Tips for Syncing Salesforce with Quickbooks Series (Part 3 of 5)
This is part 3 of a series of 5 blog posts that I will be posting on custom field mapping, formulas, and tips that you may find useful during your DBSync integration project. In this post I’ll be specifically addressing tips for Item to Product syncing.
The other topics in this series include:
- Customer to Account syncing
- Contact to Customer syncing
- Item to Product syncing
- Opportunity to Sales Order syncing
- Invoice to Invoice syncing
For Part 3 I want to look at some of my standard field mapping between QB Items and SF Products along with a few handy solutions that I’ve developed recently. First let’s look at what is available for mapping between the two systems.
For most clients, I strongly urge them to limit the sync process so that it is only a one-way sync – from QB to SF only. I consider this a good practice for the following reasons:
- Most clients only have a handful (or usually just one or two people) who are allowed to create new Items in QB resulting in a reasonable level of accounting controls and audit history, which is a good thing. Problems arise when clients are new to SF and do not have good (or any) policies established or good controls over how or when Products are created or modified in SF. This can eventually lead to problems like duplicate products being created, inconsistent product naming and descriptions, outdated (or no) pricing, products created that don’t actually exist, etc, etc.
- Most clients already have an established product database in QB and is usually rather straight-forward mapping and migrating them to SF. It’s much, much more difficult to map SF Products back to QB Items because of logic and validation required in SF so that Service or Inventory Items (for example) have the correct QB Income, Asset, and/or COGS accounts, etc, etc.
Once decided on the sync direction, I move on to the structure of the Items in QB. If you’re reading this you probably are aware that QB allows you to “group” Items in a hierarchy structure, which makes it very easy to search for Items when adding them to estimates or invoices. However, this causes a bit of a problem in SF. Because of this, I limit the grouping to only 1 level at most (no grouping is of course even better) with clients. This allows for a fairly predictable way to map them together and has the added bonus of being able to map the QB Item group (this is the “parent” Item that the Item being synced is grouped under) to the SF Family picklist field. To do this, I change the validation for my ItemToProduct data flows for the 1st sequence for each state so that it only looks at Items where the Sublevel = 1. This way it skips over the QB Items that are actually “groups”. The mapping looks like this:
In the 2nd sequence where the individual fields are mapped between QB and SF, the mapping for the Item group and SF family looks like this:
Along with that, I’ve also included below some cool field mapping that you may find useful for mapping QB Items to SF Products:
Share with us your cool tips or tricks for snycing salesforce with Quickbooks!
By Chris Mobbs, Acutedge Salesforce Consultant with hands-on experience in CRM administration and integration, accounting and controls, budgeting and forecasting, and policy and controls development.
– See more at: https://www.acutedge.com/tips-for-syncing-salesforce-with-quickbooks-series-part-3-of-5#sthash.XZz4kQ9c.dpuf