along with other plug-in developers, are unwilling to participate in such forums that give the consumer a voice.
- CartSpan not only offers a free 10-day trial with setup assistance, but will refund your money if you are not satisfied with it's performance within 30 days of purchase. To-date, CartSpan has never had to refund a customer purchase.
- CartSpan posts it's phone number in large font at the top of its website and promises a call back within 3 hours for inquiries or support requests.
- CartSpan will update stock in the cart for all of your product types, including assemblies. CartSpan employs advanced logic that determines the maximum number of assembled items that 'could' be sold based upon availability of first-level BoM-items.
- CartSpan offers advanced support for Group Item types, recognizing them during the import and converting to the appropriate items, quantities, and prices.
- CartSpan supports the FREE Payment Gateway listed lower on this page...which allows you to record the specific credit card type as the payment method. You may then direct the transaction to its own G/L account or to the QB 'Undeposited Funds' account.
- CartSpan recognizes existing customers and will evaluate current contact information coming from the cart with what is currently in accounting. If there is a difference, the accounting details are updated to match the cart.
- In addition to supporting standard coupon/discounts applied in WooCommerce, CartSpan can be configured to 'recognize' multiple coupon codes as individual discount items in QuickBooks. This allows you to track specific marketing campaigns during holidays and special events.
- CartSpan employs a method of polling for orders that includes the latest modification date of the order in addition to multiple status codes. This approach allows you to get orders into the accounting system earlier if necessary; without having to mark them 'complete' in WooCommerce.
- CartSpan utilizes its own API and standard web request protocol to update of 1000's of products in seconds; ensuring your stock availability is represented in a timely manner.
Competitors
- 61Extensions requires the use of a single account for all items imported.
- 61Extensions offers a 'one size fits all' approach to creating customer names...raising the probability of orders being assigned to incorrect accounts.
- 61Extensions updates based upon quantity on-hand in the accounting system, leading potentially, to conversations with irate customers who want refunds for non-delivery of product.
- 61Extensions is subject to the triggering logic of the QuickBooks web connector that will not account for new phone orders.
- 61Extensions offers you a paragraph and a few bullet-points to to make a decision...and there is no one to call for clarification.
- 61Extensions takes the 'buyer beware' approach, requires you to pay up-front, and offers little in the way of personalized assistance to get the product running efficiently.
- Search the internet for '61Extensions WooCommerce' and you will find an absence of positive user experiences. Search the website PissedConsumer.com and you will find too many 'customers' who's expectations were not met.
- With 61Extensions' 'buyer beware' approach to the market, all sales are FINAL.
- 61Extensions doesn't provide any information about themselves. No phone number on the website, no contact names, and no business address; only web-based email for contacting them.
- Manufacturers beware; 61 Extensions does not support the update of inventory in WooCommerce for assembly-type products in QuickBooks.
- 61 Extensions, and other web connector-based offerings, offer absolutely no support for this important QuickBooks feature.
- 61 Extensions offers no such support and imports the general payment method of 'Credit Card' for all such transactions.
- 61 Extensions currently has no mechanisms for updating client details in the accounting system after initial creation of the customer master. If customer billing contact information changes in the cart, you will have to update their details manually in the accounting system.
- 61 Extensions does not handle coupons and discounts applied at the order-level in WooCommerce. If it isn't an ordered line-item, 61 Extensions doesn't recognize it. Your only option is to contract programming for a convoluted work-around that adds an item with a negative price to the cart. This hidden deficiency will likely cost you a significant amount of money over the long-term.
- 61Extensions only allows download triggered by a single status code, typically as 'complete'
- Products like 61Extensions utilize the QuickBooks Web Connector and the standard WooCommerce API, which combined, result in severe limitations on performance. These limitations can result in synchronizations taking HOURS rather than seconds due to each call for product synchronization having to take place individually. Refer to the following review for specific example/details: http://61extensions.pissedconsumer.com/
CartSpan offers value vs. integrations that ‘just get you by’
Competitive integrations like the one compared above utilize a common ledger account for items, regardless of how you have them configured on the QuickBooks side. Most businesses classify their products differently for the purpose of analyzing sales. This capability is lost because there is no dynamic interaction with the QuickBooks company file to support this detail in the import.
Also, many competitive integrations for WooCommerce do not recognize assembled product types in the QuickBooks system. If you are offering anything other than the basic ‘Inventory Item’ in QuickBooks, you are going to have difficulties importing them properly into the accounting system from WooCommerce. The CartSpan integration for WooCommerce closed this gap beautifully and even provides advanced support the ‘Group Item’ in QuickBooks.
Relying upon your integration to help increase your sales has less to do with the order import side of the equation than with the practice of effective stock management between systems. If you have a significant number of products to manage and don’t update availability in WooCommerce in a timely manner, you are losing significant income opportunities.
Hard Benefits: CartSpan provides a deep integration with QuickBooks to provide you with near real-time updates of product availability in your store. So, as soon as you receive stock into the accounting system or accept a new order over the phone, CartSpan sees the new inventory and will pushes an updated quantity-available to WooCommerce. If you are a manufacturer, CartSpan offers a stock management feature that projects how many of an assembled item you can offer based upon supporting stock. See our blog post, Inventory Management for Assembled Product Types, for details on how this feature can increase your earnings.
Soft Benefits: Don’t discount the ‘softer’ side of how a good integration can maximize the use your accounting system. If you are constantly changing, adjusting, or ‘tweaking’ your imports to reflect how you do business, you might ask yourself, Am I really saving that much time? CartSpan is built for QuickBooks and maximizes integration opportunities. These finer points of integration can be found on our Product Features page for order imports as well as for inventory updates.
To ‘piggy-back’ on a well-known phrase, “CartSpan integrates your WooCommerce with QuickBooks…beautifully.”
We support for some very popular WooCommerce extensions
Stripe Payment Gateway WooCommerce Addon (FREE!) – Syed “Nazrul” Hassan, author of the ‘Stripe Payment Gateway WooCommerce Addon’ (SPGWA) has extended the functionality of his extension to support CartSpan integration with WooCommerce. The basic WooCommerce implementation allows payments to be taken via PayPal, but will not provide suitable detail regarding the payment method for merchants to reconcile payments. The basic PayPal integration will only provide back a reference of ‘Credit Card’ for the online payment transaction. His ‘Stripe Payment Gateway’ has been extended to allow merchants using the CartSpan eCommerce integration to import a ‘real’ reference as to what type of credit card was actually used (i.e., Visa, MasterCard, Discover, etc.) as well as a reference to the last four digits of the card used.
This small, but very important feature, supports a superior integration where the merchant may more easily reconcile payments made with bank statements from the associated card companies. This functionality is especially useful with QuickBooks U.S. accounting system where the built-in ‘Undeposited Funds’ feature is targeted to this business process of payment reconciliation.
We are aware of no other extension for WooCommerce that enables this level of support for payment method detail…not even the commercial extensions offered by WooThemes. We are also not aware of any other accounting integration tool for WooCommerce capable of utilizing this additional detail even if it were provided by the gateway. CartSpan + SPGWA represents the most effective approach to accounting integration and payment reconciliation available. Though this Addon is offered for ‘free’, many developers rely on supplemental income via the donation process to sustain themselves. So, if you end up using this Addon, please consider ‘buying Nazrul a beer’ to show your appreciation!
WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers Pro plugin – If your business has a ‘must-have’ requirement of order numbers being formatted to a legacy convention, the Sequential Order Numbers Pro plug-in by WooThemes may be able to help you. It supports initialization of the order numbers themselves to a value that you choose, as well as options for adding a customer prefix and/or suffix.