SyncFreedom

About

SyncFreedom is the brainchild of Jared Self. When Jared began his career in Accounting it didn't take long for him to come across VBA. Once Jared realized he could automate some of his work he was hooked. A lot of Accountants begin their programing journey this way. Also, like a lot of Accountants, Jared found out VBA was not an end all programing language. There were many limitations VBA had which left frustration and wasted time. As Jared heavily studied VBA inside of Microsoft Access it dawned on him VBA is not the answer. It also dawned on him that Accountants needed a programing language to call their own. Many accountants come across accounting issues that can't be solved with out of the box solutions. Instead of looking outside of the accounting industry it would be best if accountants built their own solutions. In order to do that a language had to be adopted.

So in search of a programing language for accountants to adopt, Jared learned the basics of VB, C#, Javascript, C++, and Python. Stacking them all together, Python was a clear winner. Syntax was simple to learn, the language was well documented and supported, and because it was built on C there were existing ways to integrate VBA code (which many accountants already know) into Python.

From there Jared set off to learn Python. Although Python was clearly the best language it was also clear to jared that the language was geared for Accoutants yet. Jared had to dredge through a bunch of web development, data analytics, and data science courses to get only a small amount of useful code. Eventually Jared hired a couple of programing tutors to help him attack the specific problems Accountants face. Then finally, Jared began to develop his own libraries and utilities to tackle these problems. SyncFreedom is one of those utilities.

If you've ever tried to access QuickBooks Online from a general programing language you'll find that most utilities are SQL based (ODBC). Although that makes getting the data simpler in some ways, you're at the mercy of the program that converts SQL to QBO's API and the documentation to support it. Third party tools also have their limits and can be frustrating when you hit a bug. As a general rule I always try to get as close to the source of data as possible. The more hands (or programs) data goes through, the higher the chance of data corruption or incorrect interpretation.

A big hurdle with accessing Inuit's API is the requirement for a web interface in order to make the connection. Most Accountants won't ever come across a need to create a complicated website to handle OAuth 2.0. So in order to give Accountants a little closer access SyncFreedom handles the OAuth 2.0 portion of your code. This allows Accountants to use popular Python QuickBooks packages that are well documented and supported by Intuit directly. This utility will also allow a developer to create the actual backend logic of a web application before creating the UI. In this scenario a developer can focus on what they are good at and leave the rest to someone else.