Method Community

I am planning to build some custom screens and reports in Method for Non-Inventory Items, Estimates, Sales Orders, and Invoices on Quickbooks Enterprise Version 10.

I need several custom fields added to the Items records to pass through Estimates, Sales Orders, and Invoices.  For example, we have a quantity driven price adder in fixed dollar amounts, weights, metal types, and other specification information that is item specific.  This information is used to drive invoicing and reports for production scheduling.  All of our company specific business workflow can be easily handled by simple sorting, selection, and summing against additional custom fields carried at the item level and reported against items that are attached to Sales Orders.

Quickbooks Enterprise Version 10 has added support for additional custom fields with a presentation layer mask and drop down boxes.

Does Method Integration support the use of the additional custom fields (more than legacy 5 fields)?

Some bloggers have reported that Intuit has NOT made these custom fields available through the ODBC connection.

Are these fully supported through the IPP?  Has Method Integration added this support?

Or, how should custom fields be implemented in Method?

If Method syncs to for example 1200 Non Inventory Items in Quickbooks, can we then import the custom field data for these 1200 items into a table in Method that is associated with Items? Is this easily done, or requires developer support?

I have been disappointed with Quickbooks custom fields before back when they were supported in everything but QB reports.  Am I going to be disappointed again, and should I just count on Method to fix the holes in the QB support?

Best Regards Everyone,

James

 Hey James,

Intuit has stopped updating the SDK they release, they stopped developing for it before QB V10 came out. In QB V10 you see new custom fields being made

Method does not currently use the IPP, hence, we do not support or provide information on what it is capable of doing.

If you want to add custom fields in Method, go to the Tables/Fields screen. Locate the table you want to add custom fields to and click on "edit". From this screen you can add fields to the table. check out the link below for a webinar on this topic

http://www.methodintegration.com/resources/webinars/2009-07-22CommunityWebinar2_GettingstartedwithTablesandFields.wmv

Once you have the fields on the table, you can then use the Import Tool to get your data into Method.

If you have created custom fields and want to import the data into Method, check out our new Import Tool. You can find this tool within Method under Customize > Integration tools.

Lastly, when it comes to custom fields and QB, we work within the limits of the Intuit SDK. If the SDK does not support a specific feature or does not make a certain field available then ultimately we have no access.

Thanks for the clarification Ryan.

It's a bit disappointing that Intuit is not supporting the new fields in the SDK, but they are good about not breaking legacy functionality so building the extra fields into Method sounds like a good solution.

One final point of clarification.  Will the import tool "join" the additional field data to the sync'd QB data for items based on a shared key item [Name] from the QB table and an item [Name] in my source file for import?  I don't want to rely on physical record order, or consistent sort order, and I would think the import tool might use a brute force comparison of the key fields to match import rows to the correct sync'd row if it is really the same table, or maybe a better architecture would be two separate tables, joined on the key field, presented to the user as if it is just one table with additional fields.  Let the dbms maintain the one to one integrity.

Having pulled my hair out using IIF some years ago, I'm a bit leary of maintaining relational integrity for my 1200 records.

Cheers,

James

 Hey James,

The Import Tool will allow you to select either, update based on a key field(s) or to add the data as new records. You must specify one or the other.

Sign up for your free account and give it a whirl, its located under the "Customize >> Integration Tools" tab link.

Thanks Ryan.  Will do.  I've got a Full Blown subscription setup, I've just been busy upgrading to Enterprise V10 and trying to figure out which way to go.  I might be able to stay native in QB, at least for a while, but I'm sure I'm going to bump up against some hard constraint and I'll need the flexibility of Method.