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In reference to a previous question of mine: qbfc CustomerQuery based on email address?

Is it possible to create a custom detail report of customers, and using a custom field to "filter" the report. I must admit, I am not really clued in on CustomDetailReports, as I have no need for implementing them, and never had.

It does however look like its supposed to do just what it says, a custom report feeding you info form quickbooks?

What I am attempting to do, is get a list of customers in a detailed report, and filtering that report based on a custom field value. This way I can narrow down my possibilities of customers I need to check for, and get their ListID's or FullNames.

Currently I am returning all the customers using a customerquery, and iterating through them one by one to get the guy I am looking for. This is becoming a slow process as the customers increase.

I can store my own reference in an external DB, and use that to reference an email address to a customer ListID, but I would really like to achieve this with the data stored in Quickbooks only, as per the Quickbooks philosophy of, "Store Data Once"

Before I spend resources on trying to implement a custom report, can something like the above be achieved with Custom Detail Reports?

Thanks in advance.

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Louis van Tonder
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1 Answers1

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Is it possible to create a custom detail report of customers, and using a custom field to "filter" the report.

Nope. QuickBooks does not support this.

It does however look like its supposed to do just what it says, a custom report feeding you info form quickbooks?

It will display a custom report, yes... but it won't allow you to filter it by custom fields.

Currently I am returning all the customers using a customerquery, and iterating through them one by one to get the guy I am looking for. This is becoming a slow process as the customers increase.

Have you considered instead caching the customers in your app? That would be much faster. Then you can just periodically run a query against QuickBooks to get customers that have been updated since the last time you ran the query (e.g. incremental sync of data).

I can store my own reference in an external DB, and use that to reference an email address to a customer ListID, but I would really like to achieve this with the data stored in Quickbooks only, as per the Quickbooks philosophy of, "Store Data Once"

My personal experience has been that, unfortunately, the query syntax that QuickBooks allows/uses is too restrictive for that to be realistic.

Keith Palmer Jr.
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  • Thanks, as per usual, you answered all my questions... and future questions on this subject I was going to ask... :-) – Louis van Tonder Nov 20 '13 at 13:39
  • I think I will, as you suggested, cache, not store, the customers. Maybe once when my app opens, and then in the background everytime a new customer is added, refresh my temp cache.. – Louis van Tonder Nov 20 '13 at 13:42
  • Update for anyone using this question as reference. My caching implementation takes my login routines down from 15-20 seconds, to 1 second... (I authenticate against the customer email address and password in custom field). Thanks. – Louis van Tonder Nov 21 '13 at 06:08