Method Community

I've been attempting to convert sales orders to invoices from within Method and getting synchronization errors about the address being too long. I found a number of threads on this topic, none of which provided any answers as far as I could tell aside from "well, you're pretty much screwed".

One idea that I had was to create a process that would loop through open sales orders & invoices and rewrite the bill-to/ship-to addresses in a format that only used Address1-5, eliminating city, state, country. When I do this the generated invoice at least syncs back to Quickbooks but within a few seconds QB sends it back the way it was before. Same with the sales order!! 

So... let me just get this straight: Quickbooks will not accept data in this format, but it will take it from the nicely-formatted Address1-5 data, screw it up, then send it BACK to Method in such a way that it will be impossible to synchronize back. I mean... just so we're perfectly clear on this. Am I wrong?

There is a solution. Please, someone tell me what it is.

Hi Charles,

Sorry for the late reply. This issue you are referring to is related to QuickBooks Online I believe.  They changed they way they handle the addresses to free form, which in turn affects they way we receive them, and how we set them up. We are still working on this.

You issue however I don't think falls into this.  You are using QuickBooks Desktop, correct?  I noticed that the address fields in Method for the SalesOrder table are 500.  These fields in every other table (Invoice, Estimate, Entity, Customer) are 41 in length.  I believe this is why you are running into a sync issue on these fields.  I'll need to investigate this further to see if we can adjust the sizes.

If you could do me a favour and email me your account name and turn on MethodSupport for me?  This will allow me to look at your addresses and do some testing with this issue.

I'll get back to you when I know more.

- Adam

Yes, I've seen transactions sent from Method to QuickBooks come back from QuickBooks on the second sync with the Address fields garbled because QuickBooks changes the data according to its own fuzzy logic.

(from another thread:)It's important to understand how QuickBooks uses Addr4 and Addr5.  Thos e fields are essentially "reserved" to hold information from City, State, Zip (Addr4) and Country (Addr5).  QuickBooks parses the info in these fields and copies it back and forth between the two sets of data. When you put non-conforming information in the Addr4 and Addr5 fields, QuickBooks will attempt to fit it into the City State Zip Country format and you can get some ugly resuilts and truncated data.   I find it best to consider the fields for Addr4 and Addr5 in both the Bill To and Ship To addresses as unavailable for use in Method.  Just let QuickBooks have its way with them.

Hope this helps you understand the limitation you're dealing with.  Use the City State Zip Country fields rather than Addr4 and Addr5.

Thanks, but no, this does not help. I've discovered that the only way to send data to Quickbooks properly is to blank out Addr1-5, City, State, Zip, Country, and Note. Then re-send the data from Method and it all works magically. But there does not appear to be any way to BLANK OUT the fields in Quickbooks from the Method side. This is what I am now attempting to do, with no success.