Announcing Integration with BigCommerce

We are excited to announce the launch of our BigCommerce accounting integrations. The supported accounting applications for integration, at the moment, are e-conomic, FreshBooks, KashFlow or Xero (for future reference, please check our homepage for an up-to-date list of supported applications).

The integration will seamlessly import BigCommerce orders as invoices, customers and where applicable, products into the accounting application with many useful features (e.g. automatically creating payment records and credit notes), saving the store owner hours of tedious data re-entry.

To find out more about the integration, please visit our BigCommerce Page.

Turn Salesforce Opportunities into Invoices in your Favourite Accounting Application

Announcing the Upcoming Integration with Salesforce

We are pleased to announce the upcoming addition of the customer relationship management (CRM) application Salesforce to the CarryTheOne integration platform. The addition will allow businesses and individuals using Salesforce to import their sales into e-conomic, FreshBooks, KashFlow or Xero.

We've done our best to make the integration as robust and flexible as possible and we've made some significant updates to our core platform for a clear configuration experience. There are multiple ways to handle tax, an option to define payment methods using a custom field in Salesforce (this is useful if you want to record payments under different bank accounts in your accounts software) and similarly a way to identify shipping lines in case you want special handling.

How Do You Want It to Work?

We are in the final stages of a working integration, but it's not too late for suggestions and feature requests. In fact, we want to ask you how you want the integration to work. If you use Salesforce and are interested in this integration, please write to us using our contact form to tell us your requirements (select "Salesforce Suggestion" as Nature of Request).

How it Currently Works

An opportunity is imported as an invoice in your accounting app when it reaches the desired "trigger" stage, e.g. "Closed Won". If you have chosen to use payment methods, you can select a different trigger stage and other options per payment method. The options you have will depend on the accounts app with which you are integrating.

Features

• Invoice reference: you can enter a custom Salesforce field to use for the order number/reference on the invoice.
• Credit notes: automatically create a credit note in your accounting app if an opportunity reaches a certain stage.

Tax Options

1. Set tax per opportunity product line using a Salesforce custom field
2. Set tax per product using a Salesforce custom field
3. Set tax per opportunity using a Salesforce custom field
4. Set a global tax rate in the integrations configuration
5. Tax does not apply

For options 2,4 and 5 you can also choose to utilise a custom opportunity checkbox field for exempting certain opportunities from tax.

The custom fields referred to above, if you choose to use them, will probably need to be created in your Salesforce account. This is easy enough to do:

Click on your user name on the top-right of your screen > Setup > under 'App Setup' in the left menu, click Customize > click the type of object to which your adding the field (e.g. Opportunities, Products) > Fields > where it says '[object type] Custom Fields', click 'new'.

Testing

If you are interested in trying out our Salesforce integration before it is launched, please get in touch with us as well. We will shortly open up the integration for testing and send you details of how you can try it out. You will need a free Salesforce Developer account.

Announcing Stock Integration with KashFlow

Dear existing users and prospective users,

We are excited to announce the beta launch of a stock integration feature for our KashFlow integrations. The ability to integrate stock management has just recently been made possible by KashFlow and we have jumped on the heels of this to bring you this much desired functionality.

We praise KashFlow for adding stock management into their product and making this available for integration. This feature is not just sought after but often a requirement for online businesses selling products and so opens up KashFlow to a whole new market of potential users. We are confident that KashFlow will be rewarded for the decision that many other SaaS accounting application providers are hesitant to take.

The stock functionality in KashFlow at the moment is quite basic, but it is on the right track and no doubt, going by their multilateral efforts to improve their product, will see many improvements in the time ahead.

This feature is in BETA

While it is safe to try this feature, if a problem occurs it may cause your integration to stop. If this occurs, you need only to disable this feature in order to resume your integration. We will work to resolve any potential bugs as soon as possible and provide a final release.

Great News - Automatic Payment Records in Xero

We are pleased to announce that our Xero integration can now automatically create payment records for your invoices.

Previously it was not possible to approve invoices remotely and so create payments for newly created invoices. Xero recently removed this limitation and we have now implemented the new functionality.

You can choose whether you want your integration to do this per payment method, choose the bank account for payments and whether to apply a clearing delay.

We are confident this enhancement will save many of you a lot of time and make your accounting yet less tedious.

To enable this functionality, head on to your control panel and click to configure your integration.

We thank Xero for listening to its users and making this possible.

Inventory Support Added to Xero Integration

We are pleased to announce support for Xero's inventory system which was recently made available on their API (what we use to connect with them).

What does it mean?

If you choose to use the inventory system, CTO will specify item codes when creating your invoices in Xero. This will enable you to track the sales performance of your items in Xero and better utilise reporting.

How does it work?

For every product invoice line with a product/item code set in your shopping cart app, if the code already exists in Xero, CTO will simply specify it on the invoice line, if not, CTO will create the item for you in Xero.

How do I use it?

1. Log into the CTO control panel
2. Click to configure your Xero integration
3. Select to use Xero's inventory system
4. Click save

Xero Integrations Are Now Seamless!

We are pleased to announce that our Xero integrations integrations now work seamlessly (set it and forget it). Previously a limitation in Xero's API meant that you had to authorise CTO every time you wanted to have your invoices imported. Thanks to 'long-life' authorisation made available to Xero Partners this is no longer an issue.

Our existing Xero clients have automatically been upgraded to the new system.

e-conomic Integration - Technical Overview

The e-conomic integration is a little bit more complex than our other integrations because of e-conomic's inventory system. The plus side is you can use e-conomic's stock control and the integration will utilises it.

So what makes it more complex?

Basically, e-conomic needs to have a registered product (a product added in e-conomic) specified for every invoice line created (including shipping lines). The product needs to be set up with the correct tax.

You have two options

1. You can create all your products in e-conomic manually
2. You can have CTO create products in e-conomic on-the-fly as they are ordered in your store

You choose which of the two options you want when setting up your integration.

Shipping products/items?

Currently you need to manually create a product in e-conomic for each of your store's shipping methods and assign it to a product group with the correct tax settings.

Don't worry, when you start to configure your integration, CTO will tell you which products you need to set up in e-conomic.