This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from QuickBooks and analyze it in Google Data Studio. (If the mechanics of extracting data from QuickBooks seem too complex or difficult to maintain, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)
What is QuickBooks?
QuickBooks is Intuit's accounting software, which is available in both Desktop and Online editions. Targeted at small and medium-sized businesses, it manages payroll, inventory, and sales, and includes marketing tools, merchant services, and training resources.
What is Google Data Studio?
Google Data Studio is a simple dashboard and reporting tool. It's free and easy to use, but it lacks the sophisticated features of higher-end reporting software. Many of the connectors it supports are for Google products, but third parties have written partner connectors to a wide variety of data sources. Its drag-and-drop report editor lets users create about 15 types of charts.
Getting data out of QuickBooks
To load QuickBooks data to a data warehouse, first pull the data off of QuickBooks' servers using the QuickBooks Accounting and Payments APIs, which are discussed in the QuickBooks programming guide.
Sample QuickBooks data
QuickBooks' APIs return XML-formatted data, as in this example.
<IntuitResponse xmlns="http://schema.intuit.com/finance/v3" time="2017-04-03T10:22:55.766Z"> <QueryResponse startPosition="10" maxResults="2"> <Customer> <Id>2123</Id> <SyncToken>0</SyncToken> ... <GivenName>Srini</GivenName> </Customer> <Customer> <Id>2124</Id> <SyncToken>0</SyncToken> ... <GivenName>Peter</GivenName> </Customer> </QueryResponse> </IntuitResponse>
Loading data into Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio uses what it calls "connectors" to gain access to data. Data Studio comes bundled with 17 connectors, mostly to pull in data from other Google products. It also supports connectors to MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and offers 200 connectors to other data sources built and supported by partners.
Using data in Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio provides a graphical canvas onto which users drag and drop datasets. Users can set dimensions and metrics, specify sorting and filtering, and tailor the way reports and charts are displayed.
Keeping QuickBooks data up to date
It's great that you've developed a script that pulls data from QuickBooks and loads it into a data warehouse, but what happens when you have new transactions, invoices, and payments?
The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Use fields like CreateTime and LastUpdatedTime to identify records that are new since your last update, or since the most recent record you copied. Once you've taken new data into account, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.
From QuickBooks to your data warehouse: An easier solution
As mentioned earlier, the best practice for analyzing QuickBooks data in Google Data Studio is to store that data inside a data warehousing platform alongside data from your other databases and third-party sources. You can find instructions for doing these extractions for leading warehouses on our sister sites QuickBooks to Redshift, QuickBooks to BigQuery, QuickBooks to Azure Synapse Analytics, QuickBooks to PostgreSQL, QuickBooks to Panoply, and QuickBooks to Snowflake.
Easier yet, however, is using a solution that does all that work for you. Products like Stitch were built to move data automatically, making it easy to integrate QuickBooks with Google Data Studio. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your QuickBooks data, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into a data warehouse that can be easily accessed and analyzed by Google Data Studio.