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Review: Atandra’s T-HUB QuickBooks Plug-In
By Wayne Kawamoto
May 9, 2006

On the up side, your firm is snaring lots of profitable sales from its online store and e-commerce sites and it relies on Intuit’s QuickBooks to manage its finances. On the down side, you have to transfer and download files to integrate and record online sales into QuickBooks — or worse, tediously enter them one by one.

If you’ve spent late nights manually entering data, wondering if there was a better way, there is. Atandra’s T-HUB offers a powerful and efficient solution that integrates sales from popular e-commerce stores and posts them into QuickBooks. This allows you to easily and quickly import orders directly into the accounting program and work with them right away. You can even handle shipping and credit card transactions, which is icing on the e-commerce cake.

What’s in Store
T-HUB imports orders from a wide variety of online stores, including Yahoo Online Stores, PayPal, osCommerce, ZenCart, CRELoaded, AspDotNetStorefront, MyCart.Net, eBay, Mercantec, X-cart and Ship-Logic, right into QuickBooks. In execution, the process is clean and virtually seamless.

T-HUB tracks your online orders and displays them in an intuitive "Order Review and Processing" screen. From there, you can review sales orders, edit them if you wish and with a single click post them into QuickBooks. Editing features allow you to, for example, correct spelling areas and other information before posting data.

You can view a transaction from the standpoint of QuickBooks — a powerful convenience-by simply clicking a "QB" button that quickly calls up a posted order. If you like, you can also configure T-HUB to automatically download transactions as they occur in real time and immediately update QuickBooks as soon as orders are filled.

T-HUB’s screens show orders from online stores and allow you to review and post transactions into QuickBooks.

For security, the T-HUB service is hosted on a secure server. If a transaction should fail to import into QuickBooks, an error message appears and offers the option to fix the problem or import the data again.

More Than Skin Deep
Since QuickBooks is the 800-pound gorilla in the small business accounting world and the clear market leader, most e-commerce providers offer some way to download and import data into the accounting package. However, most of these methods are based on downloading and uploading files, and traditionally they only handle invoices. T-HUB, on the other hand, creates sales receipts, orders, estimates and oversees shipping and credit card transactions.

The program also has the power to name new customers, create new items, record shipping charges and apply taxes and discounts. For those who sell through more than one e-commerce channel, T-HUB can accommodate multiple stores. It even offers a consolidated view that displays all online orders, regardless of where they originate.

Built-in credit card processing supports QuickBooks Merchant Service and Authorize.Net to deal with payments. Built-in shipping support, which works with UPS WorldShip, FedEx, USPS and other carriers via ShipLogic, Atandra’s partner, allows T-HUB to transfer shipping addresses from online orders to your shipping carrier. It can also retrieve tracking numbers and import them into QuickBooks with orders and print packing lists.

If you like, you can use T-HUB to process offline orders. Just take the orders that you obtain via phone, for example, and enter them into T-HUB. After you enter the transactions, they flow through your established order fulfillment procedure and post into QuickBooks. T-HUB handles back orders and offers filters to display and search for orders. There are also options for configuring how the system handles credit card charges, shipping, receiving orders and posting to QuickBooks. These variables are typically set during installation, but may be changed at any time.

Installation and Administration
Installation is straightforward, but you’ll want to have a solid understanding of QuickBooks and its settings. To accommodate the various e-commerce platforms that it supports, Atandra offers specific PDF documents and instructions for each, which provide good directions. During initial installation, and regardless of the e-commerce service that you use, T-HUB prompts for permissions to connect to your company file in QuickBooks.

T-HUB’s screens show orders from online stores and allow you to review and post transactions into QuickBooks.

While you can change settings later, the installation walks you through the process of configuring the program. This is where you can set transaction types for QuickBooks, deciding whether to create sales receipts, invoices and sales orders from orders and whether QuickBooks generates sales identifiers or uses the order number that comes with the online transaction.

You can decide how the program will name customers in QuickBooks and set T-HUB to automatically create and enter new customer information. Likewise, if an item doesn’t already reside in QuickBooks, you can specify how T-HUB will handle it. The program may be set to reject an order, or prompt you to select an appropriate item from QuickBooks’ inventory, or create a new item in QuickBooks.

The installation asks you to specify how to record shipping and handling charges, and considers restocking fees, taxes and insurance charges. Other settings let you post orders by sales rep, payment method, class and more.

To configure shipping options, T-HUB offers a dedicated screen that allows you to select a shipping provider, set default methods for shipping and configure options for confirmations and notifications, which can vary from shipper to shipper. As you would expect, there are also options to select a merchant service and set logon and transaction keys.

If you have wasted time downloading and uploading files or manually entering online sales into QuickBooks, T-HUB effectively automates the process. There is indeed a better way that goes well beyond manual input.

Pricing
T-HUB requires Windows NT/2000/XP, MS Access 2000 or above (there’s a free runtime version available for download), QuickBooks (US or Canadian) 2004 Pro or above and UPS WorldShip 7.0 (for UPS integration). Price is $200 and includes 30-days of support from the date of purchase.

Over the last ten years, Wayne Kawamoto has written over 800 articles, columns and reviews about computers, new technologies, the Internet and small businesses. Wayne has also published three books about upgrading PCs, building office networks and effectively using and troubleshooting notebook computers. You may contact him through his Web site at www.waynewrite.com.

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