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Last updated on Aug 20, 2026
When a QuickBooks Desktop sync fails and Maxio Support suspects the cause is a bad ASCII character in a Customer or Invoice record, Support needs to see the exact XML that QuickBooks Desktop receives to find which record and which character are causing the problem. This procedure uses Intuit's SDKTestPlus3 tool to extract that Customer and Invoice XML into files you can send to Maxio Support for inspection. Once the bad character is identified, you fix it by editing the affected Customer or Invoice record directly in QuickBooks Desktop using the standard QuickBooks interface. SDKTestPlus3 is a free developer utility published by Intuit, not by Maxio, so its interface and behavior described in this article are Intuit's, not Maxio's.
When Maxio Core sends Customer and Invoice data to QuickBooks Desktop, it encodes the outgoing XML as ASCII and converts any non-ASCII character into an XML numeric character reference. Most characters survive this conversion cleanly, but some characters in a Customer or Invoice record, often ones pasted in from a word processor or another system such as smart quotes, em dashes, or non-Latin characters, do not round-trip cleanly through this ASCII conversion and QuickBooks Desktop's own XML parser. When that happens, the sync fails with an encoding-related error, and Maxio Support needs to see the raw XML QuickBooks Desktop is receiving to identify which record and which character are responsible.
SDKTestPlus3 is a free diagnostic tool published by Intuit that sends a request file directly to QuickBooks Desktop and displays the raw XML response, which is exactly what Maxio Support needs to review. Complete the following steps to install the tool and produce the Customer and Invoice XML files for Maxio Support.
To extract Customer and Invoice XML with SDKTestPlus3
Download the following file and install it on your computer in its own directory.
Click the link below to download SDKTestPlus3 to your computer.
Open QuickBooks Desktop.
Run the application called SDKTestPlus3.exe.
This application is built by Intuit for developers to access and test XML.
Click Open.
Authorize the application to access your QuickBooks file.
Click OK in the dialog that appears.
Verify the certificate.
In this step you choose whether to permit RevenueBooks to communicate with and update your QuickBooks file. Several options are available.
Confirm access.
Click Begin Session.
Select Browse to choose a file to run.
From the folder where you extracted the zip file's contents, select ExtractCustomers.xml.
Click Send XML to Request Processor.
Attach the results to an email.
When the process finishes, a message appears in the Status box, and a file named QBResponse.xml appears in the folder that contains the zip contents. Rename this file to YOURCOMPANYNAME-Customers.xml and attach it to an email addressed to support@maxio.com.
Repeat steps 9 through 11 for the Invoice XML.
In step 9, select ExtractInvoiceLineItems.xml instead of ExtractCustomers.xml. When complete, rename the resulting QBResponse.xml file to YOURCOMPANYNAME-Bill.xml and send it to support@maxio.com.
If you're troubleshooting the QBWC1042 error where the ASCII codec can't encode a character during sync, see QBWC1042: ASCII Codec Can't Encode, since its fix path leads to the procedure on this page.
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