.:Totally:. and Quickbooks

Now this is groovy.

I just created a Quickbooks Clone as a Totally applet.
Will this be a good way to provide an accounting module for Totally instead of writing it all myself? Could be, could be.

Yes, you'll need a copy of Quickbooks.
Yes, that copy of Quickbooks needs to be running.
Yes, you need to have a company file open.

No, you don't need a fully registered copy of Quickbooks - a trial edition will do!

This is great.

The current Quickbooks Clone allows you to:
1. List all your customers and their jobs
2. Click on a customer and view all their invoices
3. Click on an invoice and enter a payment.
4. Add new invoices for a customer.

The other good thing about this is that we don't have to do a complete import of Quickbooks data directly into Totally and manage it ourselves. We just tell Quickbooks what to do, and it'll store everything we need. Then, at the end of the financial year, the Totally user can take their datafile to the accountant (who will have a properly registered copy) and be able to see all the data in that company file. The trial editions of Quickbooks don't show you anything if you have around 250 transactions.

Totally, using the Quickbooks SDK, can "see" everything. So we just need to mimic the data entry / display forms, and send that data to Quickbooks.

This also allows the Quickbooks Clone to call on extra applets that perform calculations etc on current Quickbooks data - all those things that Quickbooks doesn't natively support or offer. Great.

Caveat: This has only been tested on the Quickbooks Pro 2003 Australian Edition Trial Version.