Intuit’s QuickBooks product is one of the best known products for small business accounting that exists. Intuit does a good job marketing the product,  most accountants and bookkeepers are familiar with it, and it is easy to use. Perhaps most important is the fact that the various QuickBooks products (Pro, Premier, Deluxe, Enterprise, etc.) are priced to be attractive.

But what do you do when QuickBooks isn’t quite enough? You can purchase another product in the mid-market or use a product like FishBowl, but these alternatives are often quite expensive in relation to what you need. Sometimes, they don’t provide what you need. What do you do, for example, if you need a specific report that isn’t available in QuickBooks and can’t be generated using the “Customize Report” option? If you have QuickBooks Enterprise Solution, you can use a report writer like Crystal Reports and access the data through ODBC. If your needs are complex at all, you’ll discover as other businesses have that Crystal Reports is easy to use for basic reports, but more advance reports require some programming expertise.

We often deal with exactly these issues. The QuickBooks SDK combined with the ODBC link allows us to extract data from QuickBooks and do a host of things with it. Data Guidance Group has developed a set of programming tools that allow us to quickly assemble programs to meet your detailed needs.

If you’ve got an idea that would save you hours of time, or you need to know if something’s possible with QuickBooks, call a developer. We’re glad to answer questions about what’s possible with QuickBooks.