Intuit PaymentNetwork (code name IPN) now seamlessly integrates with QuickBooks Online. A small business can now send an invoice through QuickBooks Online and get paid fast using IPN. QuickBooks online invoices enabled for online payments will now have a link for the end customer to directly pay the small business. The plot thickens with the added benefits of low cost (only 50 cent/payment), faster funding (next day funding for most payments less than $5000) and automatic reconciliation.
Release Date: Released Midnight May 19th Genres: Payments ¦ Invoicing ¦ QuickBooks Online Rating: G for customer delight, seamless integration and fast payments Starring: IPN, 50c Payment, Next Day Funding (aka NDF) and Reconciliation Produced By: Intuit Inc. What people are saying about it: “I run a small housecleaning company and have been looking for a reasonably priced debit/credit processing option. Many companies want to charge trasaction fees and a percent of your total. I love this option. A $0.50 transaction fee is very reasonable, and makes it so that I can offer the option to all my customers.”
World Premier of the Trailer:
Stills/screen shots from the release:
1. IPN on ‘Create Invoice’ form in QuickBooks Online
2. Payment link in invoice that your customers will see
3. Two easy steps for customers to pay (Sign in and pay the invoice)
4. Payment reconciled in QuickBooks Online
Note from the IPN team: We hope that all of you enjoy this new release. Please provide feedback by posting on this blog or emailing us at paymentnetwork@intuit.com
Did you know that Intuit offers grants to small businesses like you? Through our “Love A Local Business” grant competition, Intuit has already awarded more than $500,000 in funding to 104 small businesses nationwide to both help expand their business and celebrate their success to date. Past winners have ranged from a bookstore in Morgan Hill, Calif., BookSmart, to Harmony in Hooves, a therapeutic horseback riding facility that helps children overcome handicaps.
Just this morning, Intuit announced a commitment to fund an additional $1 Million in grants to support local businesses in towns across America. You can nominate your own business to win one of these grants at LoveALocalBusiness.com.
We are thrilled that we can make a difference in small businesses and hope that you will take the time to nominate yourself and potentially become the next winner. It only takes a minute to complete the nomination. Once you are done, we provide easy tools for you to promote your business and get additional nominations from your fans.
“Everyone will agree that small businesses are the key to our nation’s job growth and economic recovery,” said Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) Chairman, Small Business Committee, U.S. House of Representatives. “My colleagues and I on Capitol Hill know that we still have a long way to go, however, programs like Love a Local Business are providing valuable support to these job creators as they try to grow and invest in their businesses. As small firms and communities improve, so will our nation’s economy.”
As a final note, we wanted to share a great story from one of our previous winners.
We’ve got some great new things in our latest release.
Learn more about Intuit PaymentNetwork which allows you to accept secure online payments (via bank transfer) from your customers.
Also we received lots of feedback on the Invoice List (thanks very much) and added some new functionality.
Ever been annoyed by a popup when you’re trying to Receive a Payment and you checked the item in the list on the page? We fixed that behavior.
All of these improvements should help you save time in QuickBooks Online. Please keep the feedback coming.
Intuit PaymentNetwork
Let your customers pay online via Intuit PaymentNetwork. When you email your customer an invoice, you can include an option that lets them pay with a transfer from their bank to yours via Intuit PaymentNetwork. It’s fast, easy, and free for your customers! It costs only $0.50 per transaction for you. Sign up, get approved and start sending invoices to your customers. We just finished a beta of QBO with Intuit PaymentNetwork. Here’s a sample of what we heard from folks trying it out in beta:
I run a small housecleaning company and have been looking for a reasonably priced debit/credit processing option. Many companies want to charge transaction fees and a percent of your total. I love this option. A $0.50 transaction fee is very reasonable, and makes it so that I can offer the option to all my customers.
I love the way the payments automatically match up with the invoices. This saves a lot of time!
To Get Started go to Company > Preferences > Accept Online Payments
Changes to Invoice List
Now you can filter all your overdue invoices, and in one click, email all of them at once to remind customers to pay you. Customers > Invoice > Invoice List
Changes to Receive Payment
Instead of first entering an amount on the Receive Payment page and then selecting open invoices, you can now check open invoices first and the Amount field will automatically total itself. Customers > Receive Payment
New Navigation Portlet for the homepage (Click Map)
For those folks who were familiar with our old homepage and missed the visual diagram of money in / money out, we have now added a similar feature on our new homepage. You won’t see this by default, so in order to add it to your homepage look at the image below. Note that this is for the new homepage (look at the bottom section of this blog post) which you should be switching to now. Click Add Content to Page on the top right and add the Click Map portlet. See this portlet in the video at the bottom of this post.
Continuous Improvement
In this release we have also done quite a few under the cover improvements that you may or may not notice. We have improved (remember that this is a relative term and depends upon other factors not QBO related) performance of certain pages, like our homepage, compared to our prior releases. We have also removed a few more window based pop-ups from QBO. If you encounter any issues with their functionality, report them on our forums. And of course certain bugs like the one on Pay One Vendor screen under FF4 got fixed.
Possible changes in the near future that may effect you
In order to cleanup some stagnant code base that we are no longer actively working on, the plan is to remove the old homepage in the near future. If you are already on the new homepage (the one with drag-able portlets / sections, like in the click-map image above) then this change does not effect you.
For those still on the old homepage (<– click to see what old homepage looked like), please consider switching to the new homepage (<– click to see what new homepage looks like) soon and / or provide feedback via the yellow feedback widget or post on the forums. To switch to the new homepage if you were on the old one, you will see a “new homepage” link on the top right under the blue header right next to the customize button.
NOTE: While switching to the new homepage, you may get switched to the new menus too that are horizontal and no shortcuts tab. If you wish to switch back to the old menu style, then just click the “switch to old menus” link thats next to the menus, right after the last menu tab. The new homepage can co-exist with the old menus as the two are separate.
Likewise for the old reconcile page, that will be gone too in the near future. If you haven’t tried the new reconcile, please do so and provide feedback for improvement before the old one is removed.
We are also planning on dropping official support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.x in the near future, as now there are newer and better alternatives to these browsers. Customers using these browsers are encouraged to upgrade to Google Chrome or Firefox 4 or Internet Explorer 8 or 9. You will get an in-product warning about the same after logging in.
I wanted to call out a great new tool released by our friends in the Intuit Payroll team that helps you get average pay ranges for specific job titles in your area. You can learn more by going to the Intuit Pay Trends site or reading their informative blog post.
Its really simple to use. By simply entering a job title and where the job is based, the tool returns a chart with median hourly and annual wages that other nearby businesses are paying for that job. I have attached a simple query I did for head cook/chef in San Francisco, CA.
Since payroll is usually a significant expense for any business its always great to have some benchmarks to make sure you are rewarding your best employees as well as insuring that you are not over-paying in some situations. This tool leverages the most recent wage data (2009) available from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
We hope you find this useful and a big thank you to our Payroll team for this great tool.
Change… it’s certainly a constant in our world. Just think, in less than20 years we went from having 5 lbs cell phones to the iPhone and the Android. These days, change is moving at an even faster rate than in previous decades. So imagine what’s to come in the next 20 years! The goal for businesses is to keep up with the change, while maintaining the balance of simple and easy for the consumer. With that goal in mind, I’d like to tell you about a few changes in the QuickBooks Online Support organization.
The first change is me, Norm Happ, QuickBooks Online Director of Sales & Services. I took on the role of QuickBooks Online Sales & Services/Support in October after 3.5 years in other sales & support leadership roles within Intuit’s Small Business Division. This is an exciting role for me, as QuickBooks Online is an incredibly vibrant area of growth within Intuit and we are playing an unique role in helping Small Business’ around the world save time and money. Having been a two-time entrepreneur, I know the role a great financial management solution can play in the success of a company. Since taking on this role, I’ve been spending time trying to gain a deep understanding of the ways we currently support our customers. We want to deliver the most effective solutions for customers as quickly as possible… so you can get back to work!
What did I find out?
In talking to customers, support agents, and analyzing our results; my team came to the realization that we have an expansive list of support tools for customers, many with varying levels of success. Just to give you a bit of background, one of the key ways we measure success in support is through our “resolution rate”. This rate is defined by the question…were we able to solve your issue the first time and how long did it take you/us to reach resolution? This resolution rate is important to us because we know time spent troubleshooting how to use the product takes you away from running your business. In reviewing the performance of our tools by the above measure, and in the spirit of keeping things simple; we determined the following methods as the two most effective ways to provide you support:
In-product self-help– if we can get the help to you where and when you need it, the solution is ideal.
Our second best solution is having a phone contact with our support agents. They are trained in diagnosing customer issues and over 75% of the time, they solve the issue during the first customer contact.
What does this mean for you?
We decided to put our investments into these two capabilities and build upon their proven success rates. Our initial investment includes:
Adding Saturday support hours (9AM – 3PM Pacific Standard Time)
Providing the most used “how-to” articles within the product exactly where you may need them
Because we chose to invest in these higher performing tools, we determined that we should shut down other tools that were underperforming. Our online support case submission tool (eCase) is one of these tools. Customers and agents told us that the tool, although good in concept, created a lot of back-and-forth in trying to clarify the specifics of the problem. The same issues were being solved 30% faster through a quick phone conversation with one of our support agents. We provide QuickBooks Online customers with free phone support because we want to ensure you’re successful using the product, love working with Intuit, could not imagine going back to the prior way you managed your business, and will be a customer for life.
We will be testing other support methods over the next few months to see if we can do an even better job of supporting you. I hope you see the benefits of these changes and we can help you get back to running your business quickly. I encourage your comments or to email me directly with your feedback.
Cheers,
Norman Happ
Director – QuickBooks Online Sales & Support
norman_happ@intuit.com
We are delighted to announce the recent launch of QuickBooks Online in both the United Kingdom and Singapore.
QuickBooks Online is now available in three versions: QBO Simple Start, to track sales and expenses, QBO Essentials, for online bookkeeping that saves time, and QBO Plus, to get the full financial picture. These products are specifically tailored to each of the local markets, but built on years of experience in the US and with a global-ready outlook. They were designed using Intuit’s customer driven innovation philosophy, with countless hours spent with local businesses trying to understand what makes them unique. The end result is an offering we are quite proud of, built to delight small business owners and help them save time.
To take QuickBooks Online global, two major new features were introduced – VAT and multi-currency. The UK and Singapore editions of QuickBooks Online seamlessly track VAT on all transactions and provide detailed reports as to what is owed. Additionally, small business owners have the ability to record transactions in multiple currencies, with QBO updating the exchange rates in real-time and tracking any gains/losses from currency exposure.
Intuit has strong local partners in each market – Smarta is offering QBO as part of their “Business Builder” package in the UK, and in Singapore QBO is available through SingTel – Asia’s leading telecommunications provider.
Posted April 1, 2011 by Darth Categories:Events, News
Intuit Inc. and salesforce.com today announced a strategic alliance that will make it easier for millions of small businesses to manage customer information alongside their financial data. This collaboration will merge leading CRM and financial management to allow small businesses using QuickBooks to more efficiently manage customer relationships so they can save time and close more deals.
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As a part of the strategic alliance, Intuit will resell Salesforce CRM with QuickBooks integration that synchronizes customer data with QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online. This application will provide streamlined information to those in sales and management to eliminate data entry in two different systems, showing aggregated customer information alongside probability for closing a deal.
Once available, it will be a prominent application on Intuit App Center, where small businesses can easily find, buy and use connected Web-based applications that run on the Intuit Partner Platform. The application is expected this summer with pricing to be announced at launch.
Bookmark QuickBooks Online for easy access in your Chrome or Chromium browser! If you don’t have Chrome, click the icon at the bottom of this post to grab it. Most Chrome users must already be aware of the Chrome Web Store and the New Tab page in Google Chrome. On this page you can can have your web application shortcuts and configure them to open in a way you prefer. We just added QuickBooks Online to the Chrome Web Store. Click the above icon or here to install the shortcut on your New Tab page.
Existing QuickBooks Online users don’t need to purchase anything or re-signup for anything. Just install the shortcut from the store (if you want) and login with your existing credentials.
Image below shows how I have setup my Chrome settings, you may choose to do the same way if you wish. I have my home page set to the new tab page, so every time a new tab launches I see my apps listed. From here I can jump to whichever app I want. The new tab page also shows your recently visited sites, so you can just jump to whatever you were browsing last.
Once the QuickBooks Online app shortcut is installed (if you choose to install) you will see the icon on the new tab page. If you want to change it’s launch options, click the wrench on the icon’s top right corner as shown in the image below. If you want shortcuts on the desktop or taskbar, click the Create Shortcut option in the menu as shown below.
Advantages of using QuickBooks Online on Google Chrome include faster browsing performance in general (due to it’s fast renderer and javascript engine), better visuals (due to great CSS3 support) and the browser is considered as one of the most secure ones around due to it’s sandboxing. It also includes fast automatic updating and hence keeping all users on the same version, which helps us developers a lot and also reduces the cost of testing against multiple versions. As we get more people on modern browsers such as Chrome, we as developers can invest more time in using bleeding edge technologies to enhance QuickBooks Online’s experience as a web application rather than spending time on interoperability issues with older browsers. Though I know that’s something a web developer can’t escape from but sure it will be nice to have majority of our users on newer browsers.
Few browser tips and tricks for QuickBooks Online can be seen on this blog post. One common issue we are tracking with Google Chrome is the lack of PDF save and print buttons. See the bug here – http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=56072. But you can just right click on the PDF and click print instead. As time passes, we are getting rid of window based popups too, since we also find them annoying.
BTW other web offerings from Intuit on the Chrome Web Store include Mint and TurboTax.
For non-Chrome users If you wish to try out QuickBooks Online in Google Chrome, click the icon below to install the browser. You can play around with it and try it out.
QuickBooks Online is officially supported under Windows and Mac versions of Chrome. While not officially supported, QuickBooks Online still works great under Linux and Chromium OS versions of Chrome / Chromium.
Post about any browser issues or possible bugs here or on our forums (preferred so that others are aware too) or via in-product feedback. Since this post is about the Chrome web store, its all chrome chrome chromium chromie, but we as developers love Firefox too
Users with companies in both US and UK regions
If you have companies in both regions, you may install both the US and UK versions of the app from the Chrome Web Store. However only one can be used at a given time from the same browser session. If you wish to use them simultaneously, you will have to create a new user profile in Chrome as shown below and install / access one of the apps from the newly created profile. Chrome profiles is a new upcoming feature of Chrome and you may not see it currently. It will be available in Chrome 16 onward. If you wish to try it, you will have to upgrade your version of Chrome by switching channels - http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel
but sure it will be nice to have majority of our users on newer browsers.
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