Keeping your Accountant happy

[Shawn Cheatham]

I'm preparing to build a new subscription app and was wondering how
everyone is keeping their Accountant happy. I haven't finalized the
payment gateway, so there's still some flexibility in my approach.

Curious to hear if anyone has managed to integrate/sync Quickbooks (or
the like) or if the standard is a file import from the merchant/
gateway.

[Robby Russell]

Most merchant gateways provide Quickbooks exports, so we generally
just go that route. If we supply enough information to the payment
gateway than we don't need to try and reinvent the wheel and build our
own QB friendly files.

Robby

--
Robby Russell
Founder and Executive Director

PLANET ARGON, LLC
Design, Development, and Hosting with Ruby on Rails

http://www.planetargon.com/
http://www.robbyonrails.com/
aim: planetargon

+1 503 445 2457
+1 877 55 ARGON [toll free]
+1 815 642 4068 [fax]

[Brian Ketelsen]

It doesn't answer your question in any way - but I'd recommend buying the RailsKit for Software as a Service from Ben Curtis.  It's $250 well spent on billing/gateway code that has been well tested.  I'm using it for a site in production now quite happily.  RailsKits.com has the details - and the earlier you purchase, the less integration you'll have to do with existing development work.

 

How's that for an unsolicited chunk of advice?

 

(I'm just a customer of Ben's this is an unsolicited endorsement)

Brian

http://www.brianketelsen.com

[cainlevy]

I've also been working on a plugin to help with subscriptions. It's not a complete package like RailsKit's SaaS, and it's seen less production use, but it should also work with an existing Rails app. See http://github.com/cainlevy/freemium for more.

-Lance

--
rails blog: http://codelevy.com
co-founder: http://uservoice.com

[Benjamin Curtis]

Thanks, Brian!

To echo Robby's email, Braintree (the gateway used with the SaaS Rails
Kit) has Quickbooks export, and I pass to BT the address info
collected during account creation, so all the work may be done for
you. :)

----
Benjamin Curtis
http://railskits.com/ - Ready-made Rails code
http://catchthebest.com/ - Team-powered recruiting
http://www.bencurtis.com/ - Personal blog

[Shawn Cheatham]

Good to hear I'm not totally off my head!

I guess the export isn't such a bad route but the thought of going
manual (in most cases) isn't very attractive. On the other hand, maybe
I'm over thinking it...

******Off topic*****
I've been trolling your blogs so closely over the past 2 months that
it's kind of erie seeing you post to my inquiry - thanks for all the
info in this thread and elsewhere:o)

The RailsKit+BT+Query combo seems interesting...just haven't been able
to get over the price tag

Freemium I only stumbled across yesterday, so it deserves a bit more
investigation.

Thanks for the posts - keep up the good work!

-Shawn

On May 15, 1:07 pm, Benjamin Curtis <benjamin.cur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks, Brian!
>
> To echo Robby's email, Braintree (the gateway used with the SaaS Rails  
> Kit) has Quickbooks export, and I pass to BT the address info  
> collected during account creation, so all the work may be done for  
> you. :)
>
> ----

> Benjamin Curtishttp://railskits.com/- Ready-made Rails codehttp://catchthebest.com/- Team-powered recruitinghttp://www.bencurtis.com/- Personal blog

>
> On May 15, 2008, at 10:45 AM, Brian Ketelsen wrote:
>
> > It doesn't answer your question in any way - but I'd recommend  
> > buying the RailsKit for Software as a Service from Ben Curtis.  It's  
> > $250 well spent on billing/gateway code that has been well tested.  
> > I'm using it for a site in production now quite happily.  
> > RailsKits.com has the details - and the earlier you purchase, the  
> > less integration you'll have to do with existing development work.
>
> > How's that for an unsolicited chunk of advice?
>
> > (I'm just a customer of Ben's this is an unsolicited endorsement)
>
> > Brian
> >http://www.brianketelsen.com
>

> > On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Shawn Cheatham <shaw...@gmail.com>  

[Robby Russell]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Shawn Cheatham <sha...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Good to hear I'm not totally off my head!
>
> I guess the export isn't such a bad route but the thought of going
> manual (in most cases) isn't very attractive. On the other hand, maybe
> I'm over thinking it...
>

Accountants are used to doing a lot of things manual... it's part of
their job to verify numbers. I'd suggest that they just schedule 1-2
times a month to run an export/import process.

Cheers,
Robby