The Future of QuickBooks: Intuit’s Direction for QuickBooks Add-On Software–Online!

Charlie Russell for the Sleeter Group writes:   Let’s face it – Intuit can’t create a feature for EVERY requirement that a business will have when using QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online. To that end, they provide several programming interfaces that independent software developers can use to create products that expand the capabilities of QuickBooks. We call these “third-party add-on” products.
Intuit is changing how third-party products work with QuickBooks, and it is apparent to me that Intuit wants developers to work with QuickBooks Online. Let’s talk a bit about the direction that Intuit is taking with this…

Some Background

This is a topic that we have talked about often in QuickBooks and Beyond. It is an important topic, because many businesses rely heavily on third party add-on products to make QuickBooks fulfill their needs.  If you aren’t familiar with how third-party products work with QuickBooks, take a look at these articles:

• Evaluating QuickBooks Integration Applications by Bonnie Nagayama
• Why Use QuickBooks Add-ons? by Doug Sleeter
• What is the IPP and how does it compare to the SDK? by Chuck Vigeant

Essentially, there are two programming methods that software developers can use to work with QuickBooks, the SDK for QuickBooks Windows (QBSDK) and Intuit Anywhere (IA). If you don’t use these (or a derivative), you can’t legally access the QuickBooks database.
The QBSDK method has been around for quite a few years, and applications using this method are usually found in the Intuit Marketplace. These are mostly aimed at QuickBooks Desktop (but not the Mac), although there can be products using this for QuickBooks Online. For QuickBooks Desktop these applications are usually working with your database on your desktop or local Server.

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