Show HN: Direct SQL Access to Your QuickBooks Data (instabooks.io)

Hey guys, I dunno about you but if you have a business and use QuickBooks, the normal API access is pretty cumbersome.

So we built a direct SQL layer to a simple model of the ledger. It's nice to have easy fast programmatic access to your books for building internal apps and stuff, not to mention giving agents access. (Agents are really good at SQL, read-only of course.)

Along the way, this made us wonder: when does an app or service really need a custom API at all, rather than just exposing data as SQL, which is sorta the lingua franca of data querying. Will more services do this in the future?

Curious what you think!

2 comments

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dy 3d ago ↗

Everything old is new again. They had it right in the 70s - SQL was vibe querying before LLMs.

Very cool - eager to use it.

stony-builds 2d ago ↗

For QuickBooks, you'll find that CDATA, QOBDC, and Kipper (us) all do that in various forms.

Part of the benefit of doing this is the speed of access. And the other aspect is that REST is great for single object retrieval but awful for grouping, summary, joins, totals, etc