Integrating Quickbooks Enterprise with unique PHP store?

We're being asked to get Quickbooks Enterprise edition for our
business.
We use a completely hand-made online store (PHP and mySQL) and used to
simply create CSV sheets that were imported as invoices into regular
Quickbooks.
But I guess that's neither 100% accurate and may not even be doable in
newer Quickbooks.

We want to be able to integrate Quickbooks into the system without
replacing our system. Has anyone done this?
Anyone have any experience with Quickbooks Enterprise and unique
in-house online stores?

Thanks for any feedback!!
Liam

<news@celticbear.com> wrote in message
news:1118928159.681411.268510@g14g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> We're being asked to get Quickbooks Enterprise edition for our
> business.
> We use a completely hand-made online store (PHP and mySQL) and used to
> simply create CSV sheets that were imported as invoices into regular
> Quickbooks.
> But I guess that's neither 100% accurate and may not even be doable in
> newer Quickbooks.
>
> We want to be able to integrate Quickbooks into the system without
> replacing our system. Has anyone done this?
> Anyone have any experience with Quickbooks Enterprise and unique
> in-house online stores?

I've never done exactly this, but I've had to deal with similar issues
(integrating two dissimilar data sources like that) -

Best thing I could suggest is that you back up your Quickbooks data and
examine the data structure in the file - Unless Quickbooks supports SQL
queries (I'm pretty sure it doesn't), you'll need to use file commands & a
lot of file data parsing.

I suppose another possibility is to see if Quickbooks does import/export to
a SQL-supporting format, but that would be a lot of extra steps in using
Quickbooks.

news@celticbear.com wrote:
>
> We use a completely hand-made online store (PHP and mySQL)
> and used to simply create CSV sheets that were imported as
> invoices into regular Quickbooks.
> But I guess that's neither 100% accurate and may not even
> be doable in newer Quickbooks.
>
> We want to be able to integrate Quickbooks into the system
> without replacing our system. Has anyone done this?

Yes. Since QuickBooks has a proprietary data architecture,
you can't make another program write into its database
directly. So the solution would involve some kind of file
interchange.

I would suggest that you write a command-line PHP script
that would pull your sales data from the database and write
it into an IIF file (this is QuickBooks' standard export-
import format; essentially, this is tab-delimited text with
some domain-specific twists; for example, data pertaining
to a single transaction can span over multiple lines of
text). The IIF file can then be imported into QuickBooks.

Last time I dealt with IIF was a few years ago, so I don't
remember all the details, but I do remember that somewhere
between QuickBooks help files and QuickBooks Web site I
found a pretty intelligible description of the IIF format...
These links should get you started:

http://www.quickbooks.com/support/ar...00/117503.html
http://www.quickbooks.com/support/ar...00/121756.html

Cheers,
NC