POS and QuickBooks

[Dale Harris]

For those of you that do not hang out in the chat room.

Recently there has been talk in the chat room about making POS export information that can then be loaded into QuickBooks. Is anyone out there interested in this and if so how much.

First of all does anyone out there already own and use QuickBooks and manually enters data from DHPOS into it. If you do not already own QuickBooks would you buy it if DHPOS could export information to it.

In other words would you be willing to spend your own money to buy quick books rather than "Sure Dale, go ahead and work your butt off to add a new feature that I may never use because it won't cost me any money or effort on my part."

[Guest]

Dale,

I use MYOB, but I believe it can also import Quicken 'QIF' files. I think it would be a great feature if you could export sales data (ideally all sales data, but I've got by without it for this long, so anything would be great) to a QIF or to a comma delimited file.

I was actually toying with the idea of writing something to intepret the journals, but since they are going to be 'protected', it didn't get very far.

[peewee3ie]

yse Dale this will help me a lot as a lot of people that ask me about your software all so ask can export to quick books. I would be gratefull if added this to pos program as i use quickbooks my self. i enter the sales at the end of the day in one lump .i.e if i sold $200 of stock i would enter it in to quickbooks as one sale.

[Bobby]

Dale,

I, personally, think that this would be a lot of work on your part, as you are adding another feature, that, 1. you would try to implement, 2. that you would have to support. I feel that there are other items on the "to think about" pile that would be more worth your time and effore to finish and implement. Take it, or leave it, but here are my ideas on what should be next:

1. Finish the stock table upgrade (since you already started it)
2. Finish the customer info part of the program. (this has been part of the program since early on, but it has never really been useful. maybe add bonus points, or loyalty discounts, etc...)
3. Finish all the smaller projects that are just lying around. (pole display output, purchase order program...)
4. Take a long extended vaction to some far off place without any electronic equiptment, cell phones, etc... (you can actually throw this in anywhere you chose, you definatly deserve it!)

You built this program to help mom and pop stores switch from calculators and cash registers to pos systems to help track their inventories. You did that very well. Now I see this program trying to cover larger and larger area. Stores that need two or more registers, should be doing enough business to afford to pay someone for a POS system. Basic QuickBooks costs $200 alone! A very good, but basic POS program can start out at $600. That is not alot of money for a business that needs 2 or more cash registers. I feel that you are just trying to make too many people happy without sticking to what this program was about. And, you are taking on all of this extra headache without any kind of monetary gain.

My point is, you have created a great program that I am sure has helped and will continue to help a large group of people, but when will it end. People are ruthless when it comes to handing stuff out for free, the best of what you have is never enough. No matter how hard you will try and please people, they will never be satisfied.

I hope that you take some of this to heart, for what it is worth.

Wishing you the best,
Bobby

[dave something]

We do use quickbooks and do manually enter every day's receipts so we can keep track of our inventories properly and centrally, among other things. We have four stores, and entering a couple hundred transactions per day per store is a large bit of typing.

To Bobby's points...
Exporting a daily sales journal to one's accounting package is NOT in my mind a far flung bit of feature creep. It's the real world and a feature, Dale's time and talent being willing, that should be in the program.

Sorry to sound like a rant...didn't mean that. The quickbooks hook is quite nearly the only thing missing for my narrow needs from this terrific program, and I'd love to see it included one day.

dave

[Andrew]

QuickBooks sounds like quite a fussy program.

I have been trained in MYOB and know it supports import of plain text export files. It then gets you to "map" the fields in the file...to the fields in MYOB. Thus allowing your POS program to export in whatever whichway round it likes, even data you don't need for MYOB.

You don't even have to map all of the fields, you can skip the bits of data MYOB can disregard.

It's quite a nice feature of a very nice accounting package IMHO.

[Bobby]

We do use quickbooks and do manually enter every day's receipts so we can keep track of our inventories properly and centrally, among other things. We have four stores, and entering a couple hundred transactions per day per store is a large bit of typing.

This is an example of my point, exactly. You have 4 stores, you pay rent/lease on the property for 4 stores, pay employees to to run the 4 stores, you pay the utilities for 4 stores... but you don't want to pay for the pos program, how fair is that to Dale, the developer?

To Bobby's points...
Exporting a daily sales journal to one's accounting package is NOT in my mind a far flung bit of feature creep. It's the real world and a feature, Dale's time and talent being willing, that should be in the program.

I never said that it was a far flung bit of feature, and I am not a creep.

Sorry to sound like a rant...didn't mean that. The quickbooks hook is quite nearly the only thing missing for my narrow needs from this terrific program, and I'd love to see it included one day.

And this is what I was talking about, not enough. If Dale does decide to include the export to an accounting program, then I am sure you will want him to work on (since you have 4 stores) a way to transmit the data to one home office so that you can import the info to your accounting software from only one location, correct?

Bobby

[smckane]

I have to agree with Bobby, there are other features that are far more important to me than Quickbooks compatability. IMHO this should go on the back burner for a bit, it's just not useful enough. Once you implement this, won't other people just ask for compatability with program XYZ as it is also very useful.

However, I may be in the minority

Stewart

[chasmit]

Dale,
As a small-business man, what's important to you?
In your shop, do you want this feature?
I think that DOS and Quicken are so good
because the programmers tweaked them to perfection
because they used them themselves at home
and at work.
Features of DHPOS I believe were developed and tweaked because you
wanted and needed them at your shop.
I think that DHPOS is so good because the programmer
actually uses it.
So, is this new feature something that is worth it to you Dale?
In your own shop?
If you will be using it, then I say go for it.
If you are trying to please all of the people all of the time,
then I need say no more.

[Andrew]

chasmit,

Dale does not use DHPOS in his store - he is bound by policy to use the software provided by his parent. company.

The quickbooks export has been requested many times - hence why this topic emerged.

[Dale Harris]

Andrew,

Today the mobile key shop goes on the road so I get to use my POS program rather than that hunk of junk I have to use in the shop.

I am so happy.

[dave something]

I don't expect to ask anyone to automate my data transfer needs. I have those functions in hand already. And, no, I don't need to have it all in a single file culled from my many locations. One file per location per day will do. It actually works better that they are kept separate anyway (locations can be separated as unique classes in QB).

And no, I never said I was unwilling to pay. I use DHPOS because it is good, not because it is free. It is free as a matter of personal choice by Dale, correct?

The original questions posed by Dale were along the lines of 'do I use QB and would I use the export/import feature if it were available?' My answer remains wholeheartedly yes to both. And asked by Dale to pay him for his time to provide such a feature to me, my answer again would be YES. I mean, which makes more sense to you: Pay a bookkeeper $18K per year to do the data entry in QB for me, or, pay Dale for a feature that many of us could find some use for? I'm inclined to appreciate the latter.

And, as Dale has pointed out nearly countless times, the program is already jammed with country-specific features requested by many of us over time, few of which any one of us uses on a daily basis. A few may use some daily, most of us use few of the 'extended' features and rarely at that.

And finally, whether the file format is dedicated to QB or MYOB is irrelevant to me. A well-formatted flat file of transaction data can be parsed in many spreadsheets and converted to QB or MYOB formats with a few keenly applied macros. QB and MYOB both publish their import file formats. I'm happy to do the import half of the equation, but I would still need an output file from Dale first.

[Andrew]

A minor side note:

Perhaps we should use a different abbreviation to refer to QuickBooks, as we often refer to QB on the forum as the abbreviation for (QBASIC/QuickBASIC).

While reading the last post by Dave, it took me a little while to realise he was referring to the accounting package and not to the programming language.

Perhaps QBooks or QBKS, or just say QuickBooks to avoid confusion.

[Joe]

Dale,

I use MYOB, but I believe it can also import Quicken 'QIF' files. I think it would be a great feature if you could export sales data (ideally all sales data, but I've got by without it for this long, so anything would be great) to a QIF or to a comma delimited file.

I was actually toying with the idea of writing something to intepret the journals, but since they are going to be 'protected', it didn't get very far.

I am new to the program but find that exporting is already covered pretty well in that you can chose to save reports to a data .txt file. If you simply change the document type from *.txt to *.csv, excel will interprete the document correctly as comma separated values and open the report quite handily in columms which can be manipulated to your hearts content. Most accounting programs are set up to import excel documents. The only suggestion I would have to Dale would be to include the option to save the data file directly to *.csv thereby saving the extra step of changing the document type from .txt to .csv.

[soggypaws]

I am just in the process of getting a POS solution for a new small business in Chicago. The ability to export from a POS system to a .csv is a critical factor in deciding which program we use. As has been pointed out by others, I'm not so much seeking a solution to directly transfer to any particular program; instead, since I have not yet made a decision on QBooks, MYOB, or another program, I would prefer to make sure that the program exports to a generic download.

BTW - I am so impressed by someone who is willing to provide his time and energy to make such an extraordinary program available for free.