Your online business is doing much better than you ever dreamed. Orders are pouring in from everywhere and you're finally out of the woods and into the new millennium; except that your shopping cart is speaking a different language from your accounting books. Redundant data entry is taking up too much of your valuable time. What if you could integrate your systems? Sure, it's possible and it is easier than you think!
The solution is to use a Quickbooks integrated shopping cart.
Quickbooks shopping carts are among the most powerful and highly integrated shopping carts available in the market today. Quickbooks focused shopping cart solutions automate orders, item data, customers and payment. Thus they automatically synchronize items, orders, customers and payments between your storefront and your Quickbooks financials.
But, what if your shopping cart does not allow automatic integration?
Fortunately, Quickbooks allows you to import online transactions that were created in your shopping cart. A special file format called the IIF (Intuit Interchange Format) is produced by your shopping cart software and this can be integrated with your Quickbooks, without your having to re-key the information.
There are two kinds of shopping carts: shopping carts with built-in Quickbooks integration and shopping carts that need add-on software for Quickbooks integration.
Carts with built-in integration have buttons or links that enable you to generate files that can be put into Quickbooks, without the use of any additional software. A couple of mouse clicks and your online transactions are posted.
Using add-on software that bridges the gap between the shopping cart and Quickbooks is a complicated process. You will have to ensure that your add-on software is compatible both ways -- with Quickbooks and your shopping cart program.
The most vital feature for integration, whether it is using in-built software or add-ons, is that the shopping cart should produce accurate and complete data. Quickbooks requires orders to be properly classified into the appropriate type of transaction. The items should match flawlessly for Quickbooks integration to work.
To make the entire process easy, you must choose a shopping cart software that allows easy, menu-driven installation, initialization and set-up of Quickbooks files. Your cart and/or add-on software should be able to handle large orders, if needed.
Quickbooks integration allows you to synch orders, items and customers easily. Since you don't have to key-in entries, your inventory will always be accurate. Thus you can save precious time and energy -- time that you should spend selling your products, instead of playing around with the numbers on your keyboard!
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