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Small and mid-sized businesses are growing at an ever-increasing rate in the global economy. This growth is often attributed to the access that small and mid-sized businesses now have to powerful and effective tools and services, such as QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Online is an accounting software system that has been designed specifically for small and mid-sized businesses. It helps them to keep track of their finances quickly and accurately, and it is becoming increasingly popular among business owners and entrepreneurs alike.

 

So what does it take to integrate QuickBooks with other systems? Not much is the answer. Take the below diagram into consideration.  Acme is a mid-sized business using QuickBooks. They know of efficiencies that can benefit them if they could integrate QB with their other systems. In the diagram below Acme would like to assess integration with their Payroll provider, Inventory provider and Payment provider. QuickBooks provides everything needed for the integration. The other systems should have available everything needed for the integration. What is missing is the connection point between QuickBooks and the other systems. So, there are many options for developing integration endpoints. In this case we will look at AWS services since they offer scale and resiliency at a low cost. Businesses will need to focus on the integration endpoint as marked in the diagram below by “ACME AWS API Gateway”. Not much is in that layer. All that is needed is to accept requests from QuickBooks in a secure way and change the QuickBooks data so that other systems can read it. Most of the cost is going to be time and materials to develop code to change data across systems.

 

QuickBooks Integration Model

Costs:

As mentioned earlier most of the cost is going to be time and materials to develop the code that changes data from one system to another. Let’s say the business has an IT service provider that charges $150/hr for Coding services. Let’s see how the numbers come out.

Assumptions:

  1. 1 million API requests is a lot. In this case we are considering the requests to be supporting the internal business operations and not customer facing services. So 1 million per month should cover most small and mid-sized businesses.

  2. Third party IT service providers will do the technical work.

  3. Cost are being calculated per one single system integration. Integrations can vary depending on how much is involved to change the data sent from QuickBooks and how much support there is from the system vendor. There may be additional costs from target system vendors for integration services.

AWS API Gateway

  1. Setup Time ~ 2 hours

  2. Run rate  ~ $1/million API request * month

Data Transformation per Target System

  1. Node JS developer  ~ 10 hours development

  2. Testing ~ 1 hour

  3. Deployment ~ 1 hour

Security

  1. Web certificates = Free if created through the AWS API Manager

Total Cost per Integration/Month

  1. One-time initial cost (capital expense) = $300 dollars

  2. Development cost per integration (capital expense) = $1800

  3. Run rate (operational expense) = $1/month

 

The monthly cost to integrate QuickBooks comes out to $1 for many businesses.

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