QuickBooks for Mac does not have a built-in payroll service like the Windows version. When you click the Payroll link you are taken to an external website for processing employee checks.
At various times from 2000 through 2009, Intuit had multiple requests to implement native support for AppleScript in QuickBooks and they completely ignored those of us who asked. No surprise there - Intuit's track record of treating Mac users as second class citizens and refusing to offer us.any.
free support for their products (not even one phone call or email on occasions where we encountered installation issues or discovered new bugs) speaks volumes. Updates: We are told that but have not yet had a chance to look at it. We are also told that Intuit's support policy and treatment of Mac users as second class citizens; we hope that this is truly the case and will believe it when we see it. Luckily, you.can.
AppleScript Quickbooks in an indirect fashion - by sending System Events through the OS X graphical user interface (GUI). AppleScripting through GUI is a kludge and nowhere near as fast, reliable, or effective as native support, but it works. So, what is AppleScript? It is a built-in feature that permits one to automate any number of tasks in the Mac OS. The focus of these pages is to show you how to automate data entry/extraction with Quickbooks 2009 for Mac under OS X 10.5.5 (Leopard).
We've run these scripts under Snow Leopard, and they seem to work, but we have not extensively tested them. Getting started. If you don't know anything about AppleScript, it's time to go learn. There are lots of books out there and here are some web sites:. at Apple.
Quickbooks For Mac Online
at UIUC (from the System 9 era, but it gives a good feel)., a book excerpt at MacWorld. We are going to be relying on scripting the Mac OS Graphical User Interface (GUI). For any of the stuff in this tutorial to work, make sure that you have enabled GUI scripting using the AppleScript Utility application which is probably located in Applications: AppleScript on your hard drive: Notice we have also checked 'Show Script menu in menu bar'. That allows us to put compiled scripts (AppleScripts that run as applications) in one easy to reach place so we can run them at any time while we're within any application. Let's go ahead and launch the Script Editor application found in the AppleScript folder of your Applications folder and let's try it out! Talking to QuickBooks 2009.
It would be very nice if we could use QuickBook's various checkboxes and buttons directly without having to figure out coordinates and send mouse commands. In fact, we can directly:. Click on buttons such as Next, Previous, Recalc, Cancel, and OK. Click on the sub-pane buttons.
For example, Expenses or Items in the Enter Bills window or Address Info, Additional Info, Job Info, and Notes in the Customer window. Probe whether a checkbox is checked, such as the Customer is Taxable or Add to iCal checkboxes. BUT because QB takes its input through mouse and key actions we can NOT directly set the values of checkboxes or text fields. You can actually use AppleScript to change the values of checkboxes (and some text fields), and they will appear changed on the screen, but QB will neither see nor save changes made that way - you will have to emulate a mouse click or use keystroke in order for QB to accept it. Again, this is because QB is not directly scriptable, we are using the GUI to fake it.
Let's try an example. Open a New Customer window and click on the Additional Info button. We can probe the state of the Customer is Taxable checkbox this way. Enter this script into Script Editor and make sure the Event Log button in your script window is pressed so we can see the output.
Change the value of the checkbox and run the script again - and you'll see that our script detects it! Set taxEnabled to -1 - It is good practice to initialize any variable. Tell application 'QuickBooks 2009' activate tell application 'System Events' set taxEnabled to the value of checkbox 'Customer is taxable' of group 1 of tab group 1 of window 'New Customer' of application process 'QuickBooks 2009' as integer - 1 is checked, 0 is not end tell end tell log taxEnabled if taxEnabled 0 then log 'The customer is taxable, dude!' Else log 'No tax for you!'
End if As you can see, we can use if/then/else constructions to take various actions depending on the state of the checkbox. Notice also that the statement to probe the checkbox state is not something you could easily guess. You'll see how to figure out what to call each user interface (UI) element in the next section. Finally, let's switch from the Address Info sheet to the Additional Info sheet of the New Customer window. Open a New Customer window and then run this script: tell application 'QuickBooks 2009' to activate tell application 'System Events' click radio button 'Additional Info' of tab group 1 of window 'New Customer' of application process 'QuickBooks 2009' end tell end tell Pretty cool, eh?
How To Determine The User Interface Elements of QuickBooks 2009. So, how do we figure out what UI elements we can probe?
Here is how we do it for the Invoice window. Open a new Invoice in QB, and then run this script with the Event Log button enabled so you can see the output: tell application 'System Events' get the entire contents of window 'Create Invoices' of process 'QuickBooks 2009' end tell The output will be a huge long list of every user interface element.
In fact, you may find it easier to copy those out as a block and paste them into a text editor so you can find/replace commas with line breaks to make it more readable. Some of those lines of output include:. button 1 of window 'Create Invoices' of application process 'QuickBooks 2009' (the red close button). checkbox 'Customer istaxable' of window 'Create Invoices' of application process 'QuickBooks 2009'.
static text 'Memo' of window 'Create Invoices' of application process 'QuickBooks 2009' (the word Memo as it appears on the invoice; this is a value that does not change). pop up button 1 of window 'Create Invoices' of application process 'QuickBooks 2009' What is that last item? Let's probe it further: tell application 'System Events' get the properties of pop up button 1 of window 'Create Invoices' of process 'QuickBooks 2009' end tell And from the list of the properties returned in the log window, we can see that it is the Template pop-up menu/button. Finally, let's see how we figure out how to activate a given menu item: tell application 'System Events' get the entire contents of menu 'Customers' of menu bar 1 of process 'QuickBooks 2009' end tell That's a lot easier than trying to guess the names or come up with those constructions yourself. Finally, one other very excellent way of determining the names/identities of user interface elements is to download UIELementInspector, which may be found in the Utilites folder of your Applications folder. If not, you can from Apple.
We're not sure if the older versions are still available from Apple. On the next page we will look at some Copyright 2008-2019. All rights reserved. Reposting of this material is not permitted and constitutes a violation of US and International copyright law.