QuickBooks by Intuit is the #1 rated small business accounting software. WooCommerce by WooThemes is a free, powerful, and very popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. As of this writing, WordPress.org reports that WooCommerce has been downloaded 950,802 times.
I use WooCommerce primarily for my publishing business, A FontLife Publication, LLC, and selling books I've written on my other websites. It works fine for selling and helping to market my inventory of self-published and used books. On the back end, I use QuickBooks 2012 for my accounting. QuickBooks isn't specifically designed to run a publishing business, but with a few work-arounds, it handles my needs nicely, albeit clumsily.
WooCommerce Extensions
One of the best things about WooCommerce is its extensibility. There are 248 WooCommerce extensions available on the WooThemes website. Some are written by the WooCommerce developers, but many are from third party authors. They are categorized as "unofficial" extensions meaning if you want support, contact the plugin's developers. I purchased the QuickBooks WooCommerce Integration Plugin by 61 Extensions to tie the front and back ends together. One of the selling points of this plugin is time reduction. Their sales pitch states:
The nice thing about the QuickBooks Connector extension is that once you get it dialed in with your settings, it’s pretty much hands off and you can set it to run as often as you’d like. By reducing the amount of time you’re stuck doing data entry, this extension lets you focus on what matters most – growing your sales.
My time is valuable to me and I very much dislike duplicating work. Time reduction appeals to me so I took the plunge, but what a nightmare getting this up and running in my environment!
QuickBooks WooCommerce Integration Plugin
A FontLife Publication, LLC is a single mapped domain in a multisite environment. The plugin installed without issue and once activated for the mapped domain, it shows up on the WooCommerce admin menu:
I followed the instructions on the Webconnector tab and created the QWC file.
Once the QWC file is created, the next step is to import it into the QuickBooks Web Connector. Unfortunately, I can't show you seen prints of the process because I run QuickBooks in a virtual machine in Parallels on my retina MacBook Pro. QuickBooks is not designed to run at such a high resolution and quite frankly, the images are horrible.
QuickBooks Web Connector
My first attempt didn't work. Web Connector complained that my site didn't have a SSL certificate. Shared SSL certificates work so there’s no need to run out and buy one. But, and this is a big BUT, if the domain you’re setting up is mapped to any domain name name other than your primary domain, Web Connector will not authenticate against your site. You'll get an error similar to the following:
20121015.04:44:11 UTC : QBWebConnector.SOAPWebService.do_authenticate() : QBWC1012: Authentication failed due to following error message.
The error message continues to explain a blank response was received. To work around this, you have to search for AppURL key for QuickBooks Web Connect in your Windows registry and change it to reflect the correct domain name. It works without the https, but keep the query string intact.
It took several hours for me to troubleshoot all of this and finally, somewhere around 2am, I achieved success! Once I had the domain connection working right, I double checked the plugin's mappings to my chart of accounts and attempted to import the products I had in WooCommerce. I spent days adding inventory to the store. My expectation was that the products would import without me having to edit them. I was wrong. Importing the products didn't work as I expected.
The SKU in WooCommerce maps to the name field in QuickBooks. Inventory counts and selling prices come across correctly, but every description is blank. Also, you can only map products to a single Sales and Cost of Goods account in QuickBooks. For example, for reporting purposes I have multiple sales accounts depending on the type of product I’m selling. They all roll up into the general sales account. I have the same configuration for Cost of Goods. After the import, I still had to edit each and every one of my products. I thought the purpose of the plugin was to reduce duplicate work. Sure, while it saves entering some fields twice, it doesn’t save from doing the work.
Will I recommend this plugin? The jury's still out on that one. I'm waiting to see how it works with importing sales orders.
Author's Note
Soon after I wrote this article, Intuit released a new version of their Quickbooks Web Connector. While the instructions explained here are correct, there are some additional steps that need to be taken. Feel free to contact me and I'll help you get this setup. It takes about 1 hour and my fee is $75.00 payable in advance. As an alternative, you may also purchase the step-by-step troubleshooting guide below for $5.00. The Guide is a .pdf file that you can download immediately upon payment.
Hi Victor,
Any further thoughts on forking the 61Extensions code? It pops up a couple of PhP errors that shouldn’t be that hard to fix.
Of the alternate solutions you’ve recommended so far, any that you can say you prefer? Some are very pricey.
Serge
The source, as far as I know, was never available in a public repository where it could be forked. I don’t have the latest version of the plugin so I can’t fix it.
I had a developer look at it. It took about 22 hours but he fixed all the code. I’m back up and running on the latest versions of WordPress and WooCommerce. I’m going to do a diff on the codebase and see if it make sense to publish the changes.
Serge Jonnaert
That’s awesome!
If you would be able to upload the working code, that would be PHENOMENAL! We’ve been left high and dry by the developer which is very unfortunate.
Did you guys every have any luck fixing the connector after the 3.0 upgrade?
Serge,
Have you done the diff on your code to produce the changes? We would be interested in them if you have.
Carl Powell
Hello All
We’re in the same boat, unfortunately. We’re using QBPOS2013 and need to move to 2016. The current extension has stopped working and we’re trying to examine other avenues but are willing to help work on the replacement in the event you have a working system. I’m willing to help any way I can.
Hi guys, not sure if this will help, but I’m in the process of trying out the Quickbooks Desktop sync by MyWorks…sounds like it’s compatible with QuickBooks Pro/Premier/Enterprise 2015 or later. I had 2012, so I had to upgrade – but I’ll report back after a few weeks of trying it to see how it’s working. Looks like it does a lot of what 61 extensions used to do for me…but a lot nicer.
do you have the 61extension plugin fixed? i would love to purchase the new plugin update from you
The 61 Extensions plugin has been abandoned. As far as I know, there’s no fix coming.
Hi Victor,
Great article thank you.
Do you know the last known version of the 61extensions Quickbooks Connector Extension plugin? I already had installed version 1.3.32 from around September 2015, in my woocommerce site. If there was a later version with any bug fixes it would be great to know, and to find somewhere from which to obtain it.
Thank you,
Jon.
Hi Jon,
There were later versions, but I have no idea where you may be able to obtain one since they went out of business.
Victor thank you. In that case may I appeal to anyone reading this who has a copy of 61Extensions Quickbooks Connector for Woocommerce version later than 1.3.32 to reply to this thread. Hopefully we can find a way to share with and support others who have been woefully let down by 61Extensions.
I currently have version 1.3.51 installed, but no longer have the zipped folder that I used to install it. It was working ok until WooCommerce updated to version 3.0.x
Hi John,
Okay thank you for the info. I suspected WC version 3 may break the plugin as quite a lot of things have changed. If you are able to create a ZIP of the plugin installation directory, I think that is pretty much same as the original ZIP.
I hope to have some time in a couple of weeks to look in to what is involved in getting the code modified to work with WC version 3. I need to establish the scale of the task, and if you could upload your version 1.3.51 to my Google drive folder that would certainly be very much appreciated: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4tpu_hmcv4fTmVzU0xxZlhfQVE?usp=sharing
Thank you.
A link in our version points to a quickbooks site with 2.2.0.17.
https://developer.intuit.com/docs/0200_quickbooks_desktop/0100_essentials/quickbooks_web_connector
I’ve tried a few different WooCommerce – QBO integration platforms and I was never satisfied. I recently found out about the MyWorks plugin and switched over, and I’m really happy with it. I’m paying less than I was before, and I get unlimited syncs of sales, client and inventory data in real-time. It’s great. I’m also able to push data from QuickBooks to WooCommerce and actually keep everything synced. I started off on their free trial and decided to switch over officially after only a day!
Check it out http://myworks.design/software/woocommerce-quickbooks-online-automatic-sync/
Thanks for the info Marie.
Hi ,
i am using SOD Quickbook woocomerce plugin , but i found plugins url are not working , so will it work or not , please justify it , also could you please let me know which plugin is suitable for quickbook integration with woocommerce ,
would it be for one time payment , hope you understand this.
Thanks
The company that was selling the SOD QuickBooks WooCommerce plugin, 61 Extensions, appears to have gone out of business. Their website has been down for a couple of months now and there has been no communication coming from the developer. The plugin still works, but nobody can say how long it will continue to work, Your guess is as good as mine. I’m still helping some customers configure the plugin but there’s no guarantee that even I can get it to work. My recommendation is to not use it and look to some other vendor. I’ve compiled this list of what I can find that is available, but I cannot vouch for any of these vendors. I have no personal experience with them. Good luck.
Cartspan: https://www.cartspan.com/quickbooks-woocommerce-integration/
QBIS: http://quickbookintegration.com/woocommerce-quickbooks-integration/
Webgility: http://www.webgility.com/integrations/woocommerce?utm_source=Referral&utm_campaign=Partners&utm_medium=WooCommerce&utm_content=Unify%20App%20Listing
Connex for Quickbooks: https://www.connexforquickbooks.com/
JMA Cart Connectors: http://www.jmawebtechnologies.com/platforms/woocommerce-quickbooks-integration
The developers of the plugin, 61 Extensions, apparently decided to sell off their business (2 different plugins) yet they have completely shut down their sites and not provided any information to their customers regarding support or status.
“We’re looking to pursue other endeavours and feel that the business could use a fresh perspective to grow it to it’s potential.” https://flippa.com/6792384-61extensions-com
Broker indicates “Recent Downtick in Revenue Due to Declining Ownership Engagement” in the Weaknesses/Opportunities section. That is an understatement, right?!
They opened the flippa.com auction at a $115k Buy It Now price then repeatedly lowered it until their last ask was $95k. It was unsold at that auction.
I figure the owners pissed off enough of us customers with their thoughtless closing without notice and there was enough negative chatter that suitors realized it would be a sinking product to revive.
Matthew,
I agree. What they did is not right. I’ve looked through their plugin’s source code and have been toying with the idea of forking it to offer a new version myself. The core of the plugin is Consolibyte’s Open Source QuickBooks PHP DevKit.
Hello Victor,
A few months ago we launched an eCommerce site based on Woocommerce with the 61Extensions quickbook sync plugin.
Everything was running great until last week. Now the plugin has stopped working and the 61Extensions website has gone blank.
Is there an alternative to the 61Extensions plugin that you can recommend?
Thanks,
-Jeff
Hello Jeff,
The 61Extensions website went blank several weeks ago. One of their customers that I had been helping sent me this list of alternatives. Hope it helps:
Cartspan: https://www.cartspan.com/quickbooks-woocommerce-integration/
QBIS: http://quickbookintegration.com/woocommerce-quickbooks-integration/
Webgility: http://www.webgility.com/integrations/woocommerce?utm_source=Referral&utm_campaign=Partners&utm_medium=WooCommerce&utm_content=Unify%20App%20Listing
Connex for Quickbooks: https://www.connexforquickbooks.com/
JMA Cart Connectors: http://www.jmawebtechnologies.com/platforms/woocommerce-quickbooks-integration
Would like some help with our Woo / QB POS plugin. New site with SSL installed. Getting this error on the Generate QWC connector file.
Fatal error: Error Num.: 1146 Error Msg.:Table ‘xxxxxxxxxx_com.quickbooks_user’ doesn’t exist SQL: SELECT qb_username FROM quickbooks_user WHERE status = ‘e’ LIMIT 1 in /home/dh_46vhj6/enchantressco.com/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-quickbooks-pos-2013/QuickBooks/Driver/Sql/Mysql.php on line 376
Please let me know what you need to have a look.
Thank you…
I don’t have a POS system I can look at to provide an answer. I would have to take a look at your site with TeamViewer. You could contact me through email to request my consulting rate.
Hey Victor,
Wondering if you could help with this. 61 Extensions website has been down for the entire day so I haven’t been able to pull up any details but from what I remember, the plugin said that you would be able to sync only certain sections of Quickbooks onto the WooCommerce site but I am not seeing the option to do so…it seems like it is making us sync ALL of our Quickbooks inventory onto the website. This will not work as we only want a division of our company on the site and we do not want to create a new separate Quickbooks account for the division.
Let me know if you think there’s anything we could do!
Thanks,
Sjaelan
The 61 Extensions plugin does not sync all inventory. It syncs whatever is in WooCommerce with QuickBooks. Inventory has to be added to WooCommerce first. The SKUs in WooCommerce have to match the SKUs in QuickBooks. Once the inventory is added to WooCommerce, the sync will work.
I’m not sure what happened to the 61Extensions site. A few weeks ago all of the products were marked as out of stock. Then, the website went down and it’s been down for a while. I can only guess that they may have decided to close up shop.
We’re having a strange issue. We’ve setup for our client WooComm cart and the Desktop Sync vers. of 61Extensions it’s working well (a year now) until just recently, a single product is being affected and the price is being set as ‘blank’ (which results as free).
We check the QB file and inventory and yes, the product SKU is there. The variations are there, they have it listed with the price 75.00.
We have removed this one SKU from WooComm cart and reput it back. All data checks out and yet within minutes of a sync this one SKU’s price become ‘blank’ (Free). It’s only this one SKU. All others are fine and we have over 1200 products in the cart.
Does your book get into the details of how this Plugin/Extension works? And, do you have any thoughts to what is
My troubleshooting guide is not going to help with your particular problem. I’m not sure I can help you with that one either. All I can suggest is that you review the log files in both the QuickBooks WebConnector as well as the plugin logs to see if it will give you a clue as to what’s going on. You didn’t mention what version of QuickBooks you are using, but if you are on QuickBooks 2015 or later, make sure you have the latest version of WebConnector installed. The latest is Version 2.2.0.34.
We are in need of someone to help finish configuring the 61extensions connector. It seems to fail at importing orders. Can you help?
Hello Mike,
Will contact you shortly via email.
Hello Mr. Font. I found your site tonight while desperately searching for help on the 61 extensions QBPOS plugin, as apparently many others have as well.
I have the plugin installed on brand new site, the company opens for business tomorrow. We installed the pc with the QBPOS and QB the past Friday. The web connector is installed and is syncing products from the web into the POS but missing details. Also, tweaks in the pos from the staff is not communicating back to the website. (apparently as far as I can see)
I am certain (and hopeful) that this plugin will work for my needs but I am missing some settings and I really need some expert help. (not having too much fortune with 61 support.) It’s sporadic.
I am happy to pay you for your time to walk me through these settings. Sooner the better please. Thank you in advance for your kind help!
I’d love to help you. I’ll respond via email.
Victor, I am having a similar issue as well. I have a client’s site that I have tried to integrate the Quickbooks (Desktop version) plug-in unsuccessfully. I am not sure where the problem exists but I will say the web connector is the bane of my existence. Documentation for setting up and troubleshooting is really poor. Besides the mostly non functional web connector, there seems to be a plugin conflict between it and WooCommerce Measurement Price Calculator plugin which is critical for some of my client’s products. I need an expert to diagnose and fix the problem, or I need to find another QB integration plugin. Look forward to hearing back from you.
Hi, we are running into issues getting the 61extensions quickbooks / woo commerce integration to work. I would like to hire someone to look at the quickbooks data and the woo commerce data and help figure out what is causing the synchronization to fail.
Please email at rebecca@scopiousmarketing.com as soon as possible.
Please PM me about hiring you to help configure my plug-in
One of our associates will be in touch.
If you want our help, please provide us with a correct email address.
Hi Victor, I just happen upon this link trying to find answers for my clients. If you can help that would be fantastic. Can the order # in WooCommerce appear on the sales receipt in quickbooks? It doesn’t appear that WooCommerce recognizes Inventory Groups correct? This baffles me as an accountant. Right now once the sales receipt comes over into quickbooks we are having to change each sales receipt to the correct inventory group. Is there any other suggestions? Duplicate sales receipts are coming over into quickbooks as well. Can this be easily resolved?
Hi Michele,
The WooCommerce order number comes across to Quickbooks as the the Sales receipt number prefixed by SR.
Comparing Quickbooks inventory groups to WooCommerce product categories is like comparing apples to oranges. As a WordPress eCommerce solution, WooCommerce uses custom post types to capture inventory items. As with any post, it may be categorized. WooCommerce products are grouped by product categories. This does not however, translate to Quickbooks inventory groups. There is no work around.
Duplicate sales receipts can be due to any one of many causes, but it is most likely a mismatch or missing element in either Quickbooks or WooCommerce. I was getting duplicate sales receipts because I had misspelled a sales tax item. It’s impossible to tell without examining the log files for both Quickbooks Webconnector and the WooCommerce Quickbooks plugin, and even at that, we might not be able to determine a root cause.
Hi Victor — my problem is similar to Brad’s — our integration between our wooCommerce web site and QuickBooks POS was working at one time. In the course of trying to get our site live, several upgrades were installed and now the webconnector no longer works. I am getting error code QBWC1012 in the log file; the description of the error is “Client found response content type of text/html, but expected text/xml”. I checked the AppURL in the registry as suggested above; it appears to be correct. I also had a chat with the Intuit folks — they said that wooCommerce is generating the wrong data. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Mike
Did something change on the server?
Hi Victor, thanks for your info. My Quickbooks Connector used to work, but somehow got broken in the course of upgrades and my web developer can’t seem to get it fixed.
Do you know specifics on compatibility? If so, please let me know if I have a compatibility problem and if you would be willing to discuss helping us solve our issue for a fee?
Quickbooks Pro 2013, WebConnector 2.1.0.30, Woocommerce 2.2.8, SOD Quickbooks Connector 1.2.6
Hi Victor
It is possible to configure the variable products to work with woocommerce and Quickbooks POS.
I can’t find information about how to and if it is supported at all.
Thank you
Mo
I don’t know Mo. I haven’t had a reason to try it. All I can tell you is that product sync is based on SKU. Do variable products have different SKUs?
Victor,
Hi. I am interested in the extension but I have a question I cannot find answered anywhere.
When the orders are imported, are they imported as sales receipts? Then when you go to the make deposits screen and the window appears with your imported orders, does the payment card type appear?
Imagine you import 500 orders across VI/MC, Amex, and Discover. Each of those has a different deposit so you need to aggregate your orders into four deposits. Without card type this is a huge pain. I have asked around and have yet to find this answer.
If you know, I would be appreciative of the answer.
Justin
Hello Justin,
Thanks for asking. I hope this helps. You didn’t specify whether you are using POS or the QuickBooks Pro plugin. I use QuickBooks Pro, so my answers pertain to that product. When you transfer sales to Quickbooks through the plugin, you have to decide whether you want them to transfer as sales orders or sales receipts. The image below displays the configuration item in the Quickbooks plugin.
As for your second question, it depends largely on how you have WooCommerce and QuickBooks Configured. The first image below shows the payment gateway configuration in WooCommerce. Whatever you have installed as your payment gateways need to me mapped to QuickBooks accounts in the QuickBooks plugin. (Second image). If you are using a single merchant account to process different types of credit cards, then only the merchant account can only be mapped to one account in QuickBooks.
Victor,
Thanks so much. Saved me $130. Without the ability to map orders to each card type, you can’t (as far as I can determine) process hundreds of orders per day. The reconciliation would be brutal as the deposits are based on card type data.
I think I will use an export program from CodeCanyon, then map the payment type to the export file, and export the file into a database that will parse all the sales data into a few lines:
revenues by payment type
taxes by payment type
number of each sku sold
Then I can have a very simple daily entry into QB without customer data.
All the best,
Justin
Hi Justin,
I don’t think that WooCommerce exposes the actual payment type anywhere in the database. I believe it only posts a reference to the gateway itself.
Scott
Justin, can you contact me at carolinapos.com at 8433532000×300 about what you did to summarize the daily sales data by card type? I’m looking to do something like that myself.
Justin,
If you are still looking for a solution to the issue of determining ‘card type’ used in the transaction, here is free Payment Gateway plug-in for WooCommerce that exposes this information:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/stripe-woocommerce-addon/
Victor,
I’m getting an error message when I tried to create the QWC file and open it, it says “The application WooCommerce QuickBooks Connector’s Service URL is not on a secure server. QBWC1051: The new application was not added.” I’ve tried inputting the link to my SSL for this website but that did not work. Am I missing something? Thanks for your help.
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
When you create the QWC file in the plugin, you need to enter a valid https url. The Quickbooks web connector won’t create the app unless it confirms the SSL certificate is valid. If Quickbooks can find the SSL certificate, it will display it during the installation process and ask you to confirm its validity. The SSL certificate is only “required” when the Webconnector app is created. I have no idea why Intuit decided to do it that way, but it’s a poor design choice. It may be possible to spoof the Quickbooks Webconnector app creation process by adding the required registry keys manually, but I’ve never tried it. All of this is explained in detail in my troubleshooting guide. It’s only $5.00. You can purchase it and downloaded it right away.
https://victorfont.com/bookstore/quickbooks-woocommerce-troubleshooting-guide/
How did the sales order posting work for you? I’ve been able to connect and post new customer order info but NOT the sales receipts. I am now 8 full hours into it and I’m frustrated beyond belief!
Hi Russ,
Sales orders came through, but not as I expected. They were mapped to the wrong accounts and I couldn’t change it. I had to delete them and enter them manually.
are you aware if this works with quickbooks online?
Hello Craig,
As far as I can tell, it does not work with Quickbooks Online. This is from the plugin developer’s website:
Hello Victor,
Been having a heck of a time with this plugin and after we got the everything connecting to QuickBooks, I get an error saying the Web Connector could not verify the web application server certificate. Have any ideas?
Also who are you hosted with?
Thank you,
Carl
Victor, I’m very much interested in an update on your progress with WooCommerce plugin and this particular extension from 61 Extensions. I would like to integrate WooCommerce and this extension with a client’s store’s Intuit POS system that they use as their cash register, etc. and populate their website with the inventory from their store automatically.
Thanks!
Deb
Hi Deb,
The plugin works very well as long as you have all of the QB accounts mapped properly. All the data comes across to Quickbooks as it should, but there is still some manual editing that has to take place. For example, the product’s title in WooCommerce should come across as the description in Quickbooks. The plugin ignores the product title and the product description in QB is blank. The other thing I don’t like is that the plugin only allows you to map WooCommerce fields to single accounts in QB. For example, I sell books on my publishing website and I like to track sales by paperback, hardcover, ebook, used books, etc. The plugin only allows me to map to one sales account so when the details come over to QB, I have to edit the transactions to make sure they map to the accounts I want.
If you are running in a multisite environment, this plugin will only work with a single site. It creates its tables at the root level of the site and does not honor the multisite configuration. You also need to be running https for QB side to work properly.
As for POS, there is a plugin by this same company specifically designed for POS. Hope this helps.