Intronis Cloud Backup + Recovery Blog

How to: Integrate your Cloud Backup Solution with your Accounting Software

  

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One of the key requirements many of our customers request is integration with the other applications they use to manage their organizations. A lot of focus is put on our Professional Service Automation and Remote Monitoring & Management integrations, as many partners utilize these products to help manage their business. Today I want to focus on one of the most common integrations: integration with your accounting software.

Most of the partner organizations we work with use or have used some sort of accounting software at one point or another. As long as your accounting solution allows you to import billing information via a Comma Separated Values file, you should be able to integrate your customers’ Intronis billing information with your solution. This includes QuickBooks, Peachtree and custom-developed solutions.

Instead of focusing on one accounting product, I want to address the topic more generically so it can apply to many accounting solutions. Let’s go through the steps to get this set-up in the Intronis Partner Portal.

Within the Intronis Portal, you have the ability to assign a Reference Number to an Intronis Account. What is the reference number? That’s really up to you, but here’s a good opportunity to use the Account Name or Account Number from your accounting solution. Let’s use Quickbooks as an example, I have an account called “Rocky Mountain Bank” and within Quickbooks, that account is assigned the account number 123456. In order to add a reference number, I drill into an account within the portal and select the ‘Edit’ button as seen below:

A screen will launch that allows you to edit account information, and you’ll see that you have the capability to enter a reference number. This reference number that you enter will later become the merging/mapping column when you import the .CSV. This creates a very easy way to associate your accounts within the Intronis system to accounts within your accounting solution:

While you are in the account, you also want to validate the account’s Custom Billing Plan. I’m not going to spend time on building or assigning custom billing plans today, but if you have questions, please check out the Quick Start Partner Guide available from the resources tab of the partner portal. Once you have the plans created and assigned to accounts, you can validate the custom billing plans that your customer is using by going to the ‘Plan’ tab from within an account as seen below:

Believe it or not, you now have all the information on the Intronis Portal side set-up! Now you are ready to generate the monthly billing information for your accounts to export to your accounting solution. Before you do that, let’s see what you will need to create the billing. First, you will need a mapping merge field to associate accounts listed in Intronis and your accounting system. We’ve done that. Second, you will need the customer on some sort of plan…done. The last two things you are going to need is the date you want to generate billing and the exact storage-utilization information per account for that date. Since you know exact storage quantities for each account, all you need to do is determine your billing date based upon your business practices.

Now you are ready to use our ‘Account Snapshot’ report to generate the billing information to be exported to the accounting system. To get to this report, mouse over the ‘Reporting’ tab and select the ‘Account Snapshot’ report. This will launch the following date-selection screen:

Simply select the date and then select ‘Export to CSV,’ which will typically give you the option to save to a file or open the file in Excel. Let’s take a look at the file in Excel to see what that looks like.

As you can see from the above spreadsheet, you have everything you need now to import into your accounting solution to generate billing for your end users. I’ve highlighted two columns of particular interest: D – Reference Code and P – Retail Cost. Remember, Reference Code is what you linked to our Intronis account so you can now use this column as the mapping/merge column as we import to our accounting solution. Retail Cost is the calculation of the cost to your end users based on the date selected, their usage, and their current billing plan. No need to do calculations on your side, simply import the .CSV file into your accounting solution to generate billing.

Below are some additional links on importing .CSV to some of the more popular accounting solutions we see. However, if your solution is not listed, chances are good that your accounting solution will support some sort of import of .CSV files.

QuickBooks Import Excel and CSV Toolkit

http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/articles/HOW12247

Peachtree

http://www.mypeachtreedata.com/page23.aspx