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January 8, 2025
Question

QB Desktop Mac 2020 - How to extract invoice data with custom fields to CSV?

  • January 8, 2025
  • 1 reply
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I own a music instrument repair shop and have used QB Desktop for Mac for many years for bookkeeping, managing parts inventory and creating / sending invoices. When I originally started using QB I set up the invoice template to use a couple of custom fields, particularly for instrument serial numbers. Because of this we were never able to move to QB Online or any other cloud-baed bookkeeping solution (they can't handle the custom fields that we require).

 

We are now in the process of implementing CRM software to handle invoicing and inventory (along with many other tasks) and will be free to move to a cloud-based accounting solution since we will no longer need to track data in custom fields (the CRM software will handle this moving forward).

 

I have around 10,000 invoices in QB Desktop Mac 2020 that I would like to extract the data from in to a CSV file. I've spent probably 20 hours so far trying to figure out how to do it and have failed miserably. I have been able to export a report of all transactions but the report does not include the critical custom fields I need. It's crucial to our business that we are able to look up the history of the instruments we've worked on so this is not helpful.

 

I have seen a couple of mentions of writing a script to extract the data however my meager programming abilities are probably not up to the task. There does not appear to be any third-party apps available to accomplish this either.

 

Does anyone have a solution for this? I'm not really looking to move the data in to the new software but I do need to have an archive of everything we've done to reference in the future.

1 reply

January 8, 2025

If you can get the custom fields to show up in a report that will be the easiest. I don't know if that is possible or not.

Beyond that, there is an AppleScript dictionary.  Open QuickBooks in Apple's ScriptEditor (in the Utilities folder) and you'll see the commands.

 

But I suspect the command you'll wnant to use is executeqbxml.  

And that will then require QBXML commands to pull invoices and then whether or not that includes custom data I don't know. 

January 8, 2025

It looks like Transaction Detail by Account report can include custom fields. Hit "Show All" next to the search columns box and see fi the columns are there that you need.

January 8, 2025

Wow - thanks so much for that! I was able to get the Serial Number column data in to the report but the Service Date column is nowhere to be found. Any idea why it would allow one and not the other?