Magento Commerce has been out a year now, and as the product has matured, and more companies have adopted it -from mom and pop shops to international, multi-channel retailers – the demands of many users still grow. With the introduction of its enterprise platform, Magento has looked to fulfill some of the demands of those companies requiring such features as user level permissions, auditing (logging) of administrator actions, content staging, among other features. While the featureset of both the newly branded “Community” edition, and Enterprise editions is expected to continue its growth with the support of Verian, there are a few significant holes that many online retailers leveraging the platform have significant difficulty with. And in defense of Magento, this hole exists with most eCommerce platforms: its integration with merchants’ accounting / ERP systems. This is typically something reserved for third parties to develop.
Strides have been made, and recent developments indicate that solutions have arrived, finally. Smile has developed an OpenERP module, and a few others have popped up here and there for various other ERP platforms, but the most widely adopted accounting package for small businesses (at least in the US) – QuickBooks – still lacks a clear leading solution for integrating with Magento. But let’s cover the options that are available for merchants to integrate with QuickBooks
Available Quickbooks to Magento Integrations
- T-Hub: One of the early options available for Quickbooks integrations, T-Hub (developed by Atandra Systems), and has been in the order fulfillment / Quickbooks integration market for quite some time. While I cannot say that I have personally used the software with Magento, with other eCommerce applications – I’ve heard some unfavorable remarks about the support provided by Atandra on this product. However, because of Atandra’s long-standing in the market, it certainly provides a valuable option for those looking to not only integrate Quickbooks, but also improve their order fulfillment processes. It is not what I consider a straight Quickbooks integration, and may include more functionality that necessary, but it certainly has the capabilities to synchronize the data between the applications.
- Magento Data Link: This seems to be the first “straight” synchronization between Magento and Quickbooks, however falls well short of what I’d expect just in terms of available information about the product. No documentation, no valid reviews (lots of people complaining about the price though), not even a screenshot. Warning signs to me to steer clear of this one.
- eCC: One of the later contenders in this market, eCC is developed by Webgility, and much like T-Hub, is more than just a Quickbooks integration. With a full set of order fulfillment capabilities, it can also be configured to not process shipping so that users can bypass those steps which lead to a direct integration into Magento. Webgility is fairly new to this market, but appears to be aggressively targeting retailers looking for a solution to their order fulfillment and integration woes. One thing that impresses me greatly with this company is the service provided (I was on the phone recently with a sales rep for 20+ minutes who was very helpful), their focus on quality, and the helpful information on their website. When you compare their website to Atandra’s (who hasn’t even taken the time to update their copyright data in the footer for over 3 years), with the videos, and documentation, it goes to show the effort that Webgility puts into the product. However, when it comes down to it, the proof is in the pudding and we’re looking forward to testing this product against T-Hub in the next week (stay tuned for that post).
- Magento Order Export Module: This Magento extension allows you to output XML or CSV formatted order data to be manually processed or imported into a variety of different backend applications. While this requires a manual process to be executed, it is certainly a viable solution to bringing down your order information into Quickbooks.
- Stone Edge Order Manager: A well-known solution in the order fulfillment arena for small to medium sized businesses, there is a beta version of the software available that integrates the order fulfillment solution with Magento, and again, backend integration into Quickbooks.
- Custom Development: None of the above truly present a seamless, automated solution to integrate Magento with Quickbooks. The community had started some initiatives a while ago in creating a Quickbooks sync group however one year later and the project has seemed to stall. The costs to develop this for an individual project or client would be a big pill for a client to swallow, and there aren’t any signs of any development firms (aside from the group) really stepping up to the plate (at least not that I’ve caught wind of).
My past experiences with enterprise software have proven that integration projects and software can be difficult and riddled with problems. Which is probably why you see such few options available for Magento (also why we don’t develop one ourselves). This has been the number one request from our Magento clients, but again, this is certainly not something unique to Magento, most eCommerce platforms in the small to mid market rely on third party software (like T-hub and Stone Edge have done) to tie onto their software, and usually it is just a matter of time before they do.
Over the next few weeks, we will be trying out more of these solutions, and we’ll make sure to report back with our findings. If you have other recommended solutions, or have feedback on any of the above, please share your experiences in the comments below!
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Your right, this is what we’ve been looking for in a long time, but our developer has been stymied by it. It’s just too big a task for a single person. I’m definitely looking forward to your final report on T-Hub and eCC – I’ve been hesitant to pull the trigger on T-Hub; so this will be a great report!
[...] has a great article listing out the options out there for any merchant looking to integrate their two most powerful [...]
Kevin, thanks for taking the time to write this article. I am looking forward to your review on eCC vs. T-Hub. Will you be reviewing the eCC inventory sync module as well (this available in the test version)? This is an important feature for small businesses that share inventory between their brick and mortar store(s) and eCommerce site.
I’ve been testing eCC, and though I am a little disappointed that it doesn’t run as a service and requires human interaction to bring in data, it works and works well. Down the road I hope they offer it as a service and fully automated, but for now it seems more than good enough. I’m almost certainly going to buy it today.
Additionally I can’t say enough about the support. When I ask questions I get prompt, clear, concise answers “warts and all”, no attempt to mask answers I won’t like. KUmar there has even taken the time to get me on the phone and has worked to help me get the best out of my trial. The “comfort factor” of this is more than enough to offset swallowing having to have a manual step in the process (for now).
Hello,
I wonder whether anyone else has feedback on eCC? Cian give it good review so I may get the trial.
Hello Kevin,
I see that you posted this article in May. Do you have any updates? What is your experience with eCC now?
Many thanks.
Hello,
I am a magento developer and quite interested to know more about quickbook and its integration with magento.
You’ve written some really good articles about Magento but haven’t updated in this category in a while. Hope you can continue!
Ray
Hi Ray, thanks for chiming in. Yes, unfortunately our Magento blog has fallen flat as our Magento developers have been swamped trying to get client Magento projects done. We do have a long term objective of managing this section of our blog better on an ongoing basis and promise to deliver informative Magento blog posts as we clear up our backlog =) But appreciate your interest and patience.
I have checked out ECC and T-HUB now. They were both easy enough to set up for the trail and get working with the basics. Neither of them provide a customer management option, or any sort of task / case / assignment functionality as you would use from say a CRM. So you are going to have to have CRM, Quickbooks (pos and financial), & Magento. And since ECC and T-HUB don’t connect to a CRM they leave you hanging. Stone Edge claims to have customer management functionality, we are going to check this out next.
[EDIT: via email communication, Tao goes on to detail the following]
I am coming at it from the perspective of how many orders can be handled a day. And finding a solution that can scale up – that is it is cheap to get in to then can go up to 500-1000 a day, assuming a switch off of Magento and Quickbooks before reaching that number.
From why I have learned so far ecc and thub do nothing in the area of increasing the number of orders you can handle. They put your info into quickbooks, but outside of that they are just glorified label printers that do nothing for the shipping center (the accounting person is the only one that benefits from ecc/thub). They save you from having to copy the shipping address in to world ship and that is about it.
Stone Edge looks to be the only choice actually for a low cost entry into the order management system market. The only competitor is Dynacomp MOM which Stone Edge blows away. The next step up in terms of cost and setup is pretty big, moving to Order Motion, Escalate Retail, or full ERP package that generally wants you off of Magento, or wants a lot of money to code Magento in.
Thanks for the update Tao, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Stone Edge after you’ve had the opportunity to look into that.
We are looking into using the free magento with quickbooks. Are they any drawbacks?
I got a 14 day trial of eCC and am working with it currently. It installed easily on both QB POS (as a plugin) and on my Magento test store. Here are the feature shortcomings I discovered:
When eCC creates Web Store item from QB POS:
- Online Store item ‘Name’ is converted from Receipt Description and converted to ALL CAPS (they told me it was a bug)
- SKU is identical to converted item name (this is OK but how do you insure it is unique as I have a separate attribute in POS for vintage?)
- No ability to filter or exclude QB POS Departments
- No ability to map attributes or even encode or concatenate QB attributes to the Web Store SKU
When eCC creates QB POS item from Web Store
- Web Store SKU -> QB POS Receipt Description (this is probably OK)
- Web Store Description ->QB POS Long Description and is truncated at 30 chars (bug)
eCC has the ability to process credit cards using a few merchant CC gateways (but not the QB POS specific CC gateway I use for QB POS). I have concerns about this as using this feature to process CC later probably violates the ever increasing requirements for CC security (PCI).
With half baked QB inventory sync and a charge of ~$500, I’m discouraged using this solution.
@Richard – thanks for chiming in. I appreciate your feedback on the eCC solution. I think it is fair to say at this point based on some of the feedback that it is a solution that seems promising but has some areas to mature.
We use t-hub. Good product works well, but forget about support. Emailed them twice because I wanted to add a store and never heard back from them.
Any status on testing ECC and T-Hub head to head.
Responding to comments about ones own product is a tough call but I’ve been following the feedback here for the past couple months and feel obligated to bring some clarity on eCC and our business:
1) The very existence of an integration app like eCC is because there is a big disparity between the data structure of QuickBooks, online stores and shipping providers. Not to mention that businesses have diverse catalogs and a multitude of ways in which they setup their inventory and ordering workflow.
2) No, eCC does not satify the needs of *every* e-tailer today running QuickBooks. There are certainly aspects of the integration today that require more work such as support for complex POS inventory matching with attributes, automated real-time synchronization, ability to handle custom fields and workflows, etc. However, we are very confident that it meets the needs of majority of online sellers..and we’re continuously adding/changing features to cover a wider audience.
3) Our focus today is primarily in automating QuickBooks integration, Inventory Synch and shipment processing. eCC does not have full-featured CRM capabilities and we don’t claim to be a full blown order management application.
The areas we enhance and what eCC evolves into in the coming years will be dictated mostly by what customers tell us. So please keep the conversation alive.
Thank you.
Parag
@Parag – thanks for chiming in to the conversation. I think you touch on some very important points about exactly what eCC is, and what it is not. CRM functionality is not something I’d expect out of your solution, I think one commonality across all of the needs is to address the pain points of online merchants of handling the process and workflow of everything that needs to happen after the order is placed in Magento – namely order fulfillment. Not only in the ability to print shipping labels, but more importantly to expedite the fulfillment process and create some efficiencies, as well as integrating that data with backoffice software. That’s the specific focus of the products we’re talking about here. Granted, this article is dedicated towards options for Magento merchants to integrate with QB, but certainly order fulfillment and processing is another, but related topic and something that your tool covers as well. We look forward to seeing how eCC advances, as I mentioned in the post, I’ve talked to numerous folks at eCC of which I liked what I heard. But you’re right, actual users feedback is going to be the most important gauge, and also help you in driving your product into being an even better solution.
Kevin, do you have any updates on your comparisons? I am part of a small company starting from scratch and we are looking at using Quickbooks POS for our retail store and Magento for online. It doesn’t look like there is a clear leader for integration, which is disappointing. I’ve toyed with eCC and T-Hub, but they are a bit incomplete of an integration. I need something that can handle importing custom attributes from Magento. I guess another option is to find a different POS system that is better matched with Magento. Anyone have recommendations?
Does anyone have reviews on MagneticOne’s Quickbooks solution for Magento?
Hello Kevin,
We are looking into using the free magento with quickbooks.
is it available in community?
t-hub and ecc are premium. if free quickbook extension available or any programing help or some code to start with quickbook please let me know.
your help most helpful for me.
Thanks and Regards,
Manish Patel
We are looking at using t-hub or ecc to help with shipping automation and invoicing via QB’s. We also have orders from brick/mortar retailers processed thru Magento (CE). We are looking for a way to IMPORT orders into Magento (for existing customers) via .xml and email confirmation of order receipt back to customer…a poor man’s EDI. Any one attempt this or have suggestions/advice?
The problem I’m finding with all of these solutions is the inventory sync. We have a high volume website and a ’sometimes high volume’ store, and need the inventory to sync real time (ie when an item sells online, it decrements in the store, and when an item sells in the store, it pushes to the magneto side).
I’ve been working with @parag and the guys at eCC for several months now, and they are great to work with, very responsive, and a capable team. That being said, the inventory discrepancy trouble is giving me severe heartache.
@Al Doan – we are in the exact same spot where inventory must be synced. We even thought of investing on a new POS, but very reluctant to do so at this stage. Judging from your experience, would you recommend us using eCC or should we deffer to T-Hub? Thank you
@Al Doan – What efforts are the guys at eCC putting forth to help resolve your inventory discrepancy troubles? Other than that issue, how is eCC working as a simple Quickbooks integration solution? Is your magento sales information coming down in to it and making order fulfillment through QB easy, etc?
Great Article Kevin ….:)
Would like to share about Version :magento.1.4.x.
It has default order export functionality compare to older version. With present version we need to download extension to do order export. Therefore its better to use magento 1.4.x for new features.
Thanks,
Anil
Has anyone been able to test the beta version of Magentic One’s Quickbooks integration to Magento extension?