EngageU 2023 Recap

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The 2nd edition of the EngageU European Claris FileMaker conference was held earlier this month in Antwerp, Belgium. The conference attracted over 200 participants from 22 countries all around the world (including 2 from Australia!) and was expertly organised by ClickWorks and Square Moon.

This was my first European FileMaker event that I’ve attended in-person and it definitely won’t be my last. The conference kicked off with a Claris Partner Meeting followed by a brewery tour and dinner at De Koninck where I got to sample a variety of different Belgium beers. The next two days were filled with sessions and discussions in the KCC Congress Centre which was a great venue (and short walk from the hotel). One of the highlights was the conference dinner which was held at the historical Marble Hall next to the famous Antwerp Zoo.

I was grateful to be invited to present two sessions at EngageU 2023:

  1. Webhooks: in this session I explained what webhooks are and why you should use them, and gave an overview of the options for deploying webhooks including commercial solutions like Claris Connect or build it yourself using other programming languages like PHP and JavaScript. I also did a few live demos using Stripe and Twilio showing how you can implement webhooks to receive automatic notifications of new payments from Stripe and incoming SMS messages from Twilio.
  2. Apple Maps Integration: this session covered using Apple’s MapKit JS to display maps in your FileMaker solution using the FileMaker Web Viewer and Apple Maps. I demonstrated how to create simple maps of an address using MapKit JS and how to plot multiple markers on a map and customise the appearance of the markers.

Thanks to everyone that came to my sessions. All sessions at EngageU were recorded and will be available on YouTube once they have been edited. If you have any questions about these please get in touch. I’m looking forward to finding out where EngageU 2024 will be and starting my planning for the long trip back to Europe again.

Databuzz releases Multi Companies Version of fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition)

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Sydney, Australia – 31 October 2023 – Databuzz today announced a new version of fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) which supports connecting to multiple QuickBooks Online company files. 

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) is a Claris FileMaker solution that integrates with the QuickBooks Online accounting platform and is now available in two versions:

  • fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Single Company: this version, released in March 2023, supports connecting to a single QuickBooks Online company file
  • fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Multiple Companies: this version, released in October 2023, supports connecting to multiple QuickBooks Online company files. It includes a Companies table which stores the details and authentication tokens for each Company you need to connect to. Customers, Vendors, Invoices, Bills etc are all related to a Company record so it knows which QuickBooks Online company to upload to and download from

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Multiple Companies allows you to upload and download data between FileMaker and QuickBooks Online, the cloud based financial management software for small businesses. fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Multiple Companies removes double data entry and human errors saving your company significant time, money and hassle by automating the exchange of data between FileMaker and QuickBooks Online.

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Multiple Companies is completely unlocked allowing you to integrate it into your FileMaker solution. You can copy and paste examples showing you how to authenticate with the QuickBooks Online API and upload Customers, Vendors, Invoices, Bills, Payments, Purchase Orders, Bills and more at the click of a button. 

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Multiple Companies features include:

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Multiple Companies includes examples for the following QuickBooks Online API endpoints:

  • Company Info: authenticate with multiple QuickBooks Online companies and download company information
  • Customers: download and upload Customers
  • Vendors: download and upload Vendors (Suppliers)
  • Invoices: download and upload Invoices
  • Estimates: download and upload Estimates (Quotes)
  • Bills: download and upload Bills
  • Purchase Orders: download and upload Purchase Orders
  • Items: download and upload Items (Products)
  • Customer Payments: download and upload Payments against an Invoice
  • Bill Payments: download and upload Payments against a Bill
  • Credit Memos: download and upload Credit Memos
  • Purchases (Expenses): download and upload Purchases (Expenses)
  • Journal Entries: download and upload Journal Entries
  • Attachments: download and upload attachments for Invoices, Estimates, Bills, Purchase Orders, Customers and Vendors
  • Notes: download and upload notes for Invoices, Estimates, Bills, Purchase Orders, Customers and Vendors
  • Download Account Codes, Tax Rates, Tax Codes, Classes, Departments, Customer Types, Payment Methods, Terms and Preferences

Availability, Pricing, and Compatibility

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Multiple Companies is available in a number of licenses: Company, Product (Vertical Solution) and Developer. It is available now from the Databuzz website at https://www.databuzz.com.au/fmaccounting-link-quickbooks-online-edition/. Company Licenses start at AUD $995.00. fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Multiple Companies requires FileMaker Pro v16 or later.

Media/Customer Contact:

Andrew Duncan

Phone: +61 418 468 103

sales@databuzz.com.au

About Databuzz: Databuzz is a long-standing Claris Partner. We have been developing and deploying FileMaker solutions for clients in Australia and internationally since 1999. Our clients are individuals, small-medium businesses, government agencies and multi-national corporations. Databuzz was founded by Andrew Duncan, a Claris FileMaker Certified Developer. For more information please visit our website at https://www.databuzz.com.au.

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Claris Beyond FileMaker QuickBooks Online Presentation

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Last month I presented at the Claris Beyond Meetup group on integrating FileMaker with the QuickBooks Online accounting platform using our fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) solution. fmAccounting Link helps eliminate double data entry which saves you time and money by connecting your Claris FileMaker solution with QuickBooks Online using the QuickBooks Online API.

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) can help you get up and running with a FileMaker QuickBooks Online integration quickly without having to spend hours reading API docs and running tests. I demonstrated how you can upload Customers, Vendors, Invoices, Purchase Orders and more at the click of a button as well as receive automatic notifications of changes to Invoices, Payments, etc using Claris Connect Webhooks.

The recording is now available and you can watch it below or directly on YouTube:

A Beginner’s Guide to the FileMaker OData API

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Last week at the Reconnect.Sydney 2023 Claris FileMaker developer conference I gave a presentation on getting started with the FileMaker OData API titled A Beginner’s Guide to the FileMaker OData API.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session and laughing at my jokes and hitting me up with some great questions.

If you would like to get a copy of my slides you can download a copy of my slide deck here.

There were a couple of questions/issues that were raised at the end of the Q&A period that I ran out of time to answer properly. Here’s some comments about those issues:

  • there was a question about requesting cross joins of data from unrelated tables. I didn’t include a demo of this as my session was aimed at beginners getting going with OData, but you can get more information about this in the Claris FileMaker OData API Guide. The OData documentation on URL Conventions includes a section on Addressing the cross join of entity sets which goes into more detail.
  • I demonstrated the behaviour when you attempt to edit/update a record using the primary key as the identifier and if no matching record is found a new record is created. This is documented in the OData spec as Upsert an Entity: “An upsert occurs when the client sends an update request to a valid URL that identifies a single entity that does not exist. In this case the service MUST handle the request as a create entity request or fail the request altogether.” It looks like the behaviour has changed from the first release of the OData API for FileMaker Server for Linux.

Leave a comment below if you have any questions about my presentation or OData generally.

Reconnect Sydney 2023 Recap

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For the first time in more than three years the Claris FileMaker developer community in the APAC region gathered in-person again for the Reconnect.Sydney 2023 conference last week. Around 100 developers from Australia and New Zealand came together to learn and network for two days, catching up with old friends and making new ones.We even had conference swag and professionally printed name badges!

As a speaker, sponsor and one of the organisers it was a busy two days. Reconnect.Sydney was organised by FileMaker developers for FileMaker developers and organising conferences is definitely not part of our day jobs. There were a few nerves in the days leading up to the conference but once the opening keynote was underway it felt very familiar like FileMaker DevCons of yore. There was a definite buzz in the air and the quality of the sessions were excellent. I really enjoyed the ‘Mobile Tyre Shop – COO perspective’ session by Jamie Cartwright (and Databuzz customer!). Hopefully this will be a future Claris testimonial and Claris need have a video of this on their home page.

Huge thanks to all the other organisers for helping to make this such a great conference:

We were also very lucky to have ten sponsors who all helped make the conference a huge success. Special thanks to our principal sponsor Claris:

I’m looking forward to the next instalment of Reconnect.fm in Brisbane in September 2024. If you would like to be notified about future Reconnect events please sign up for the mailing list here. I’ve uploaded the slides from my ‘A Beginner’s Guide to the FileMaker OData API’ presentation with an update on some of the questions that I couldn’t answer on the day.

My next stop on the road to Claris Engage 2024 is the EngageU conference in Antwerp, Belgium from November 12–14, 2023 where I’ll be presenting two sessions.

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) Now Supports Webhooks

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We’ve just released a free update to fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition), our FileMaker solution that integrates with the QuickBooks Online Accounting platform, to support QuickBooks Online Webhooks. We now support webhooks using either Claris Connect or our supplied PHP file. Claris Connect now includes a free tier which includes up to 500 flow steps each month – if you haven’t used Claris Connect before now is a great time to try it out and take advantage of the free tier.

Webhooks allow you to subscribe to automatically receive notifications from QuickBooks Online when certain events happen. We’ve included support for the following QuickBooks Online event triggers:

  • Customers: create and update
  • Invoices: create and update
  • Payments: create and update

You can easily add support for additional event triggers by following the pattern we have used in our FileMaker scripts.

Once you have setup Webhooks for your required event triggers the fmAccounting Link file will automatically update when one of the events is triggered. For example if a new Payment is created in QuickBooks Online fmAccounting Link will be notified and also created a new Payment record linked to an Invoice, automatically updating the amount owing.

Webhooks save you from having to continually poll QuickBooks Online to check for new records that you wish to download into the fmAccounting Link file.

You can get more information and instructions for setting up webhooks on our support site here. We have a video showing the Create Payment event trigger webhook in action below (or watch directly on YouTube here)

The full list of changes are listed in the version history notes here. Existing customers can download this version from the link on your original order email or your Databuzz account if you created an account with us with your order.

Reconnect.Sydney Session Topics Now Online

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The list of session topics and speakers for the Reconnect.Sydney 2023 Claris FileMaker Developer conference is now on the Reconnect.Sydney website (some speaker profiles are still being loaded). It includes both speakers from Claris (APAC and USA) and experienced developers in the APAC community. We’re excited to announce that Databuzz will be a conference sponsor this year and I will also be giving a talk on ‘A Beginner’s Guide to the FileMaker OData API’.

We now have 9 companies sponsoring the conference – I’d like to thank the sponsors from outside the APAC region in particular for their support, including FMTraining.tv, Monkeybread Software, Productive Computing University and Proof+Geist. Special thanks to Claris for being the Principle Sponsor as well and helping make this conference a reality.

Tickets can be purchased via the Reconnect.Sydney website – remember sales are limited to the first 200 people so don’t leave it too late to purchase your ticket as we do expect this event to be sold out. There is an early bird discount for purchases before 30 June ($219) which reverts to $249 after that date. Your ticket also includes lunch, morning and afternoon teas over both days.

I look forward to meeting up with members of the Claris FileMaker Developer Community once again in July. If you would like a demonstration of any of our Claris FileMaker integrations solutions for Xero, DocuSign, QuickBooks Online, WooCommerce, Shopify, or SMS/MMS messaging at the conference please get in touch or reach out at the conference.

fmESignature Link and Composite Templates

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When we released v1.0 of fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition), our Claris FileMaker solution for integrating with the DocuSign eSignature platform, we decided on using a ‘Template’ model that supported directly uploading PDF files or using DocuSign hosted Templates. This allowed you to generate a PDF (either a static PDF or one generated from a FileMaker layout) and upload that along with a list of recipients and where they needed to sign etc, or simply specify a DocuSign Template ID and upload the list of recipients and their roles.

These supported methods for creating the DocuSign envelope from FileMaker have been easy for our customers to understand and implement in their existing FileMaker solutions. There are times though when these simple envelope creation models won’t support your requirements that might involve multiple documents/templates and authentication requirements.

For more complex envelopes DocuSign also support the composite templates model, which is the most flexible envelope creation model. With the composite templates model you can create complex envelopes which cannot be handled by the direct document or DocuSign Template models, such as when you need to send both a PDF document and include a DocuSign Template.

Some examples of composite templates that we’ve helped customers integrate over the past few years include:

  • a payment processing company needed to send a DocuSign Template that included multiple documents, in person signers and SMS verification
  • a talent agency needed to send an envelope that included both a FileMaker generated PDF as well as a standard DocuSign Template and dynamically assign recipients and roles to both documents

None of the above use cases were possible with the standard direct document/DocuSign Template models. We were able to work with these customers to create some custom FileMaker scripts and Templates in their fmESignature Link file to meet their requirements. If you would like to discuss implementing a composite template for your fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition) integration please get in touch.

You can get more information about DocuSign Composite Templates at the following articles:

FileMaker Brighton User Group QuickBooks Online Presentation

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Last March I presented at the FileMaker Brighton User Group meetup on our latest FileMaker integration solution: fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition). It was a very lively meeting with lots of great questions and feedback – I demonstrated the how you can connect FileMaker with QuickBooks Online to eliminate double data entry and save your company time and money.

The recording is now available and you can watch it below or directly on YouTube:

You can get more information about fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) on our website here and download a free 14 day trial version. If you would like us to speak at your next Claris FileMaker meetup please contact us here.

FileMaker 2023 Platform Compatibility Update

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Last week Claris released the FileMaker 2023 Platform and we’re pleased to report that all Databuzz products are compatible with the FileMaker 2023 Platform (also referred to as FileMaker Pro v20, FileMaker Server v20 and FileMaker Go v20). Using the current shipping versions of our integration solution we tested the core functionality using FileMaker Pro v20 and haven’t encountered any issues. Here’s a summary of what we tested

fmSMS – we have sent messages from multiple SMS Gateways, checked Account balances, downloaded incoming messages and checked the status of sent Messages successfully.

fmMMS – we have sent messages from multiple MMS Gateways, checked Account balances, downloaded incoming messages and checked the status of sent Messages successfully.

fmAccounting Link (QuickBooks Online Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from QuickBooks Online to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to QuickBooks Online successfully.

fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from Xero to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to Xero successfully.

fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from WooCommerce to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to WooCommerce successfully

fmEcommerce Link (Shopify Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from Shopify to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to Shopify successfully

fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition) – we have been able to send a signing request, check the status, download the completed PDF and form data successfully.

fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) – we have been able to authenticate, download from AccountRight to FileMaker and upload from FileMaker to AccountRight successfully.

If you encounter any issues with any of our products and FileMaker 2023 Platform please let us know. We’ll be writing more articles about some of the new features in the FileMaker 2023 Platform over the coming weeks – you can subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when they are released or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.