Quickbooks is the most popular accounting software for small businesses. I currently use ‘Quickbooks Pro 2006‘ for my own consulting practice and I’m pretty happy with it. Although QuickBooks comes with a complete set of financial statements built into the software, I thought it would be fun to see how the database is structured. Unfortunately, once I got into analyzing the database structure I found it a bit confusing. It wasn’t very obvious how they stored their data and it took some time to figure it out. Nonetheless, some of you may also have to deal with difficult databases and this could provide you with good examples of what you might encounter.
The only problem with writing reports with QuickBooks is that there isn’t a freely available database driver for accessing the QuickBooks database. I found a third party database driver on the internet and they offer a 30 day free trial. I downloaded it and imported the entire QuickBooks database into an Access database. They call their software QODBC and you can find more information at this URL:
Figure A-3 shows the tables in the QuickBooks database.
Figure A-3. Quickbooks database tables.
