Accounting Software integration with ZenCart?

[creativearc]

I have several ecommerce clients, many of whom use ZenCart.

I've never had to directly interface with a client's accounting software. Many of my clients are probably 'too big' for Quickbooks, so they use something else. (MAS, perhaps)

However, since I never need to worry about it, I'm also not very informed, either.

Specifically regarding QuickBooks, I've never heard of a client directly integrating that software with a shopping cart. By 'directly' I'm referring to live integration, where order data is synchronized with Quickbooks in real time.

I know there is a QBI plugin for working with Quickbooks 'on demand' on a regular basis.

Is there something else out there? How do ecommerce stores typically interface with their accounting software?

[ryanp]

I've not yet set up Zen-Cart to interface with my accounting software but my "day job" involved developing concepts and managing the implementation of similar integration projects.

In most cases a "live" or real time integration is not necessary and is in fact difficult to implement without security problems. You'd have to be really big with a very dynamic inventory turnover for that to really make sense.

For examle if a customer comes along just for fun and orders 5,000 of everything you have. You don't really want that being booked immediately in your accounting software.

Additionally real time updates make logging, error handling and data synching issues much more difficult to handle programatically.

Most of the systems I've dealt with were more or less automated import / export interfaces that ran once a day, sometimes more often. Nothing really glamourous and often times just a batch file for transfering text files between the two systems.

When you addin issues such as what to do with products in carts, what happens when the bricks and mortar store sells out a product that an online customer is just purchasing, how do you handle inventory discrepancies? Those things are the tricky parts so in the end it's often best to have a simple interface and get your processes and inventory management in order.

Hope that give a couple of things to thing about.

Patrick