*Update: We are extremely humbled that Apple featured our banner on the Business Category homepage for iPad. None of this could have happened without you! Much love and thanks to our loyal QBO customer base.*
You asked for it and we delivered…QuickBooks Online for iPad is here and it’s free! You can start using it right now! Sign in using the same User ID and password you use for QuickBooks Online.
Free for all QuickBooks Online subscribers, QuickBooks Online for iPad syncs seamlessly with QuickBooks Online. It helps you manage your customers, invoices, estimates, and expenses from work, home, or on the go. Not only have we been featured by Apple as a “New & Noteworthy” app, but QuickBooks Online for iPad already ranks among the Top 10 free iPad business apps on the App Store.
Optimized for the iPad with Retina display and iPad mini, QuickBooks Online allows you to:
Gain insights into your sales, income, and expenses with interactive reports and charts
Instantly capture your customer’s electronic signature to approve estimates and send invoices from anywhere
See a timeline of your customer’s latest transactions and attach photos and notes to your estimates
Optimized for the iPhone 5 and iOS6, QuickBooks Mobile version 2.0 now offers a convenient sliding navigation and revamped design that allows easier access to the most used features.
Free for all QuickBooks Online users, QuickBooks Mobile helps you manage your customers, invoices, payments, sales receipts, and estimates no matter where you are – home, work, or on the go.
An improved customer filtering, details, and maps help efficiently pinpoint your customer and boost your productivity.
We’re also delighted that Apple showcased QuickBooks Mobile Version 2.0 on the App Store! This time, QuickBooks Mobile was featured in the following collections:
Check us and the other apps out to help manage your small business and to stay productive on the go! We’re extremely humbled to be held in such high regard by Apple and we will continue to improve our financial management solution for all of our small business owners.
We’re thrilled that Apple recently selected QuickBooks Mobile as part of the “Start Your Business” section on the App Store! We’re so excited to be a member of this power-packed group of mobile apps for small businesses. Free for all QuickBooks Online users, QuickBooks Mobile helps you manage your customers, invoices, payments, sales receipts, and estimates no matter where you are – home, work, or on the go.
To check out other apps in the “Start Your Business” section click here to launch it in iTunes or on your iPhone OR on your mobile device click through the top featured banners on the App Store home page until you get to the “Start Your Business” section.
This blog post shares some insights on how an accountant (virtual CFO) leverages the power of QuickBooks as a platform.
Cathy Iconis
Meet Cathy Iconis, a power user of QuickBooks Online and the owner of Iconisgroup. Iconisgroup (http://www.iconisgroup.com) is more than just an accounting firm as they help clients connect their numbers to their vision by offering virtual CFO and consulting services.
How does Cathy successfully manage her clients’ finances as well as her own business?
QuickBooks Online helps Cathy with the essentials for her business. She utilizes QuickBooks Online in three ways:
As a platform: Cathy creates a QuickBooks Online company for each client. This serves as the foundation for each client’s data and is stored securely in the cloud. Then she utilizes multiple third party applications to analyze and share analytical data insights with her clients. Transaction pro importer, a third party application, available on Intuit’s app center (http://appcenter.intuit.com) allows her to import her client’s financial data into QuickBooks Online. She creates memorized reports in QuickBooks Online and other systems, like Salesforce, that are then emailed to her clients and/or added to personalized dashboards Cathy has created using Google Sites. Finally, her client’s accounts payable needs are met with Bill.com, one of Intuit’s key partners for billing. For her office communication needs, she is happy with Google Apps, which includes Google Sites, Docs and Email for only $50 per user per year. Cathy uses many third party applications to unleash the power of QuickBooks Online, and they all work well together. This platform approach enables Cathy to harness the latest innovations inside and outside Intuit. Given Cathy’s affinity to the cloud it comes as no surprise that she uses social channels such as Linkedin and twitter to stay connected with her clients.
Report created by Cathy Iconis
As a reporting system: Cathy’s strengths are in demystifying complex financial problems for her clients with a simple and customer focused approach. She understands the power of numbers and creates actionable reports to help clients better manage their businesses. Cathy is also a problem solver and will go the extra mile to help her clients grow. Recently she created her own customized report for “Job Costing” when she did not find this as a standard report in QuickBooks Online.
Job costing report in QuickBooks Online
As a financial management system: QuickBooks Online covers the nuts and bolts of financial management helping Cathy’s clients organize their finances and make better decisions. Since all the information is online, Cathy is able to oversee her clients’ financial statements throughout the year and communicate with them real time to resolve issues.
As you can see there are multiple ways to unleash the power of QuickBooks Online to grow and manage your practice. If you have better ways or insights to share about how you leverage QuickBooks Online to be successful, please reach out to us with your contact information.
As we roll out changes to QuickBooks Online in the future, we may use some new HTML5 features like IndexedDB, History, AppCache, WebStorage, GeoLocation etc. We may also look at copy/paste from outside applications into QBO. Few of them will make browsers like Firefox or Chrome ask for extra permissions. It’s your choice to accept or ignore them and in either case your regular usage of QuickBooks Online will be unaffected. However accepting / allowing such features may just help enhance your browsing experience. Such notifications only come up once, till you eventually clear your browser’s cache / cookies / site preferences, which causes a reset. So you can always reset your browser preferences any time in case you want to change your choice.
In Firefox 10 on the mac you will see the permission request notification as shown in the image below. Other versions on other platforms might look a bit different visually.
For Chrome users, you can just grab the Chrome Web Store app if you haven’t already done so. This will automatically add the necessary permissions (without the app, the notifications may come as a yellow bar on top). After installing that app, in the future you may notice the QuickBooks Online app shortcut greyed out on your Chrome’s New Tab page as shown below and Chrome should prompt for you to accept some permissions. Click re-enable to get it working again.
Track multiple sales tax rates, email invoices in HTML, GoPayment integration and more coming soon with our next release being rolled out over the next few weeks. As always we hope that these changes benefit you. So keep the comments coming!
GoPayment integration – accept credit cards on your mobile device
In case you haven’t heard about or used Intuit GoPayment, check it out here http://gopayment.com/. We have now integrated QBO with GoPayment so that you can accept credit card payments on your mobile devices. This is an exciting new way to accept payments and many of our customers have been asking for this.
New Sales Tax
We will be soon introducing our new sales tax feature that will allow you to record multiple sales tax rates. This will be a major departure from the current sales tax implementation that only allowed one default tax rate.
What you see today
The image below shows the Sales Tax preference on the Company > Preferences page.
Once we roll out this new sales tax, the above old preference will be removed from the Preferences page. For those users that have sales tax checked, you will notice that as soon as you uncheck this checkbox and save the preferences, this whole section will now point you to the new Sales Tax center where you will manage any sales tax related features.
Sales Tax Center
The new Sales Tax Center helps you manage and track sales taxes. With it, you can
Set up sales tax (both single and combined rates) so you can charge sales tax on invoices and other sales forms
See current and upcoming sales tax due by agency
Record your tax payments in one spot, instead of using a paid bill or check
See recent sales tax payments
The 1st time you come to this page, you will see
You will then be required to setup sales tax rates as shown below. If you had previously set up a default sales tax rate we will automatically create a new one for you with that percentage.
After adding a sales tax rate, the Sales Tax center will show you sales tax owed and recent payments. If you don’t have any sales transactions with sales tax for an agency, it will show as zero.
What will you see on transaction pages with this new sales tax
Below is a screenshot of an invoice page showing you the new sales tax select drop down, where you can choose a particular rate.
What happens to existing transactions using old sales tax?
Nothing will happen to your existing transactions. You probably have prior transactions that were saved using the old sales tax. When you open them, they will show as before, with the old styled sales tax box. If you edit them, they will still use the old sales tax. Going forward, if you had a default tax rate of 10%, we will create a new rate in the drop down using that percentage.
When can I start using the new Sales Tax?
In order to make the transition a smooth one you will only be able to start using the new sales tax rates starting on Nov 1st. This way all sales transactions prior to Nov 1st will have the old sales tax rate and all sales transactions starting Nov 1st can use the new sales tax rates. This makes it easier when you go to pay and record your sales tax for the months of October and November. You’ll pay your sales tax for October in the same way you’ve always done. You’ll pay (record) sales tax for November from the Sales Tax Center.
If you were using IPN thus far, you would have noticed that we required all of your payees to sign up for this service. This was a barrier to use and so lots of people just didn’t pay using IPN. You’ll be happy to know that we are removing this requirement and letting anyone send payments without the need to sign up for IPN. Look at Company > Preferences > Accept Online Payments for more information. In case you didn’t know how IPN worked, see the image below for the typical workflow.
Track your business on-the-go with QB Mobile
We have free native apps connecting to QuickBooks Online on the iOS and Android. Follow the links below to download QB Mobile. We know many customers have been asking for the ability to do tasks on their mobile devices. Right now you’ll be able to create invoices and estimates and manage your customers. We are updating these apps frequently so stay tuned!
Right now you can e-mail invoices as plain text with a PDF attachment. We are now expanding this further to allow HTML emails instead of plain text. They look much nicer! To email in HTML, enable the preference under Company > Preferences > Form Delivery. There is an HTML version for both the summary and full version. Please note this a Beta feature and we will be looking for feedback through the feedback widget to make changes and adjustments in the coming months. See the image below for an example.
*There is a known issue with the logos for Outlook 2007. Logos are properly sized for all other email clients, but Outlook 2007 does not respect the size contraints of the logo. We will have a fix with the next update.*
New Customer Add Dialog
We are introducing a newly designed dialog for adding customers. For the moment you will only see this when adding a new customer from the Customer Center. Other pages will still show the old dialog. We will be using this new dialog hence forth for any newly designed pages requiring the functionality of adding customers.
You should find this one cleaner and less cluttered. We have logically grouped similar sections together and made it more aesthetically pleasing than it was before. You will also notice that this dialog is no longer a window based popup so it will definitely not lock out your browser tab. This allows you to switch to other tabs if you are copy / pasting customer information from another tab like from an email.
Tip: When adding a new customer, our system only requires that you enter a name or a company name. Even though the dialog has a lot of other fields to fill out, you can choose to ignore them till later if you don’t have the information on hand right away.
Tip: Many of our users have low resolution screens. If you are one of those users and don’t plan on upgrading to a newer monitor anytime soon, try using a browser like Google Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer 9. And remove any / every toolbar you have (if any, not including your bookmarks or favorites bar). 3rd party toolbars in modern browsers are absolutely redundant and unnecessary these days as most functionality is already built into the browsers.
New drops downs and simpler add dialog
With this dialog you will also notice our new drop down select boxes. We talked about them in this blog post. You should be able to search as you type. Since we are now allowing a full text search, you should be able to find a customer by searching for it’s parent or find a customer by searching some part of the customer name. You will also notice the new quick adding dialogs for payment methods and terms. Previously both of these were window based popups and now they are not.
Customer Center Improvements
There were some formatting changes made to the transactions area of the customer center as well as an enhancement. You will notice the new transaction button is now on the left and much more prevalent. From this button you can add a new statement, charge, invoice, payment, sales receipt, or recurring template. You will also notice the filters have been moved to the right of the grid, with a new print button on the left. This print button mirrors the print from the invoice list, allowing you to now print everything in the grid. Select a customer, then select any transaction or date filters from the drop downs to filter what you wish to see in the grid below, and then just click print.
This feature should now be available to all. You can look up company information on your mobile phone with simple text messages. Subscribe to receive customized push alerts and keep updated on upcoming invoices and bills. Look at the Text Messaging menu option under the Company tab.
QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) is a new offering being developed to give accounting professionals the tools to work faster and manage their QuickBooks Online clients accounting needs in one place. QBOA has been in Beta since February and is entering into a Pilot phase, the final step before the offering is commercially launched. The Pilot program gives accounting professionals the opportunity to test most of the accounting features which will be in the first release of the product and give feedback about their experience so that we can continue to make it better.
QuickBooks Online Accountant is being designed specifically with the accounting professional’s workflow in mind, here are some of the key features:
Cross-Workflow Tools
With the Client List, accounting professionals can manage all their online clients from one place
The Accountant Center provides features and reports accounting professionals need at their fingertips
Step-by-Step Workflow Tools
QuickBooks Online for Accounting Professionals Demonstration
Sign up for the pilot
The Pilot program is free. To learn more about QuickBooks Online Accountant and sign up for the free Pilot program, please visit http://accountant.intuit.com/qboa
EDIT: Some reconcile features will only be seen if you switch to the new reconcile. On the reconcile page, if you see a link in the top right corner saying “New Reconcile” then please click to switch to the new one.
Take advantage of a limited time promotionto pay your bills online and have Bill.com credit your phone bill $25 for the next 3 months. This promotion ends August 6th. Learn more about Bill.com and the promotion here.
With Bill.com and its integration with QuickBooks Online, you can now view invoices online, route bills for approval, and pay them online through Bill.com. All bills and payment activities are matched and reconciled accurately in QuickBooks Online - eliminating the need for double-entry and managing multiple systems. Bill.com also allows documents to be attached to accounts so all bills and financial documents can be managed in one place.
Manage all your bills and financial documents in one place
Customer Success Story:
Alkahest Artists & Attractions, an entertainment booking company, uses Bill.com on the iPad to pay artists and booking agents from anywhere.
From anywhere and on any device, manage your bills and your cash flow with easy-to-read reports.
”I discovered Bill.com’s integration with QuickBooks Online that works via the Internet, putting all
transactions online. Now I can payeveryone by direct deposit. Our artists are elated and I can
go on the road myself and not have to worry about their payments”
Mac Frampton, Owner and Treasurer
Alkahest Artists & Attractions
Every new contract that comes in to Alkahest is converted to a PDF file and attached to the account as a reference. The integration with QuickBooks Online helps compute commissions owed to independent agents and sends payments directly into their accounts. “In the old days,” Frampton said, “I’d sometimes have to tell the agents not to cash their checks for a few days, to make sure I had money to cover them. With Bill.com and QuickBooks Online, any time they cash their checks, the money is there.”
Check out Bill.com and other apps that work with QuickBooks Online in Intuit App Center.
About ten months ago the QuickBooks Online team launched an open beta of a platform we call “Intuit Data Services for QuickBooks Online” (IDS for QBO). IDS for QBO is a set of tools that allow third-party developers to create independent applications that will work seamlessly and securely with your QuickBooks Online data. This means that you can utilize enhanced functionality – such as paperless bill-pay, easy expense reporting, and integrated appointment scheduling – via 3rd party applications. This lets you eliminate redundant data-entry and keeps the tools you use to run your business in sync with one another. You own your data – why shouldn’t you be able to easily use it with other applications on the web?
In March, we announced that IDS for QBO had met stability, quality, and performance goals and that it was officially ‘out of beta’. We released with support for a wide range of money-in and some money-out workflows, and with the Intuit App Center Toolbar integrated in the core product so that you can access your apps from within QuickBooks Online.
We’ve developed the platform with performance and security in the forefront of our minds. Rest assured that we’re protecting your data and making sure that when you want to access your data, you don’t have to wait a long time for it. IDS for QBO will only give data access to apps that you sign up for – if you haven’t given an application permission to connect to your QuickBooks Online account, it won’t be able to access your data.
The Apps
QuickBooks Online provides an app center and a platform for connecting to your data, but the ecosystem is nothing without developers building solutions for your businesses. We have been privileged to work with a group of excellent early-adoption partners who have already built out ten applications that you can use to extend the functionality of QuickBooks Online. We owe these developers a big thank you for getting on board early, and we think you’ll find their apps compelling and useful! The following ten applications are currently available on the Intuit App Center:
AuditMyBooks Analyzer analyzes your QuickBooks Online data to catch common bookkeeping errors, indicators of accounting fraud, and other issues with your QuickBooks Online data. AuditMyBooks Analyzer has fast scans that detect most common problems in minutes, and reporting to help you understand the problems with your data.
Bill.com for QuickBooks Online is a paperless bill pay service that works with QuickBooks Online to eliminate error-prone data entry. It imports your chart of accounts and vendors from QuickBooks Online and enables users to view and pay bills electronically. Bill.com is a great way to reduce paper and increase your efficiency with one of the most common tasks in running a business – paying your bills.
Expensify aims to make expense reporting painless. Syncing with your QuickBooks Online company data, Expensify helps you automate the expense reporting process and provides capabilities like receiving expense reports via email and reimbursing them through direct deposit to a checking account. Once an expense report is complete, you can sync it with QuickBooks Online to eliminate painful data re-entry.
Full Slate is designed for businesses scheduling clients for one-on-one appointments, Full Slate offers an online scheduler that lets prospective and existing clients schedule appointments directly from your website 24×7. By importing customer information from QuickBooks Online and synchronizing their contact information as it’s updated, Full Slate helps you manage busy appointment schedules and maintain accurate customer information.
Intuit Small Business Scheduler is an Intuit app that gives your business the ability to manage everyone’s scheduling in one calendar that is available anywhere, anytime, from any computer. From tracking expenses and appointments to remembering internal meeting details, this app is an excellent resource. Synchronizing your customer, employee, and item data with QuickBooks Online keeps Intuit Small Business Scheduler up to date, and lets you charge customers for billable appointments through QuickBooks Online.
OneWay Commerce is an e-commerce application that lets your business use your Facebook Fan page as an e-store. Integrating a shopping cart with your fan page gives you an instant storefront tied into a social media strategy, and integration with QuickBooks Online means no data re-entry is required to keep your financials up-to-date.
Profit for Staffing is an employee management and time tracking application that works with your QuickBooks Online accounts, as well as many payroll services. Providing invoicing, payroll, reporting, and document sharing, Profit for Staffing can help improve communication and workflow across a variety of business needs.
QuickBooks Dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online provides you with new insights into your sales, payment status, and other transactions you’ve had with customers. You get a deep view of your customers and vendors, as well as total data synchronization with QuickBooks Online. Make a data change in either Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online or in QuickBooks Online, and you can quickly and easily update the other application with your changes.
Quotes is a new application for QuickBooks Online that helps you streamline the Request for Quotation (RFQ) process. Integrating with item and vendor data from QuickBooks Online, you can quickly gather multiple quotes for goods or services from different vendors.
Transaction Pro Importer makes it easy for you to import many list and transaction types into QuickBooks Online from text and Excel files. With a UI that gives you control over the data import and field mappings, this could be a great way to import transactions into QuickBooks Online.
What’s Next
We just highlighted the great apps that are currently available to help you run your business better, but there are even more coming. The QuickBooks Online product team is hard at work improving platform functionality to allow developers to build new and better applications that let you leverage your QuickBooks Online data in new ways. We believe that you own your data – we are just here to help you protect and use it.
We’re also partnering with developers and organizations to give you access to even more best-in-class web applications that will work seamlessly with your QuickBooks Online data. These third-party web applications will work with QuickBooks Online, providing your business with new functionality not available in our core product. From data analysis to niche solutions for particular industries, expanded reporting to specialized workflows, we expect to see many more applications launching on the Intuit App Center in the coming year. Our focus is on saving you time and money while running your business, and we think the existing and upcoming apps in the Intuit App Center will help you do just that.
If you are a developer, or a technically minded small business owner, check out our recent post on the IPP blog for the technical low-down and information on how to get started developing your own apps with Intuit Data Services for QuickBooks Online.
Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, online invoicing and cash management solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), has just added seamless synchronization with QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Online customers can now view invoices online, route bills for approval, and pay them online through Bill.com. All bill and payment activity is matched accurately in QuickBooks Online eliminating the need to manage multiple systems.
Take advantage of a limited time, special promotionto use Bill.com and have Bill.com pay your phone bills for the next 3 months (up to $75). Thousands of businesses are already using Bill.com to save over 50% of the time and cost it takes to pay bills. And now the savings is even greater…let Bill.com pay your bills for you by taking advantage of the special promotion. Learn more about Bill.com and the promotion here.
With the integration, it’s easy to get started instantly. Now you can download all open invoices from QuickBooks Online directly into Bill.com - along with vendor lists and chart of accounts. You can begin paying bills instantly and avoid the time and costs of starting a new system.
Bill.com gives you complete control over your finances and gives you peace of mind to enjoy why you’re in business in the first place. Mac Frampton, performer, part owner and treasurer of Alkahest Artists & Attractions sums it up: ”It was hard to pay our artists and booking agents while I was on the road, now with Bill.com I can pay everyone by direct deposit, our artists are elated and I can go on the road myself and not have to worry about their payments.”
Check out Bill.com and other apps that work with QuickBooks Online in Intuit App Center.
Log into your company, then go to Company > Preferences. The very first thing you will see is a box with your present company name in it. Make the changes that you want and when you are finished click SAVE in the lower right.
QuickBooks Online Edition does it's own backups through the Intuit server network. You do not perform data backup as you would with a Desktop Edition. You can store a data copy on your hard drive but it is useless in the fact that you can do nothing with it. You cannot restore your data nor can you run the file in a Desktop Edition. But if it makes you […]
To change the Session Timeout, please follow this link and read then information before doing anything: https://qboe.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1684/kw/online%20timeout/r_id/103898 Note, this procedure will only change the time that QBOE will time out. It will not do anything for your computer if your computer is going into sleep mode. That correct […]
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