3rd Party Software for Quickbooks – Transaction Pro Importer

     Continuing on the topic of my previous column, 3^rd Party Software for Quickbooks, there’s another great utility I came across that allows you to import data from Excel into Quickbooks. Quickbooks 2010 now allows you to add and edit lists in bulk with Excel, such as Customer lists, Vendor Lists and Item lists. However, there is still no easy way to import transactions from Excel into Quickbooks.

.    I came across the Transaction Pro Importer program while looking for a solution for a client who used the Concur Solutions website to track Rep expenses across the country. The Reps would submit receipts online. After the client approved them, direct deposit checks were issued from within Concur. The client was downloading an Excel report from Concur and then manually entering each check and related expenses into Quickbooks.  They were looking for a way to automate the data entry process from the Excel report into Quickbooks.

.   Transaction Pro Importer (TPI) proved to be the answer to their prayers. The program can take a variety of transaction data from an Excel spreadsheet and import it into Quickbooks. It can import all kinds of transactions, everything from bills, checks (except payroll) and credit card charges to Sales Orders, Invoices and Deposits. It also handles most lists in Quickbooks. You have to do some mapping work, telling TPI what fields in the Excel spreadsheet belong to what fields within Quickbooks, to get your first data spreadsheet imported. Once you have the mapping done, you can save that mapping configuration and all future imports are just a matter of a few clicks.

.     The TPI program can be found on the Baystate Consulting website (http://quickbooksimporter.com/Default.htm). It is reasonably priced and I found the email tech support very responsive. Please feel free to write me with suggestions for future topics regarding 3^rd party software that works with Quickbooks.

3rd Party Software for Quickbooks

     While Quickbooks is a great program for basic accounting for a wide variety of businesses, occasionally you’ll find it has its limitations. That’s when clients look to 3rd party software programs that work well with Quickbooks. One great source of additional utilities for handling tasks that Quickbooks doesn’t handle on its own are those created by Karl Irvin. Karl is a Certified Quickbooks ProAdvisor and, I believe, the creator of all the Quickbooks utility programs listed on the Q2Q.US website.

.     I’ll just comment on a few of Karl’s utility programs. Let’s say you have an invoice that you’d like to duplicate for many customers (for example, monthly membership dues). Rather than having to create the invoice individually for each customer, you could use the Invoice Duplicator program. Now let’s say, you’ve created the invoices & printed them, but you want to print them again 2 weeks later. Instead of having to open each invoice & mark it “to be printed” again, you can acquire the “Mark Invoices to be Printed” Utility, which will mark a whole batch of invoices to be printed with a few clicks.

.     There are utilities that will combine A/R & A/P data from several Quickbooks company files. Another will transfer data from one Quickbooks company to another. I’ve used the Data Transfer utility and Beginning Balance Transfer Utility to shrink Quickbooks data files for clients when the file size has become too unwieldy. There are other specialized utilities worth checking out, as well. Karl currently has 22 listed on his website ( www.q2q.us) . The utilities are all reasonably priced and tech support is great. You’ll usually get a response to any email query within 24 hours from Karl himself.

.     As 3rd Party programs continue to add a lot of value to your accounting experience, allowing you to expand the usefulness and productivity of Quickbooks, I will continue to write about them in future columns. Feel free to contact me if you have questions regarding Quickbooks and 3rd party software.