search

bschalme / qbd-api

An API web service for QuickBooks Desktop
Apache License 2.0
4 stars 3 forks source link

Questions #1

Open meilechwieder opened 11 months ago

meilechwieder commented 11 months ago

Greetings from New York.

I've long been looking for an API to quickbooks desktop. It looks like this is it. I just have 3 questions

1) where do I get a valid download for OpenSync? 2) can we have this work together with something like ngrok.com so that I can access the API remotely (- will need authentication) 3) is there a documentation for all availble API calls? 4) is there a way in the API to know if quickbooks is open (i.e. if the DB has the latest data - most recent sync)?

Thank you for this awesome work!

bschalme commented 11 months ago

Hey Meilech,

Thank you for your kind words.

To answer your questions:

  1. LetSync LLC's LetSync Desktop is the direct replacement For Synergration's OpenSync. OpenSync was written using VB6, and Microsoft was dropping support for it, thus necessitating a re-write (presumably to .NET).
    1. Make sure to do your due diligence to ensure LetSync Desktop is compatible with your versions of Windows and QuickBooks Desktop
  2. I'm sure it's possible to run QBD API behind ngrok or something similar. I have QBD API running in a Docker container on AWS ECS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer, which is behind an API Gateway. ngrok looks like it does much of that.
  3. QBD API uses OpenAPI for the API documentation. Browse to your preferred OpenAPI front-end at /qbd-api/swagger-ui, /qbd-api/rapidoc, or /qbd-api/redoc.
  4. All QBD API sees is the underlying MySQL database. It assumes the data is current. It is blissfully unaware of any running QuickBooks Desktop instance. So you'll need to adjust your workflows accordingly.

Some back story on Synergration and OpenSync:

  1. Tom Crawford, the founder of Synergration (and the only person running it for the longest time), died about 5 years ago. Yudel (I forget his/her surname), who was working with Tom for some years, took over Synergration and its products, and re-branded the company to LetSync LLC. He shut down Synergration.
  2. I'm still using Synergration OpenSync with QuickBooks Desktop 2016. Yeah, the time is coming to do an update, but:
    1. The pricing for LetSync Desktop is substantially more than OpenSync was. Synergration was only charging four or five hundred bucks or so for a permanent license, with free upgrades in the same major.minor version branch. LetSync is $399 per year, every year, as of the date I wrote this.
    2. Intuit is pushing us all toward QuickBooks Online. As a result, QuickBooks Desktop is getting harder to purchase. All I see is that it's only available as a subscription. Gone are the days, from what I can see, where you could buy QuickBooks Desktop for a few hundred bucks for a permanent license.
    3. I would spend close to a grand for both QuickBooks Desktop and OpenSync, and keep them for five years or more. Nowadays, you're looking at spending that much or more every year. So you'll have to look at the business case to see if it makes sense for you, versus migrating to QuickBooks Online.
  3. To be fair, with what Tom was charging for OpenSync, and the Herculean effort it must have been to support so many versions of QuickBooks Desktop, I doubt it was sustainable from a business perspective. My guess is Yudel realized this, and set LetSync Desktop's pricing accordingly.

Hope this helps. Feel free to post more responses if you have any questions or observations.

Oh, and if you're a Rangers fan, please take care of Blake Wheeler. He did good by us here in Winnipeg.