When you want more from your 2020 Spaces and QuickBooks Integration
If you are not in home construction space, probably you haven’t heard of 2020 Spaces. They are the leading software in home construction and most likely be used by your contractor when, suppose you decide to remodel your kitchen 🙂
But if you are a construction firm and user of 2020 Spaces, looking forward to integrate it with your accounting application – like QuickBooks, then read on!
2020 Spaces comes with support for “Invoice” integration with QuickBooks. While this would work for most construction firms, it does create a hole for others. To understand the issue, let’s work through the business process integration for Order-to-Cash process in this space.
In any construction or made to order business, you start with an Estimate or a Quote. Once a quote is created, you would create a Sales Order, thereby looking in stock within your warehouse if you have one, and if you don’t then you would create a Purchase order off your Sales Order and send to your preferred vendor. Once the item is received, you will create a Bill to your Vendor and at the same time create a packing slip off your Sales Order and create the invoice off your Sales Order (for the Items received and shipped).
If you noticed above that there are numbers of steps that are required to trigger purchasing and shipping order before the Invoice is sent. So how do we fix it?
2020 Spaces supports only Invoices (Since as of publishing of this article), you would take it with what it has. Then you could use DBSync CloudWorkflow Engine to query all newly created Invoices (perhaps use a tag within the 2020 Spaces invoice generated) to read it create a Sales Order mimicking the Invoice and its line item. Now while doing so, you will be able to link the invoice to the sales order by only the number or a custom field. Traceability between Sales Order and Invoice from within QuickBooks will likely be lost, but you can always relate it over using the number or custom fields.
What do you gain?
- You will be able to create the purchase orders from Sales Order and track inventory and items
- You will be able to create packing slips and other functionality off Sales Order process
- You can selectively create Invoices off the Sales Order for items shipped and receive payments quicker
Hope this neat and easy use case of DBSync CloudWorkflow can make life a lot easier for Construction Operations folks.
