Solution: Creating SQL-based solutions for MYOB and other accounting packages.
While MYOB comes with many standard reports, it was enlightening for me to find out that many users were out there which did not have the reports they needed.
As such, these users typically exported various reports to excel and re-coupled them together with many complex formulas.
The AddonsLink platform we created allows you to create those reports using more rigorous software development practices.
Overview
AddonsLink has a module called Data Warehouses. This module allows you to define various Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server databases which will store data downloaded from MYOB.
The standard get data process that BudgetLink, TimesheetLink and FormLink uses also downloads data to custom data warehouses. In fact, those products use the exact same technology.
The data warehouses can be programmed to pull the necessary tables simply by ticking them in the list. The get data process will flesh out the fields and populate the data.
Once this process has run, the data warehouse can be enhanced with custom SQL queries to shape the data as required.
The performance of those queries is surprisingly good since the data is cached locally to disk. On top of this, certain queries can be created to compute and store the results similar to the way stored procedures work.
It does not only work with MYOB but also integrate with some tables from Xero and Quickbooks. This means that both Quickbooks and Xero get an ODBC/OLEDB like access using this technology.
If you've ever wanted to create your own reports, knew a bit of SQL (or could design basic queries using the query designers) and feel up to the challenge, the data warehousing capacity of the AddonsLink platform could be for you.
N.E.
