Do you find it challenging to get the information you need from QuickBooks?  Are you tired of spending hours and hours trying to get a report you need?  QQube by Clearify is a new tool which “allows you to create reports & analysis in minutes – not hours or days. It will help those who have struggled, with kludgy cut & paste operations, ODBC drivers, & reporting tools that don’t do what you want. QQube is the brain child of CLEARIFY founder Chuck Vigeant – long considered the foremost expert on QuickBooks data for custom reporting & analysis purposes.”  I had an opportunity to visit with CLEARIFY founder Chuck Vigeant, and asked him some questions regarding the release of their new reporting and analysis technology – QQube.

ML: What IS QQube?
CV: It is a technology that allows you to drag and drop fields directly onto Excel, SAP Crystal Reports, or any tool of your choice, without having to know anything about tables, relationships, or even how the data was engineered in the application.

ML: You mean that I don’t even have to mess with connecting tables and relationships in MSQuery or even Crystal?
CV: Absolutely not.  We have report shells for SAP Crystal Reports that are pre-configured, and our Excel Tool contains a pallet of fields that you simply drag and drop.

ML: How did you do this?
CV:  Using sound data warehousing principles, which have been in existence for several decades, we have brought the technology that large corporations spends millions of dollars on, to the small and mid-size business market. And all, for a fraction of the cost.

ML: Who is the tool designed for?
CV:  Small and mid-size businesses that need  simple reports, or complex analysis, companies with multi-level needs, e.g. owner needs a dashboard, project manager needs to view a specific project, and a bookkeeper needs a commission report; number crunchers, franchise or multi-company operations; and CPA firms, tax practitioners, consultants who provide analytic services for their clients.

ML: Are there any specific industries that you target?
CV:  Any company would benefit, but we have found that construction industries like the fact that they can look at the details of multiple jobs in a glance – including payroll details; and QQube is popular with Manufacturing, Retail and Professional Service industries.

ML: How did you come up with the concept of QQube?
CV: Ever since the release of the Intuit Software Development Kit in 2002, we have been trying to find economical and efficient ways of providing the types of reports and analysis that customers cannot get out of QuickBooks.

I had partnered with the FLEXquarters people in those early years, helping them to engineer their product for better reporting – and getting it to work with SAP Crystal Reports; and my stint as a member of the prestigious Accountant and Advisor Council gave me a greater voice to work with engineers and product managers.

I was even contracted by Intuit to help engineer their Business Analysis project, which was an online Business Intelligence offering based upon Business Objects technology.  But soon after the release – and 2 ½ years of work – Intuit made a decision to not continue to pursue that avenue.

In 2011, The QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions team created a more direct connection to the database using views and an ODBC connection – but, like the QODBC driver – people were left to wrangle with ODBC driver hassles, countless hours of dealing with tables, relationships, and reverse engineering, and just general frustration.

We even quit providing QODBC boot camps, because it was clear to me, that no matter how hard we tried to improve our teaching mechanisms, it was still too difficult for almost ANYBODY to use, unless they did it for a living.

So, after 8 years of long hours, hard work, and thousands of custom report/analysis solutions, I found that we had very little – if any – progress on providing easy access to QuickBooks data.

That’s when I decided to create QQube.

ML: Is QuickBooks the only application that QQube is designed for?
CV: At the moment, yes.  But our long-term strategy and short roadmap will make this technology available for other applications.  The time for people to need a rocket science degree to get at their OWN data has come to an end.

ML:  Thank you Chuck!

There will be several free, live webinars about QQube where you can see how easy it is and learn more about it.  Details and register here.

Follow Clearify on Facebook or Twitter or Chuck Vigeant on Linkedin for upcoming webinars and updates.

Watch previously recorded webinars here

Read Charlie Russell’s blog post, “QuickBooks Reporting is Simple with QQube” on QuickBooks and Beyond here.