KareoTool

I volunteered through Catchafire on a Technical Specification Development project for The Women’s Center of Southeastern Michigan — a match with a total impact of $7,802.

The problem

The center’s accounting workflow depended on data from Kareo, their practice-management software, which then had to make its way into QuickBooks and Excel. As they grew their roster of therapists and clients, that manual shuffle didn’t scale. The goal: get the needed data into Excel with the least possible effort and cost to automate and maintain.

What I built

Kareo’s old-school SOAP API can’t be reached directly from Excel’s Power Query, so I built a custom C#/.NET exporter that calls the API and downloads each endpoint into clean Excel spreadsheets. Configure your credentials and the endpoints you want in App.config, run the executable, and the data lands in an Output folder ready for Power Query to pick up.

The twist — and the real lesson

Mid-build, I discovered a better path: Kareo’s Custom Reports feature, which hooks into Excel’s Power Query directly — no custom tool to construct and support long-term. The honest takeaway is that the most maintainable solution was the one I didn’t need to build. I wrote up the whole journey (including everything I learned about Power Query and the M language) in the repo’s README so the next person can skip straight to the better answer.