One of my consulting clients, Kurt Gilbert of Outrider Corporation gave me some light on an important open source conversation being held by many around the world. It’s information that we already know, but important to remember. Basically, we need to find a way to take an open source shopping cart, merge it seamlessly with an open source CRM and with Quickbooks! Whoever can accomplish this task first will be the innovator who changes the Open Source world forever. Many small business clients I work with agree that Quickbooks is the tool for accounting for their business. My clients love Sugar CRM and they love Zen Cart for an online shopping cart. The only problem left in their businesses is that their 3 favorite business tools do not integrate easily and seamlessly.
I am very interested on receiving any information regarding open source developers who are working on integrating these products. In my opinion small business will benefit from this new merge the most. Small businesses are currently at a disadvantage because they can’t afford the large scale corporate sized applications. They don’t have 20K for SAP software for example. Which is why Open Source has to deliver for the sake of survival for small businesses all over the world, especially here in the United States.
Currently Sugar CRM claims to have Quickbooks integration, but only for the enterprise version of Sugar. Why is this not open source? Why do we have to pay for this feature? Sugar does not have any kind of integration with Zen Cart that I know of to date. And Zen Cart has no integration with either of the two other tools at this time. This is a huge problem for Open Source. As soon as someone can build easy integration between these 3 tools, small businesses nationwide will have a better competitive advantage against their corporate competitors.
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June 28th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
I personally have done research in the “Alternatives to Quickbooks”. That in it self was an eye opener. The general ledger system is and can be very robust and complicated. I have never used quickbooks, and have never needed to. I would present this question. Why cant you live without quickbooks? How consistant is the business model, that Sales and Contact management will integrate into eCommerce. I guess if the customer database was integrated to a CRM I could see the benefit. Still, I would advise against a proprietary general ledger. I would be interested in the Open Source Sugar CRM ledger plugins, and eComerce plugins.
Trevyn
June 28th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
I never thought of it that way. That’s a good point. What about any open source quickbook types? Are there any that you know of? Any that you would reccommend?
June 29th, 2007 at 8:38 am
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&tab=wi&client=firefox-a&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=gnucash
Here are some screenshots of GNUcash. This is the big one and runs only under Mac OS and Linux. I chose not to go with a full ledger program because I felt it was over board for my business accounting. I guess the question you want to ask yourself is… what features do I want in a Accounting program, instead of what does my accounting program want me to do. As Phil Meyer allways says. “The application should drive the choice of applications.” What features do you want out of your accounting software. I use google spreadsheets for my accounting. And use Open office for my Invoices and statements. I use my online bill pay for electronic checks.
June 29th, 2007 at 8:42 am
check out http://www.citrusdb.com
July 6th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Zencart and Quickbooks do go together… sort of. I use a little plug-in thing in Zencart that allows me to take all the online orders and send to Quickbooks use iif files. There, I create invoices, bill customers, email receipts, and create UPS shipping labels. Saves me from re-typing a lot of stuff. I too would love to see Sugar integration.
July 9th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Thanks for that feedback Adam. Do you mind me asking you what plugin that is?
July 10th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
[...] built in the open source world and this is one of them. A little while back I wrote a post titled Zen Cart + Sugar CRM + Quickbooks = Heaven! where I wrote about how great it would be to have plugins that had all 3 applications speak to each [...]
August 9th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
We’re actually building this right now and should be done by Sept. We have an AJAX point of sale for OSC as well as for Zen Cart. We’re currently mapping the data one would typically want shoved to Sugar CRM. The problem in building a plug in or contribution that others could use for their systems is that Sugar CRM is an evolving and very multi-purpose product. Usually these things have to be massaged for each deployment and are not very plug and play since each clients uses their CRM differently.
Pushing data one-way is not so hard .. we just do not find many clients who are satisfied with that.
August 10th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Tom, is your program going to be open source or proprietary/license?
November 21st, 2007 at 8:17 am
I too run a zencart shopt. Although I dont see a need for sugarcrm in our business, the reporting tools of quickbooks would be very helpful. Regarding the push/pull of data. Have you evaluated the possible uses of Jitterbit http://www.jitterbit.com/.
I have not had the time to sink into learning it, but you can create what they call jitterpacks (they already have a sugarcrm jitterpack), which can be shared and modified by each user. It appears to be a very powerful tool and would be quite useful in integrating zencart with other data sources (sugarcrm, etc). I would love to see if anyone has explored that tool for integrating zencart with sugarcrm and/or any opensource accounting packages of which there are many. Just take a look at the accounting section on this opensource resource http://mashable.com/2007/09/23/open-source/
March 19th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Wow! This is probably the most helpful article I have ever found searching on google. I too am looking of a way to mashup zen cart with an accounting program. We currently are using quickbooks so I will be looking into the plugin you have found.
But I really like open source solutions better so I hope there will be integration between some of the QB alternatives and zen cart.
For Quickbooks alternatives there are a number of open source ones available. Off the top of my head:
GNUcash (already mentioned, but worth seconding)
TurboCash
Quasar (linuxcanada.com)
For just invoices there are two web 2.0 services:
blinksale.com
freshbooks.com (has Quickbooks integration)
Really a fully open source integration of the three (accounting, ecommerce, CRM) would be the best; it is tough to beat quickbooks though.
There are open source ERP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning) solutions available (just google open source ERP)
I am only now looking at them so I have no idea if they offer the type of functionality this mashup would.
Anyway,
Awesome idea for a mashup. Very useful article for me. Great work, keep it up.
Thanks,
Taiyo
May 15th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
At some point, searching for FREE gets really expensive! I’m the king of free and I’m searching for the perfect CRM / Quickbooks solution right now (shopping cart will be an issue in the future). I just read about http://www.oasiscrm.com OasisCRM, which cost $900 per head, but looks like it includes all of the functions you are looking for.
Time costs money. Time for ME as a web developer / IT Consultant to find a free or cheap solution cost my client more than paying for a professional source.
At some point I have to find the BEST route for my client (and my self) and that could be to invest money into something as important as your Information Back-Bone.
- David
Vice President
http://www.variux.com
June 12th, 2008 at 12:02 am
I’m a bit late to the party, but you might want to look at NolaPro.
The accounting side of things is as solid as Quickbooks: there are articles online comparing the two. Multiple company, multi-currency etc. In addition it appears to have a web shopping portal built in, so if you’re exposing it to the internet (probably not so smart, but there may be ways of doing it securely) then you can use that as a ZenCart alternative. It also has a sort of Extranet capability where your clients can check their invoices etc.
Nice piece of software. Its free, but closed source - the code is obscured by Zend.
July 1st, 2008 at 10:52 am
I chuckled when I came across this while researching something else. Our company (that my husband and I own) integrated ZenCart, Sugar CRM, and Quickbooks together for a client of ours back in mid 2007. We wrote a script (PHP) that grabbed e-mail addresses from a subscription form that was added to an EZ-Page in Zen Cart and automatically inserts them into a pre-defined Target List (that we created in Sugar CRM prior to implementing the EZ-Page). Our client runs several different Zen Cart stores, and all the different e-mail addresses get collected and inserted into their respective Target Lists, all into one Sugar CRM instance. We also just recently (June 08) integrated this with WordPress 2.5 as well. We’ve had no errors or complaints since we implemented this feature for them. As for QuickBooks, there’s a mod for the open source version of Sugar CRM that allows QuickBooks integration. We had to modify the code a bit though I believe to get it work how we wanted it to because it was a little buggy.
If anyone is interested, our company website is http://businessopus.com
- Mary