Accounting Integration Overview

ServiceCEO's accounting integration is designed to give you the tools to keep your company ledger and balance sheet correct at all times without duplicating data entry between ServiceCEO (your management application) and your accounting, banking and payables systems. To this end, ServiceCEO can link up with many General Ledger The general ledger is the main accounting record of a business which uses double-entry bookkeeping. It consists of accounts for fixed assets, current assets and liabilities, profit and loss or income and expenditure items, and funds or reserves. The general ledger is a summary of all of the transactions that occur in the company. (GL) applications in order to transfer data between the two programs. In general, this will be a one-way transfer of data from ServiceCEO into the GL application.

Note!

Note:
ServiceCEO was designed and built for accrual-based accounting, meaning that sales are recorded when the sale occurs, regardless of when you are paid for that sale. When you receive goods or services, you record an expense, regardless of when you pay for that expense.

The GL application that can be most closely integrated with ServiceCEO is QuickBooks^®. QuickBooks is a popular accounting software program developed by Intuit. ServiceCEO can quickly and easily connect with and update the QuickBooks general ledger after financial actions are performed within ServiceCEO (i.e., jobs are closed, deposits are made, etc). This integration helps reduce errors often associated with double entry and cuts down on amount of accounting work that is required to run your business.

XML Integration

If you are using a GL application other then QuickBooks, ServiceCEO will export a representation of your financial transactions in an XML format, saving these transactions to a .xml file. Extensible Markup Language (XML) files will be created and saved to a designated directory (identified during accounting integration - see the Configuring XML Integration section for details). The XML files are marked with the event date and a serial number. These XML files can then be imported into an accounting package.

This XML Integration does not automatically integrate with any applications, nor is it a web service. Rather, it is a manual process that begins with a user clicking an Export button in ServiceCEO.

Since ServiceCEO does not directly import the XML files into your accounting application; you, or your systems integrator, will need to create or purchase an application that performs the following actions:

Monitor the directory (as defined in ServiceCEO) for created XML files (aka, a "file drop").
Open the XML file and parse the information out of the file.
Load the data from the XML file into an object.
Validate the information. If there are errors, the user should be made aware of these errors.
Import the information stored in the object into your accounting package. This will most likely require the ability to integrate with your accounting package as well as the ability to map fields from the object to the proper fields within your accounting application.

While one example of such a tool is Microsoft^® Great Plains^® Integration Manager, we do not currently recommend any applications that could import XML into an accounting package for you.

Caution!

Caution:
ServiceCEO exports the GL information into an XML file, but does nothing with that file once it is created. You, or your systems integrator, will need to install and configure a tool to load data from ServiceCEO XML files into your general ledger database.

For more information about these XML Files, download the XML Software Development Kit (SDK). This compressed file contains:

ServiceCEOXML.zsd. This XSD XSD files are XML Schema Document files. XML Schemas are an industry-standard way to define the structure of XML documents. For more information, see http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema or http://www.w3schools.com/schema/default.asp file explains the structure of the XML export files.
Sample XML files. Currently, this includes an example of exported deposits, inventory adjustments, paychecks, purchase orders, and two invoice exports (identified as Sales and Sales2).

Exporting Data

Data can be exported from three locations within ServiceCEO, all located in the Office Duties section:

Invoices, Transactions, and (if tracking Inventory) Inventory Adjustments through the Sales Exports tab.
Deposits, including customer payments, through the Deposits tab.
Paychecks (gross wage data) through the Paychecks tab.

If you are using ServiceCEO's Inventory module, you can also export your Purchase Orders A Purchase Order (PO) is a document by which you indicates to a vendor the type, quantities and agreed prices for inventory items that the vendor will provide to you. from the Purchase Order record.

Tip!

Tip:
While you do not need to be logged into ServiceCEO as an administrator to export data an accounting package, only users with the proper security settings can export data from ServiceCEO. See the User Groups section for details about security settings.

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