New Technologies Make Credit Card Billing and QuickBooks Integration Complete

In The Beginning

In the beginning of credit cards, at least as I remember, it was the old slide machine.  You know, place the card in the platform and then place a receipt slip with carbon paper insert on top of the card and then slide the roller over and a copy of the vitals is imprinted on the receipt. As a kid, we never could have imagined where our technologies would be today and the way in which people would complete transactions.

My How Far We’ve Come

As we know it today you basically have a credit card merchant who provides several means of completing a credit card transaction, the following implies more to non-brick and mortar establishment. They can supply you a portal for entering your credit card information on your computer for payments you take over the phone or they can offer you an online portal where you can direct customers from your website to their payment authorization site. The one constant that does not change is that each and every one of those options requires some amount of labor on your behalf to initiate.

The biggest time sink, taking an order over the phone, doing anything over the phone outside of good customer service is a wasteful use of resources in most cases.  I truly feel that most people that transact more than a dozen or so transactions a day, by credit card, have already started moving to some assortment of automated bill acceptance.  There again, you brick and mortar business owners have a different reality called in store sells. This topic will be covered in other articles.

So, while the small businessman or businesswoman has saved a little bit of time in the effort to get paid, the largest time sink is yet to follow. The credit card merchant informs the small business owner that the transaction is valid and the details of the transaction are emailed for record keeping. Your records, all tucked up nice and neat in your QuickBooks company file.

It was last reported a couple of years ago that QuickBooks commanded over 90% of the small business accounting software sales. (Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickBooks)

When you look at such staggering market absorption, it is understandable why so much focus is given to QuickBooks. However, at the end of the day when you have a paid receipt the end result is book keeping. More time is spent entering and reconciling transactions in QuickBooks than accepting and verifying the original transaction.

To Review:

·Businesses use to take a manual imprint of your credit card and then have to manually to everything.

·Along came the advent of transferring large amounts of data faster over phones and satellite. Suddenly, dial-up credit card processing was the next wave.

·Then the internet…

·However, A Lot of effort is still wasted performing booking keeping entries

Where we are today…

Today, we have the advancement of technologies that are rewriting how small businesses get it done. First was the advent of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) phone software that allowed a high level of automation for redundant phone tasks.  Though this has proven that it can be overdone, IVR technology has still proven to be very versatile. Secondly, Intuit began to see the advantage of providing a platform to help business owners accept and account for credit cards.  But these technologies never quite made it together to completely automate the payment and book keeping process.

There is now a new technology that has married all the features together.  A technology capable of receiving and automating bill payments over the phone, receive and process credit card transactions on the internet, and then integrating completely with QuickBooks to update the company file.  To take it one step further all the data for this technology is taken from the open invoices in your QuickBooks company file; making the process, once you complete the initial invoice, automatic from start to finish.

The first company to integrate this bill processing option for QuickBooks was a hoa website design company called HOAConnections.  Though the platform has wide reaching implications for all businesses that utilize the QuickBooks accounting software.

We will write more articles that dive more in depth to more particular niche market uses of this technology and following articles.

Brian Barrett

President / CEO

HOA Website Design by HOAConnections http://www.hoaconnections.com

For more info on Payment Collect visit: http://www.hoaconnections.com/features-pricing/payment-collect/