We're running Quickbooks retail with Network Solutions Pro.

We are just trying to load products but the Item Number/Name Field in Quickbooks loads in Network Solutions as the title field, which is title of the page in the URL etc...

What should happen is that the Item Number field in quickbooks should be the same Item number in NS and the Title Field should come from the short Descripion field in Quickbooks.

We chose NS Pro and Quickbooks Retail for integration and honestly at this point I'm not impressed.

Ideas???

Hi honestylehardware,

This is something that has been discussed before here on the forums. The reason we use the Product Name - note it is actually the name not title - is because that is mandatory on our database. Product number/part number, is not. Due to this since everyone that uses our software has to fill in unique product names we can for sure use that piece of information. Since not everyone uses part numbers this could potentially break their integration then.

As of right now there is no time frame to change this but it has been brought up to product management.

One thing you can do though is after the product has been pulled from the site into QuickBooks, you can change the name in quickbooks and it will not affect your site on the next sync. So once that product is added in simply change the name to the part number and from then on you will have what you need.

Joe

I am curious about two things:

1. how many quickbooks users out there use item numbers? I may be wrong, but I am guessing the vast majority. Any Users care to reply? If the vast majority use item numbers, this thing should never have been developed the way it was. By the way, all users of Monsterbooks, its predecessor, were very much accustomed to using the item numbers because that how that software worked. I would think NS must've had super compelling reasoning to make such a change...

2. If you change the product name after the first sync, does that also change the name of the URL page?

--mmasha

Hi mmasha,

1. The change was made because we do not require products to have a part number in v7 and that our only true unique identifier for products on v7 that we know everyone will use is the product name. This is because the product name has to be unique. Also in QB it clearly states Item Number/Name in QB so it could be either the products name or the item number. Some users put the part number there, some put the product name.

2. If you pulled all your products from QB into the MCP, then you can change the product name in the MCP from that item number to a more descriptive name.

Now if your product was pulled from the MCP in to QB after an order, there are a few things you can do to 'merge' the products in QB.

So in the example above say you have product with the name of prod1 that has an item(part) number of asdf1234. In QB you have that product with asdf1234 in the Item number field. You just sync an order for that product from the MCP to QB, and now you have a new product in QB called prod1. To merge prod1 with the asdf1234 product you would do the following:

A. Change the 'Item Name/Number' of the old QB item (the one that you had already been using) to the 'Item Name/Number' of the new item created as a result of the order export.

So you would change asdf1234 to have prod1 in the item name/number field

B. QB will tell you that item name/number is in use, and ask you if you would like to merge the items... click ok/yes.

C. In QB the description/qty/price/etc that you had on the old item will be replaced by the new. You can edit all of that info back to what you would like it to be in QB. The item will remain linked to the corresponding product on the site.

In this case you would set the description to prod1 and the name to asdf1234 and change any pricing, or qty.

D. The next time you download an order containing that product the inventory amounts will be adjusted accordingly. All other information (descriptions, cost, price, etc) will remain unchanged on both sides.

I hope this can help

Joe

Joe,

Thanks for the reply. I get how it works, but my point is that it is completely different from Monsterbooks in terms of the key field, and for those with hundreds or thousands of products, the merge idea doesn't make it more palletable.

Nonetheless, a work around is better than none. My sync has yet to work at all since my site was cutover on June 2, so these are secondary issues, but ones I need t prepare for in the event that NetSol can figure out why the sync does't work for my site...

I agree with this being an issue..and a huge headache for customers migrating from v4.
If you step back and look at the overall syncing issue, it is crystal clear that customers using QB use item numbers (not names) to separate their products into organized lists.
If MCP says Product Names are required, but Item Numbers are not...is the reason they chose to force the Product Names to sync with the Item Number fields in QB...that is simply poor foresight and a terrible excuse when it comes to programming a forced ######.
Why not force Item Numbers IF QB syncing is desired? Problem solved.
This must be addressed and should have been resolved with the 7.3 update.

mmasha,

I totally agree with what you are saying and we've been having the same issue since last year. I don't know of any Quickbooks setup that works the way they've designed the web connector interface, and they obviously didn't check with existing users before creating this.

I've heard the same reasons given in conference calls with them, trying to tell me this is how Quickbooks should work. Maybe if you were setting up Quickbooks from scratch you could do it that way (which still wouldn't make sense) but for any existing user its a non-starter.

I have to imagine there are lots of monster books users who have the exact same issue. Keying in orders by hand is getting really old....

Joe,

I was just reading through your 'solution' to the quickbooks integration issue. Wouldn't it be much easier to just express to your product development team & the powers that be that this isn't just a cosmetic thing and requires immediate attention?

I appreciate the reason the engineers thought that they should design it this was was that the item # field isn't required, but why was that not an issue for people in MonsterBooks? Why not at least allow your customers to choose how to integrate as you did in MonsterBooks?

Actually there was a timeframe to change the integration. In April I was told that this would be fixed in version 7.3 (email pasted below)...

[REMOVED DUE TO FORUM REGULATIONS]

________________________________________

Hi welldressedfood,

I can say for sure that our product management team has had this request before and has taken it under advisory. At this time though nothing has been said if they will change this or not. In the mean time the best I can recommend is the work arounds that I have provided.

Joe

I agree with every other customer on this forum that it is totally ridiculous for you to expect us to jump through the hoops that you recommend to fix this problem. Any serious business is going to have part numbers and every serious business is going to need QB for accounting. Your engineering team goofed big time and you should be working on fixing this NOW, not being surly about how it's being "taken under advisory". Look how old some of these posts are! You basically have made NS with QB unusable without us having to do another HUGE amount of work -- you've already had us do a ridiculous amount of work to adapt to the migration. How can you possibly be proposing this as a solution? Completely incredible.

Hilary
www.sundialwire.com

I'm seconding Hilary's response. The entire reason I signed up with NS was to have the ability to integrate with Quickbooks, this problem renders the sync function on orders essentially useless as it is faster for me to manually enter my sales than go thru the brain damage of merging style numbers. Not to mention that I am a clothing store and my items are all tagged and barcoded so changing my item numbers won't work. This is a complete disappointment and I am hoping that the more you hear from users that it is unacceptable will help push this to the top of the NS priority list.

Krista
www.vintagefringe.com

I have to agree the band-aid NS suggests makes it unusable. Would it not be possible to leave the part number optional for non-QB users, and just make the documentation clear that the part number is required for a successful NS-QB integration?

What online business does not use part numbers? Even people have part numbers (SS#)!!!

I know one person that doesn't. So he'd fail to sync...and most often does.