Need Your Help making QuickBooks Online play well with others
Over many years of spending many inspiring hours with small businesses (big-small and teeny-small) I know one thing for sure – your information is in lots of places. Some may live on paper, in notebooks, some on the computer – maybe on your hard drive, maybe on the web. Not to mention the information in your head!
If you’re new to QuickBooks Online, I’d love it if we had a magical device that could let you dump all the customer, vendor & financial information you want right into our product to help get you started.
If you’re a regular user of QuickBooks Online, I’d love it if we had a magical device that could let you share the information inside our product with other products. Because after all, who wants 4 customer lists and 2 lists of unpaid invoices? Who wants to bounce between 3 different pieces of software that don’t talk to each other?
There’s a bunch of us that have been considering what these magical devices might do. Certainly some of the feedback you’ve been giving us is inspiring us… because it’s only through talking and listening to small businesses that we get inspired to do what we do. So this is where we need your help – we’re listening – what information (from where?) would you like to dump into QuickBooks Online? What other software applications would you like QuickBooks Online to work with?
Heather Kirkby
About Me: I’m a QuickBooks Online product person that loves small businesses, bike riding, and good food (yes, the last two are directly related).
September 19, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I’d love to be able to import contacts, e.g. from Gmail. Others might find Outlook or CSV beneficial.
October 13, 2009 at 8:50 pm
This is something we’ve been talking about – thanks for validating. We’re investigating ways to improve the first-time experience with the product (of course this would benefit everybody).
September 26, 2009 at 9:33 pm
At the moment I am carefully looking at moving my accounting to the online version of quickbooks. One of the things that Quickbooks in general lacks is the ability to generate professional and custom looking invoices. Yes, you do have the PDF invoice but it doesn’t look appealing to me or my clients. I would LOVE to be able to upload a custom PDF with open fields (following QB instructions) which will then be populated by the online app.
Another option is the ability to seamlessly integrate with 3rd party services like Freshbooks.com which DO tend to generate professional looking invoices.
Thanks!
October 13, 2009 at 12:09 am
You can do that now with Quickbooks Desktop 2010
October 13, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I would love to see the online version catch up with the desktop features like professional invoices that can be customized, job costing, HRIS functions, and multi-level users which the desktop has over 115 levels whereas the online has less than 15 levels?
October 13, 2009 at 12:11 am
You can create professional looking custom Invoice templates with the upcoming Quickbooks Desktop 2010
October 13, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Well, that doesn’t help. The article is about the QB online version. Focus!
It sounds to me like you may need to re-evaluate your future growth – as more people and companies are demanding better online services in your space. The faster you move in this direction the less likely you will need to make big purchases like the recent Mint.com acquisition.
October 13, 2009 at 8:51 pm
We’ve been talking a lot about improved invoice customization. What makes an invoice look professional to you?
January 4, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Definitely need the ability to send a personalized message as a ‘cover sheet’ to the invoices. A message at the bottom of the invoice isn’t what at least one of our clients is looking for. At present, the best solution we could find was to create a PDF of each invoice, and attach that to en email to the customer. Relatively tedious – although not as tedious as changing the invoice template for each invoice!
January 4, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Yes, a personalized message at the top of the invoice – without having to go into the customization settings – would be nice.
September 28, 2009 at 6:35 pm
One thing that Quickbooks Online is really lacking in is the ability to download customers and product data and then re upload after making changes it would be a lot faster to add new products in a spreadsheet and upload them to the existing list.
January 31, 2010 at 10:38 am
I agree with Richard about the need for an ability to import and export using CSV files. The ability to import customers and invoices as CSV files would greatly enhance to ease of converting from another system to QBO. And export too!
October 9, 2009 at 6:28 am
I would like to see you update the QuickBooks Online SDK to make it comparable to the desktop SDK. There are indeed a ton of third-party apps that could easily be integrated with QBOE, but the SDK is currently very limited. Thanks.
October 13, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Ditto – I would love to see QuickBooks online catch up with the desktop version rather than pushing the Enterprise version as an alternate, which seems to be heading the wrong direction, because the Internet is so powerful and provides flexibility and access for multi-users nationwide!
October 12, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I have a customer that has over 300 employees and their bank statement has over 400 items each month.
I have been hoping that you will let me download the payroll and bank transactions for 3 years, I have been making the same suggestion all the time.
I would love to migrate him to the desktop web version but he doesn’t want to keep his information on one of his computers that someone can steal and /or it go down.
October 13, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Victor, are you an accountant? Would be really interested in learning more. You can contact me directly on twitter @Heather_QBO
October 14, 2009 at 9:01 am
I am accountant, how can I help change the QB online to except import information.
It would make my workload about half for this customer.
My email address is busbys@grandecom.net, I could not send this to you with the address you give.
October 17, 2009 at 7:38 pm
I would like to see a few things to help improve customer management. It would be nice to have a customer search box built right into the top of the OE menus where you could type the first few letters of a customer’s name and jump right to that customer’s summary, and add assets to a customer record. (Since QBOE targets the service industry, and many of us service specific assets such as computers in my case).
Also, It would also be nice if customers could be tagged or flagged with different colors for various reasons to be determined by the business owner. (VIP customers, business customers, past due customers, deadbeat customers, etc.)
Lastly, the ability to upload documents and attach them to a customer, vendor, employee, or a specific transaction would be a huge help. I would love it if when I purchased something from one of my vendors if I could upload the “order confirmation” as a PDF and attach it to the transaction in QBOE.
Marc
October 17, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Marc…We’re investigating some stuff exactly on these lines. Thanks for the suggestions. Good fuel and encouragement for our product planning.
Heather
October 18, 2009 at 3:57 am
I definitely agree with Marc we really need those bonus features to help manage our customers/clients. I might also add that if a customer has a note attached to their account that this should show up beside the name box when entering a sales receipt or invoice so that additional info could be added on the fly right there.
October 26, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Why don’t you open up QuickBooks Online to marketing services like email providers and of course, lil ‘o text marketing services like Fanminder?
November 7, 2009 at 9:30 am
Make it faster! I have several online clients and I’m sure I would have more if the online version was as fast as the desktop version. The future belongs to online versions and cloud computing. I love not having to worry about backups, upgrades, and other physical computer issues. “Back office” functions are a perfect “Home office” business for self employement. I provide bookkeeping services via many versions of QuickBooks for many clients both onsite and offsite. Keep up the great work! Warm regards, Connie
November 8, 2009 at 7:09 am
I hear you Connie, we’re working on it! Thanks.
November 20, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Please make it accessible via a Chrome Browser and Firefox browser running on a Linux (Ubuntu) OS.
December 16, 2009 at 8:45 am
Absolutely agree with Kent on this point about Linux and firefox etc. Also agree with Marc above about essentially what would be CRM functions. I know myself and several other companies that use a separate program to keep track of dated call logs with notes for current and potential customers. It’s a simple thing to add and would save allot of hassle. One last thing, concerning import/export of data from QBOE. Keep it simple, if QB could import/export via. something as simple as a csv text file than third party contributors like myself would be more than happy to share our scripts and such to the QB community. It just simply takes too much time to enter or update everything on click/reload at a time in an on-line environment. I need to temporarily lock a table, upload revised data and unlock the table. You get the idea. Thanks for listening.
December 3, 2009 at 11:03 am
Find a way to integrate with an online payment processing company such as PayPal, Google, or Amazon. I need to accept payments through one of these services and my only option is to get an add-on, OE Companion, which is inferior for my needs to anywhereERP. I find this irritating because such integration is something that should be included in Intuit’s service and thus should not impact the inventory management options available.
December 4, 2009 at 2:17 am
Hey Paul – so you just want to download PayPal transactions into QBO, is that right? versus being able to process a PayPal transaction directly inside QBO…
January 1, 2010 at 9:00 pm
For my needs, being able to download PayPal transactions into QBO would be great!
December 20, 2009 at 11:10 am
We are a small trucking company and use a dispatch system. This has the ability to export to Quickbooks desktop for invoicing but not QBO. I can only find one third party appplication and that is not easy to use. Does anyone know of any applications that might make this import easier?
January 4, 2010 at 2:44 pm
I would like the various tabs / windows to say more specifically what is presently being displayed in each. I often have a P&L by month in one tab, a P&L by class in another, and some transaction research in others. I end up clicking around the tabs until I find the one I am looking for. Would be solved by better titles in the tabs, yes?
February 11, 2010 at 3:33 pm
I believe that it would make a lot of sense to have options for people like us that use PayPal to process payments and SalesForce.com for CRM to have some data integration options other than third party developers. Even if these options were simply a CSV or XML import.
March 2, 2010 at 11:36 am
Definitely Paypal. That’s something I would pay extra for, hopefully only on one end….I’d be less than thrilled to pay both Paypal *and* QBOE for the capability.
Any method to import data would work for me. CSV, text delimited, comma delimited…I make it all work.
March 3, 2010 at 2:18 am
Interesting post… Looks like solid state memory is really starting to take off. Hopefully we’ll start seeing decreasing solid state harddisk prices soon. 5 dollar 32 gig Micro SD Cards for your DS flash card… imagine that!(Submitted by NewPost v2 for R4i Nintendo DS.)