Method Community

Hi! My company has decided to make the switch from Quickbooks online to quickbooks desktop (enterprise to be exact). Unfortunately, as any one who has ever had to do this may know, it is not easy to on the quickbooks side of things. Luckily....method to the rescue! So essentially instead of using Quickbooks export, convert, import mess of a system, I am attempting to export the tables from one account and import them into the new desktop account, and then sync Method with QB Desktop (seriously though quickbooks, I've been on the phone w/ them for 3 days straight...to make hardly any progress).

I understand this is not quite as easy as just pressing export and then import, so I was hoping for a little advice. I was wondering what tables should be inported in first. I figured the entity table is kinda important so I should do that one...but with tables like ActivityStatus and ActivityType, is it better to import them before or after I import the main Activity Table. Also...I know there are differences in the tables between the method desktop and method qbo versions, but does anyone know any really big ones I should look out for or be worried about. 

Also...I was trying to find an article that says what does and doesn't convert over to quickbooks. I know I read something like that once, is there somewhere I can read up on this or know what won't sync between method and quickbooks. 

Sorry...that's a lot of questions, but I would really apprciate the knowledge and help! Thanks!

Hi Maia,

First off, I highly recommend trying to do this on the Quickbooks end of things. The reason I say this is because trying to do this through Method would be incredibly complicated.  Aside from matching the tables (difficult and time consuming in its own right), making sure transactions id's and list id's match up properly would be an incredible pain and more trouble than its probably worth.  You may be able to get the CRM info across, the Quickbooks data might be a whole other story.  I'm not aware of anyone ever trying to do this before.

If you wish to take the time to try it you can. 

As for finding what can or can't be synced over, that can be found here: https://ipp.developer.intuit.com/0085_QuickBooks_Windows_SDK. Understand that there are differences in what can be accessed in QB Online and QB desktop.

Adam

mlwells,

I wrote a program that uses the Method API to transfer some Method data from one account to another. The reason for creating it was for a client that was switching from a standard Method account to a Multi-tenancy account, but the idea is similar. 

The way it worked was that they first synced the new account to their QuickBooks file which handles all of the Customers, Items etc. just like Adam mentioned above. The program I wrote, then transferred Campaigns, Leads and Activities that are not part of QuickBooks data and matched them up by customer name.

Having done this a number of times, you definately want to let QuickBooks handle everything it is capable of handling and then import the rest afterwards. Using the import/export feature is easy enough for things like Activity Status and Activity Type, but when you start importing activities it can get way more complicated. The reason it gets more complicated is that an activity can be related to another activity and the way it is related is by the RecordID. But, when you import into the new account the Activity RecordID's will most likely not match the old account (if you have deleted just one activity, they won't all match) and then the related activities will be all out of whack. That's just one example, but many of the table are "linked" by RecordID and the RecordIDs aren't the same it has the potential to cause problems.

Hope that helps!