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How to Get QuickBooks Data in Microsoft Access

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Wouldn’t it be cool to have your great Microsoft Access database application have some reports displaying data from your QuickBooks file? It is possible without much work and, in some cases, even less money.

I’ll briefly discuss a couple products you can use to work with QuickBooks data in an Access database. But keep in mind that there are many ways to do this.

One of the quickest and easiest is to use QODBC. It is a product developed by FLEXquarters.

To keep this post relatively short, I’ll leave the detailed explanations to the authors. But in short, you can create a DSN to get ODBC access to the QuickBooks data as linked tables in your Access database. Then you can query and report to your heart’s delight.

Their web site has a good introduction to what QODBC is, how to install QODBC, a couple things you have to do the first time you use it, and how to use QODBC with a Microsoft Access database.

Another good product, and in some ways a better product than QODBC, which enables you to work with QuickBooks data in an Access database is AccessBooks RealTime by Synergration.

Again, I’ll leave the details of explanation to them. But the summary of this product is that you install an application, point it to your QuickBooks file, and tell it to synchronize. It then creates an Access or SQL Server database and loads the QuickBooks data into the database. You can then work with the QuickBooks data that have been put into this new database. And you can synchronize whenever you want.

You can also take things a step further, getting your changes into QuickBooks with AccessBooks Updater.

These products aren’t free or cheap, but they’re also not really expensive. If you have a decent business need to create your own reports of QuickBooks data, or work with QuickBooks data and your own, etc, then these are good products to consider. Don’t forget there are also other products out there that allow you to integrate your custom database applications with QuickBooks. Maybe I’ll discuss those in a future post.