The Benefits of eCommerce Integration with your FileMaker CRM

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In Australia and other parts of the world this week marks the start of a new financial year, which is a great time to review your business processes and eliminate any inefficiencies that is costing your business time and money.

One of the most common businesses processes we see in many small- medium sized businesses is the double data entry of orders from online eCommerce systems into the FileMaker custom business application (and sometimes once more into the Accounting software). We work with many small businesses that have an online presence, selling products and services using online platforms such as WooCommerce and Shopify. Many of them are unaware they it is possible to automate the exchange of data between eCommerce systems and FileMaker using APIs (an API is an Application Programming Interface that a company makes available to other software developers to allow you to get your software – FileMaker in this case – talking to their software).

If you’re using FileMaker as your CRM (Customer relationship management) application to track your customers, sales, invoices and payments there are a number of advantages of integrating it with your eCommerce software, including:

  • no more double data entry in FileMaker. The order and customer details have already been entered by the customer in the eCommerce system – with the click of a button the order details can be downloaded to your FileMaker custom application in a few seconds
  • no more double data entry of Product details in your eCommerce system. If you’re using your FileMaker application as the central repository of product data you can push/upload data from FileMaker to your eCommerce system (including images) at the click of a button
  • less errors between your eCommerce system and your FileMaker custom application. Being able to download and upload data between your eCommerce system and your FileMaker application means there is less likelihood of data entry errors between the 2 systems
  • free up staff time for more productive work. Rather than having staff spend countless hours each week doing double data entry they can be freed up for more productive (and enjoyable) work, such as following up on sales leads, customer service, marketing etc.
  • it also allows staff to upload and download data to the eCommerce software without giving them direct access to the eCommerce software

We’ve helped customers save between 1-2 hours of time each day for staff that were previously manually entering online orders into their FileMaker application. Now they download all the orders in the morning for the previous day and the whole process takes under a minute. We’ve even helped some customers use the power of Webhooks to have new orders pushed directly to their FileMaker Server so they don’t have to download any new orders – they instantly appear seconds after being placed online.

If you would like to discuss integrating your FileMaker solution with your eCommerce system please contact us for a free initial consultation to discuss your requirements. We also have a number of products which allow you or your in-house/external FileMaker developer to do the integration yourself with the WooCommerce and Shopify eCommerce platforms:

PayPal launches PayPal Business in a Box (United States)

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As part of National Small Business Week in the United States PayPal today announced PayPal Business in a Box aimed at U.S. small business owners who would like to take the leap into online sales. You might be just starting a business for the first time but you don’t have web design capabilities to develop an online store or know how to set up online or point of sale payment methods, or an established offline business looking to move online.

PayPal have partnered with two of our favourite companies WooCommerce and Xero to deliver a simple, integrated solution that gives you the tools you need to start an online business. If you’re using the FileMaker platform to run your existing business you can also take advantage of our solutions that integrate WooCommerce and Xero with FileMaker:

FileMaker, WooCommerce and Xero make a great combination when it comes to running your business – we should know as we’ve been using these platforms for many years to manage our business, online store and accounting needs. We’ll be publishing a new article shortly about the benefits of integrating FileMaker with WooCommerce and Xero and how you can save time and money and avoid unnecessary double data entry.

fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) – Tracking Categories Updates

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If you’ve been using Xero for a while you’re probably familiar with their use of tracking categories to categorise transactions such as Invoices and Bills to suit your business needs and allow you to generate reports by tracking category. For example you might setup tracking categories for different areas of your business (e.g. departments, cost centres, or locations) so you can track their performance over time.

A typical Xero tracking category might be named Sales Regions and have the following tracking category options:

  • North
  • South
  • Eastside
  • West Coast

 

There are some limitations to tracking categories in Xero – a Xero organisation can have a maximum of two ACTIVE tracking categories and four tracking categories in total (ACTIVE and ARCHIVED). You can enter up to 100 category options for each category.

We’ve always had some basic support for tracking categories in the fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) solution – you could download all your tracking categories from Xero at the click of a button and also add them to Invoices and Bills when uploading to Xero. Over the past 12 months we’ve had more and more customers request additional support for tracking categories, including the ability to manage tracking categories completely in FileMaker.

We’ve just released an update to the fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) solution that includes full support for Xero Tracking Categories. You can now enter two tracking categories for the following items:

  • Invoices
  • Bills
  • Purchase Orders
  • Overpayments
  • Prepayments
  • Receipts

Both tracking categories are also downloaded from Xero for each of the above items. We’ve also added the ability to do the following from the fmAccounting Link file:

  • create a new tracking category and upload it to Xero (as well as update existing ones, e.g. change the name or status)
  • add new tracking category options and upload them to Xero
  • delete a tracking category from both FileMaker and Xero
  • delete a tracking category option from both FileMaker and Xero
  • download an individual tracking category, including all tracking category options

We currently support a single tracking category in our Timesheets module – we’re working on a few changes to Timesheets and tracking categories which will be included in the next update to fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition). Timesheets uses the Payroll API and you enable Timesheet tracking categories separately to the general tracking categories, but we expect them to work in a similar way to Invoices, Bills etc.

Xero Surpasses One Million Subscribers

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Xero today announced that it has recently surpassed the one million subscriber mark on its global accounting platform, doubling subscriber numbers in less than two years. We’ve been closely following the growth of Xero over the past five years and knew it was only a matter of time before they hit the magic million mark, becoming the first cloud accounting platform to achieve this milestone.

When you consider they had only 50,000 subscribers just five years ago the growth rate has been phenomenal – in April 2015 they had 475,000 subscribers and in March 2016 that had increased to 717,000. Xero has added almost 300,000 subscribers in the past year alone.

As a Xero customer, Xero Approved Developers and developers of the fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) add-on we’re extremely pleased to see the rapid growth of Xero around the world. We’re getting more enquiries each month from the North American market and it appears Xero is starting to gain some attention and market share in that tough market.

Here’s some other numbers about Xero that demonstrate the size of the size of the Xero ecosystem globally:

  • in the last 12 months Xero has processed more than $1.2 trillion of global economic activity
  • the Xero API receives more than 10 million calls per day
  • there are over 35,000 developers in the Xero ecosystem
  • there are over 100,000 business advisors – accountants and bookkeepers – empowering small businesses as they join the cloud accounting revolution

Every day our fmAccounting Link customers around the world are uploading Contacts, Invoices, Payments, Purchase Orders, Bills and more from their FileMaker solutions to their Xero accounting software, removing the burden of double data entry and saving them tens of hours each week in manual processing. If you have any questions about integrating Xero with your existing FileMaker solution please get in touch or visit the fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) page for more details.

Downloading the Xero/MYOB Invoice PDF

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Whether you’re using Xero or MYOB AccountRight for your business accounting software there are times when you would prefer to send your customer the Invoice that Xero and MYOB generate natively. For example if you have added an online Payment option to your Xero Organisation you might prefer to send the customer the Xero generated Invoice with the “View and pay online now” link in the PDF for customers to click and pay online with a credit card. Similarly if you’re using MYOB AccountRight you might to send your customer the invoice using one of the MYOB M-Powered layout forms.

For our fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) solution we’ve already given users the ability to:

  • get the Online URL for an Invoice and include that in an email etc that they send to clients so they can choose the “View and pay online now” option
  • download the Xero Invoice PDF into a FileMaker container field and then save that to the desktop etc or include that in an email to the customer in place of a FileMaker layout based Invoice

We’ve been working on creating a similar feature for our fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) solution and it will be included in the next update. Like the Xero solution it will allow users to click a button to download the MYOB PDF invoice into a FileMaker container field and then save that to the desktop or include that in an email to the customer. We currently have the ability to download all the Form Templates setup in your MYOB Company File:

and then specify the Printed Form for each Customer in the fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) file:

 

This is then used as the default when you request the MYOB Invoice PDF, however you can specify a different form template to be used by passing a parameter with the request for the Invoice PDF. Here’s a quick video that demonstrates creating an Invoice and then requesting the PDF from MYOB:

fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) Now Supports Jobs

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We’ve just finished an update to fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) which now includes examples for working with Jobs, one of the most requested features from our customers. fmAccounting Link shows you how you can use FileMaker to:

  • download Jobs from MYOB to FileMaker (all Jobs or filtered by Start Date)
  • create Jobs in FileMaker and upload them to MYOB
  • update a single Job from MYOB
  • enter a Job against an Invoice Line Item or a General Journal Item
  • download a Job Budget from MYOB to FileMaker and send an updated version back to MYOB

This is a free update for all existing customers. You can view the full release notes on our version history page. If there are other features you would like to see in the core fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) file please get in touch and let us know.

New fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) Videos

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We’ve just uploaded a couple of new videos demonstrating how you can work with Prepayments and Overpayments using fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition). In each video we cover:

  • creating a new Prepayment and Overpayment from a Customer
  • allocating the Prepayment/Overpayment to an Invoice
  • refunding the balance of the Prepayment/Overpayment

You can watch these videos on the Videos page or here are the direct links:

Prepayments in fmAccounting Link

Overpayments in fmAccounting Link

fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) – Prepayments Update

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Our first update to fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) for 2017 is now out the door – this release includes a number of minor enhancements as well as a new endpoint example: Prepayments. We’ve had a number of requests for Prepayments so we’re happy to release this free update to all our existing customers.

The fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) file has examples for:

  • downloading Prepayments from Xero (all Prepayments or between 2 dates)
  • creating a Prepayment in FileMaker and pushing to Xero
  • allocating Invoices to a Prepayment in FileMaker and pushing to Xero
  • creating a Refund for a Prepayment in FileMaker and pushing to Xero

Further details on fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) including the full list of examples are available on the fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) product page. If there’s any examples that we don’t currently have that you would like to see please get in touch and let us know – we’re already working on the next round of enhancements and examples based on customer feedback.

fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) Updates – my.MYOB Login and General Journals

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We’ve been busy working on some updates to fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) over the past few weeks. fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) was a popular item during our recent End Of Year sale and we’ve had some great feedback from customers about features they would like to see in future releases.

We’ve just released an updated version of fmAccounting Link  – v1.0.8. As well as the usual bug fixes we’ve added examples for working with the General Journals API endpoint – you can now download, create and update General Journals from FileMaker using fmAccounting Link. We’ve also added support for users that have linked their MYOB Company File User ID to their my.MYOB login – typically this is set using either of the following dialogs in AccountRight:

We couldn’t find anything about working with linked my.MYOB logins in the API documentation and after raising a ticket with MYOB developer support we were informed about the changes you need to make when working with linked my.MYOB accounts. We’ve added a new checkbox to the MYOB Company screen that allows you to flag that you’ll be using a linked my.MYOB login:

which handles the required changes automatically. For existing customers using older versions of fmAccounting Link you can simply disable a single script step to handle working with linked my.MYOB logins – see our FAQ page for details.

We’ve started working on adding examples for working with the JOBS API endpoint and hope to have this completed in the next few weeks. If there are features you would like to se in the core fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) file please get in touch and let us know. You can view the full release notes on our version history page.

FileMaker Inc. Releases Xero eBook

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filemaker-xero-ebook

FileMaker Inc. have put together a number of resources outlining the benefits of Xero integration with a FileMaker custom app, focussing on how to eliminate duplicate data entry between FileMaker and Xero and centralise your Customer, Inventory and Invoice data whilst protecting your Xero financial data. I’m pleased to report that our recent Xero Webinar and our fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) solution are both featured.

You can access the eBook and other resources from the FileMaker Inc website. If you would like to discuss integrating Xero with your FileMaker business app please get in touch.