QuickBooks Online Blog

Remember that Health Care bill last year? It included a little clause that would have a big effect on small businesses.  It would play out like this: Anytime you buy something from someone over $600 you’d be required to send them a 1099. Imagine buying a computer from BestBuy and then being required to send Best Buy a 1099.

In order to change this, the Senate and House will have to repeal it. Last night, the Senate did.

What happened? The Senate voted on several amendments to S.223, FAA Re-Authorization bill. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) offered Senate Amendment 9 calling for repeal of the new 1099 reporting requirement and would be paid for with unspent discretionary funds offset, except for Department of Defense, Veteran Affairs, and Social Security Administration. It passed with an 81-17 vote.

The house still has a chance to vote before any changes go into place.  However if this doesn’t get repealed, QuickBooks Online will be changing how we handle reporting to help make this new requirement easier to track and manage for you.

Stay tuned…

Since we first introduced QuickBooks Online ten years ago, small businesses have sent 155 million invoices, logged $1.3 trillion in expenses, and entered a whopping $5 trillion in revenue — a sum equivalent to one-third the U.S. Gross Domestic Product — using the service.

Over the years, QuickBooks Online has evolved with the needs of small businesses to save them time and instill self-confidence managing their finances, so they can focus on what they love — running their businesses. Recently, we added a feature to the product called Trends that enables small business owners to compare their income and expenses with other businesses in similar locations and industries. Extracting insights from Trends, small business owners can identify ways to cut expenses and boost sales, or more broadly see how their industries are performing. We also recently added inventory management capabilities and refreshed the user interface to further simplify accounting tasks.

You can read more about recent updates to QuickBooks Online in today’s news announcement. Or, share the infographic below to celebrate ten years of small business success with QuickBooks Online. Click the image for an enlarged view.

NOTE: These tips are brought to you by  Track1099.com -  a paper-free, 1099-MISC e-delivery and  e-filing service. Track 1099 integrates with QuickBooks Online’s 1099 vendor information (e.g. address/name/phone).

1. Make sure you send the 1099-MISC form to your Recipients by Jan. 31, 2011.

Deadline is getting close! Track1099 e-delivers your 1099′s to the Recipient by sending an email with a secure link, requiring them to enter the last 4 of their Tax ID number. This ensures security, complies with the IRS rule to receive “consent”, and allows the Recipient access any time to their 1099.

2. File the 1099-MISC with the IRS before Feb. 15, if you’re sending paper or by Mar. 31, 2011, if you e-file.

E-filing with Track1099  reduces the hassle of printing and snail mailing.  If you only have one 1099, you only pay for one, though we do offer discounts for larger volumes.

3. Double check correct Tax ID numbers with your vendors; having the wrong SSN or EIN can expose you to the possibility of IRS fines.

By using Track1099 to e-deliver, you get a double check on the correctness of your Recipients’ Tax ID numbers, reducing the chances of an error being sent to the IRS.

4. Make sure both the IRS and the Recipient have received their 1099-MISC’s.

If your Recipient loses their paper 1099-MISC, guess what — you’ll need to resend. With e-Delivery, their 1099 is never lost. They just go back online and retrieve it. In our IRS Status table, at a glance you may check on the status of both the IRS e-file and the Recipient e-delivery.

5. Reduce IRS paper waste.

In 2009, the IRS received 85 Million 1099-MISC forms, the vast majority of which were sent to the Recipients via paper. This is a stack of forms more than 10 miles high. Please do your part for our environment and e-deliver as well as e-file.

Sincerely,

Sharon Lindsey West and the Team at Track1099 . (Check us out…and e-deliver and e-file your way to big time savings.)

As we reached the final days of 2010, we took the pulse of small businesses in America to hear both their biggest challenges and greatest rewards from 2010 as well as their perspective of what’s to come in 2011. While small businesses are still feeling the brunt of the recession, they enter 2011 motivated to grow and with realistic expectations.

In our survey of small businesses, 65 percent of respondents said starting their own businesses was their personal passion. Despite the hardships brought on by the recession, 85 percent of those respondents said the passion is still there, driving them forward. Also, an impressive 66 percent of respondents said they expect their businesses to grow in 2011 despite the rocky economy.

Here’s what else we learned from the front lines in our small business survey. Click the infographic for an enlarged view.

By Oliver Helleboid, Vice President of Intuit Payroll product management.

You asked and we listened! We’re working hard to deliver some of the most commonly requested features for our QuickBooks Online Payroll customers. The following highlights some of the new and updated features recently released.

• Change payee name for payroll tax payments (Available to all customers the week of 12/20/2010.)
• Mark payroll tax payment as paid (Available to all customers the week of 12/20/2010.)
• Mark payroll expenses as cleared/reconciled (Available to all customers the week of 12/20/2010.)
• Set up expense accounts by wage and tax type (Released 12/3/2010)
• Set up a third-party designee (Released 12/3/2010)
• View payroll information by work location (Released 12/3/2010)
• Print paychecks and paystubs in a 3-part format (Released 10/29/2010)

You can find out more about these changes here.

This is a good start, but the team is not stopping.  We will continue to listen and respond to your feedback.  Happy Holidays!

Deep dive into the Christmas Tree industry:

For those who celebrate, it wouldn’t be Christmas for a lot of folks without the smell of pine in their homes. For others, evergreens mean allergies, high price tags, or a lot of set up effort, so they opt for artificial trees.

Regardless of personal preference, it’s a big time of the year for tree-tailers, so we thought we’d offer a closer look at the iconic industry. Click on the infographic for an enlarged view

And if you really want to smell the pine…head to Oregon.

Before diving in, a couple of disclaimers. These tips and tricks are for specific browsers. They may or may not apply to others. There are a lot more generic tips for browsers than the ones listed below, which you can find by googling. The ones below may help increase your productivity with QuickBooks Online or any webapp/website for that matter. If you know more, you can comment below for others to read and take advantage of. If you are a Chrome user, type in about:flags in your address bar to try out some cool features that can further enhance your productivity.

Firefox 4 and IE9 are mentioned multiple times below, however they are beta browsers and can have bugs. You are not barred from using them, however use precaution while using them as they are not officially supported till their release next year.

Opening QuickBooks Online in a new tab
Applies to: Google Chrome, Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9

Instead of copy/pasting the url from one tab to another and then navigating to the page you wanted (or using the shortcuts menu if you have the old menus enabled), you can just right click any tab and click duplicate. This will not only open the same content in a new tab, but also have the entire navigation history of the current tab duplicated in the new tab. With this you can have multiple QuickBooks Online tabs open. I believe there are/were a few users of QuickBooks Online that used the old shortcuts menu just for the purpose of opening QuickBooks Online in a new window. With this browser feature, you can achieve just that and then perhaps make a switch to the new menus if you are interested.

Saving your docs (PDFs) in the cloud
Applies to: Google Chrome (extension – http://goo.gl/yeXQi)
Firefox (addon – http://goo.gl/ll8Op)

Right now there isn’t a way of attaching documents right along with transactions within QuickBooks Online. So you end up either saving the document on your hard drive or in your email. In both cases you end up missing the link between the transaction you entered and the physical/electronic copy of it. The trick here is to use an online document storage service like Google Docs. Once your doc or pdf is saved there, you can put a link to it in the memo field of your transaction. So that in the future when you see that transaction, you can just use the link to get to its original copy.

Likewise, when you are sending a pdf to a customer or vendor. Instead of printing out the invoice and emailing it or mailing it, you can store this document directly in Google Docs and just share it with your customer.

You should take advantage of the addons listed above. Doing so can always help if and when your computer fails. You will still have access to your docs all the time and from any place. And also you end up reducing paper clutter in your workspace.

Improved browser tab naming

Following modern web application design concepts, each tab on the browser that has QuickBooks Online open, will now show what page is open. Unlike before that just mentioned QuickBooks Online and the company name. The new format is <page name> – <company name> – <quickbooks online SKU name> wherever applicable and whatever fits in the available space of the tab. With this new format, we hope you will find it easier to navigate from one tab to the another if you have QuickBooks Online open in multiple tabs. Also because of this change, the browser history will now show the pages you have been on previously so that when/if you want to navigate by pressing the back/forward browser buttons, you know exactly what page to go to.

Application Tabs
Applies to: Google Chrome, Firefox 4

As people start to spend more time on the web, they start using the browser for majority of their tasks. People working online generally have one tab open with their email, another tab with their news feed, another tab with their documents and hence forth. The more tabs you have open, the more cluttered your browser space becomes. Each tab gets less space, specially if you have a smaller monitor. And the positioning of the tab is also sporadic. You can right click any tab and make it an application tab by “pinning it.” In this way, whenever you launch the browser, it will have those tabs open by default without you explicitly having to open a new tab and typing in the url or using your bookmarks. The position of it is also fixed. So if you launch QuickBooks Online regularly and have it open just like your email all the time, you can pin it so that it shows up on the left as below. Application tabs reduce to just their icon thereby providing you with more space for other tabs. Click to watch the concept video from mozilla.

Windows task bar and start menu app shortcuts
Applies to: Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7

This is something we are experimenting on the side and this will mature over time. Right now you will see a very basic implementation of it. The idea is to have shortcuts to QuickBooks Online as well as specific pages within QuickBooks online directly from your windows 7 taskbar or windows 7 start menu. Basically taking advantage of jump lists – the list you get by right clicking an application icon on your taskbar in windows 7.

Once you are logged into QuickBooks Online, you can tear off a tab by dragging it to either the task bar or start menu and pinning it as a web application shortcut. In the future you can use that to launch a QuickBooks Online specific browser window. In there you will notice the back and forward navigation icons in green color. If you are not logged in, then you need to log in at least once, and the shortcuts you see will work, otherwise they land you on the login page. This feature will evolve, mature and improve over time. More on this feature in a later blog post, perhaps sometime next year after IE9 releases.

Similar thing for Google Chrome

A similar (but no jump list shortcuts in this case) thing can be done in Google Chrome via Wrench > Tools > Create Application Shortcuts. When you do this you end up with shortcuts on the desktop / start menu / taskbar. Launching QuickBooks online from these will get rid of the browser “chrome” (chrome of a browser signifies the part of the browser thats not the page content. So the toolbars, address bar, menus etc) and give a full screen feeling. This dramatically increases your viewable real estate and will help people with smaller monitors. Pages that are confined to a single page view, like Registers, Lists, Customer Center…all will show more information.

As you will notice that some of these new browsers give a lot of functionality to the user. If you want to experience some of these features, give Firefox or Chrome a try to see if you like using them for QuickBooks Online or for any website/webapp in general.

Switching to Firefox or Chrome or Safari also gets you more browser real estate. You don’t need any 3rd party toolbars as the basic browser functionality out of the box serves all needs. The more viewable browser area you have, more you see and the less you scroll. Hence you can be more productive.

What Browser?
20 things about browsers and the web

Why you should upgrade to a modern browser?

Major reason is javascript performance and security. Below are performance statistics from about 2 months ago. With all the performance enhancements, you will notice your pages loading faster. Navigating around, interaction will all be faster. The look and feel will also be better with the new browsers and many of you will see noticable differences when switching from IE7 or IE8 to Firefox or Chrome or Safari. This applies to any web page you visit and not just QuickBooks Online. Besides performance and security, switching to these new browsers brings in a lot of modern technology features like HTML5 and CSS3. With these new technologies we can add more interactive features at a faster pace. But this does require on your part to adopt these new browsers.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/10/windows-browsers-benchmarked-october-2010-edition.ars

Linux browser support

You are no longer barred from using Chrome or Firefox on Linux. Just make sure you are using the latest versions and keep them up to date. They may have quirks more than their windows and mac counterparts, but should be generally usable none the less. It will not require you to change the user agent strings like many of you do already to bypass our browser check and also save your time by not forcing you to run wine or VMs with Windows. Since these are still not officially supported (QuickBooks Online support agents cannot help you with issues specific to linux) just like Firefox 4 or IE9, do take precaution in using them. If you encounter issues (QuickBooks Online support agents cannot help you with issues specific to linux), post about it on the forums instead or on this blog post as a comment or submit feedback.

Chrome PDF printing issue

Look here: http://goo.gl/zTfeC

Try it out

This post was originally published on the Intuit Small Business blog by Kevin Casey

Amid all the hullabaloo surrounding the agreement to extend Bush-era tax cuts and unemployment benefits, an unexpected star sneaked in to steal some of the limelight: Payroll taxes will drop 2% for every worker in the United States in 2011.

If the deal passes Congress, the payroll tax cut would fatten America’s collective wallet by about $120 billion next year, according to the White House. Put another way: Consumers may have more money to spend on your products and services in the new year.

Under the agreement, businesses would also be allowed to expense 100% of their capital investments immediately for tax purposes next year rather than depreciate them. The Treasury Department estimates that could spur as much as $50 billion in additional capital investment next year.

The White House touts the payroll tax cut, in particular, as a major catalyst for jobs creation and overall economic growth. The deal also extends benefits for the long-term unemployed and keeps the Bush-era tax breaks in place until 2013.

The news could be a call for celebration, but not everyone is cheering just yet. Democrats aren’t happy with the deal, and even politically conservative groups like the National Federation of Independent Businesses have tempered their enthusiasm. Senior vice president Susan Eckerly said in a statement that the NFIB was “encouraged” by the pact, but expressed concern over the extension of unemployment benefits and the exclusion of a 1099 rule repeal.

But while competing interests punch it out in the Washington ring, you can at least consider the potential upside for your bottom line. Your customers will have a bit of a bonus to apply to their budgets. If you have employees, they’ll take home a few more dollars in their paychecks. It’s important to keep the big picture in aerial focus, but this looks pretty good on the ground.