A client of mine has the program Quick Sell 2000, which is a POS program, based on Microsoft Access. He is insisting that, since his program vendor says it works, I can convert information from that program to QuickBooks. I have struggled with this trying to make it work, but I don't have the knowledge to do it or else it's just not working. You said that it was not practical to transfer and you suggested that he enter the information manually into QuickBooks each day. This works for me. However, I need to have written confirmation from an expert with QuickBooks in order to convince him. I thought you said it would be in the "Consultant's Reference Guide" but I cannot locate it. Could you tell me where to look?
A client of mine has the program Quick Sell 2000, which is a POS program, based on Microsoft Access. He is insisting that, since his program vendor says it works, I can convert information from that program to QuickBooks. I have struggled with this trying to make it work, but I don't have the knowledge to do it or else it's just not working. You said that it was not practical to transfer and you suggested that he enter the information manually into QuickBooks each day. This works for me. However, I need to have written confirmation from an expert with QuickBooks in order to convince him. I thought you said it would be in the "Consultant's Reference Guide" but I cannot locate it. Could you tell me where to look?
In general, I don't recommend using IIF files to import transactions from other systems into QuickBooks. This is not because the POS systems don't do a good job creating IIF files(I'm sure they do!), but it is because (among thousands of reasons) IIF files do not have any verification, error trapping, or undo capability. So when you import your iif file into QuickBooks, it just dumps all the data into your company file. If you want to verify anything, it's very difficult, and if you want to undo it, you'll have to delete each transaction and list item that was imported. This is not the disciplined accounting process I want my clients to adopt. Another reason I'm against it is that Intuit does nothing to support outside software developers who want to send data to QuickBooks. They publish a reference guide for creating iif files (inside the help files of QuickBooks), but if there are bugs, there is no one there to help you resolve things. When Intuit creates a software developer support program, and commits to it, I'll change my tune on this. If you can verify that the POS program is only sending one (or just a few) summarized sale transactions each day and that it doesn't add new list items (or if it does, it should not add too many), then I would be more inclined to use it. On the other hand, if all it does is add one transaction per day, you could very easily enter that data by hand. It's always a tradeoff.