QuickBooks for Communes

QuickBooks for Communes is a web application built specifically for non-Accountant communards, consisting of a Purescript frontend and a Haskell API server that communicates with QuickBooks Desktop using the QuickBooks WebConnector.

This is a port of our Acorn Accounting application and still in the alpha stage.

The frontend will present Communards with transaction logs for relevant Accounts as well as forms for entering their Credit Card purchases, Town Trips, or Internal Transfers.

Goals

Eventually we'd like to have support for:

• Forms for communards to account for their Trips, Credit Card Purchases, & Internal Transfers.
• A workflow for accountants to approve entries before they are pushed to QuickBooks.
• Public views of approved entries & their receipts.
• A Chart of Accounts designed for communards, along with detailed account ledgers.
• Support for attaching receipts to entries.
• User accounts for communards, allowing them go back and edit their non-approved entries.
• Tracking of communards membership dates, used to pay monthly & yearly stipends.

We don't plan on:

• Supporting multiple languages.
• Supporting multiple currencies.
• Managing existing QuickBooks data. We only want to push data to QuickBooks.

Build

manage.hs is a management script for the project. You can use it to make production builds, rebuild the code on file changes, & clean any build artifacts.

You need Stack & Yarn installed. Then you can simply run ./manage.hs to start the development servers. ./manage.hs build will make production builds for the server & client, while ./manage.hs clean will remove the built files.

You can also do some lower-level building of the frontend & backend.

Client

We use Spago & pscid to build the client code & Parcel to bundle & serve the UI during development.

cd client
yarn install
yarn run watch
yarn run serve

The watch command rebuilds the client when the source files change, and serve starts a development server that builds the styles, serves the index, & redirects requests to the /api/ path to the backend server.

To assemble the code, styles, & HTML for production, run yarn run build.

Server

We use Stack to build the server & manage it's dependencies, with a Makefile for running common commands :

cd server
make run
make watch

Configuration

Server configuration is done through YAML files. Some sensible defaults are loaded from the default-settings.yaml file, but this does not contain instance-specific settings. Therefore, you will need to create a settings.yaml file in the server directory, with at least the following fields:

account-sync:
   id: "<some-uuid>"

Unless you're running the server on the same system as the WebConnector, you'll need to set the hostname field as well.

You can generate UUIDs by running the following commands in stack repl:

:set -XScopedTypeVariables
import Data.UUID
import System.Random
(randomIO :: IO UUID) >>= print

TODO: Add a script for generating minimum settings.yaml file with randomized values? Generate on first run if one doesn't exist?

TLS Configuration

The QuickBooks WebConnector requires TLS when connecting to hosts other than localhost. You can use openssl to generate the self-signed certificate and key files(if your server is accessible from the internet, you should use a normal TLS certificate instead):

cd server
openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -sha256 -nodes -days 3650 \
   -subj '/C=US/ST=Virginia/L=Mineral/O=Southern Exposure/CN=<qbfc-server-domain>' \
   -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem

Replace <qbfc-server-domain> with the FQDN of your QuickBooks for Communards server(e.g., accounting.acorn). If your server does not have a domain name, you can use any arbitrary domain, provided you add it to the hosts file on the computer running QuickBooks. This file usually lives at C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts:

192.168.1.XXX qbfc-server.local

By default, QuickBooks will not trust a self-signed certificate. You'll need to tell your QuickBooks computer to trust it:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Open the settings menu and select Internet Options
3. Click the Content tab and then the Certificates button
4. Click the Trusted Root Certification Authorities tab and then the Import button
5. Load your generated cert.pem file
6. Test the certificate by visiting https://qbfc-server.local:3000/cert/, you should see a blank page instead of an TLS error or Insecure Webpage warning.

Documentation

You can build the client's documentation with yarn:

cd client
yarn run docs

The documentation will be placed in /client/generated-docs/index.html.

You can build the server's package documentation & open it in your web browser:

cd server
make docs

Some useful external references:

• QuickBooks Web Connector Programmer's Guide[PDF]
• QuickBooks Desktop API Reference
• QuickBooks SDK Request/Response Reference
• QBXML v13 Samples
• Example SOAP Requests/Responses: Authenticate, Send Request, Receive Response, Close Connection
• ConsoliBYTE's Wiki

License

GPL-3.0, exceptions possible.