Update July 27th:

Hi everyone — we know this isn’t ideal for Mac users who depend on Safari in your daily web lives. We feel your pain. That said, I’d like to explain a little more about why we currently aren’t supporting Safari 5 in QuickBooks Online.

Without any public beta or pre-release version from Apple, we were unable to test Safari 5 before it came out. Unfortunately, when Safari 5 was released we discovered a bug that made QuickBooks Online unsafe to use with Safari 5, and we blocked access to QuickBooks Online from this version to protect your data. (Later, when Apple released Safari 4.1 with the same bug, we blocked that version as well.)

Within hours of the discovery of this bug, our engineers reported it to Apple. The bug has already been fixed by Apple in WebKit, the engine on which Safari is built. Now we are all waiting on Apple to release an update to Safari that contains the fix. We can’t tell you how soon that will happen, because Apple hasn’t told us.

I know this is hard to hear, but please keep in mind that this is a bug in Safari, not a bug in QuickBooks Online. We’ve done everything possible to reach a speedy resolution, and we hope that the fix will be made available to you as soon as possible.

In the meantime, Firefox and Chrome are supported alternatives to Safari in OS X. I’ve heard from several of you that these browsers are giving you problems, and the best advice I can offer is to contact our Support team to discuss these issues. We have many, many users on these browsers in OS X who are not experiencing the problems that have been described here. But we can’t help you with these problems through comments on a blog — please reach out to our Support team for troubleshooting.

- QBO Dave

Update July 5th:
Safari 4.1 for Mac OS X Tiger is also having the issue listed and should not be used for the time being.

Update:
The bug in question – https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40367
This bug has been fixed in webkit by apple developers, however apple still needs to officially push out updates to Safari.
When this will happen is unknown since it’s in the hands of apple.

What is Webkit?
Wikipedia entry for webkit.
Webkit is the underlying engine for Safari, and since this bug is in a very low level math operation in webkit, it is hard to get around it.
In Quickbooks Online this causes erroneous calculations related to money.
The issue is not with Quickbooks itself and can be reproduced as mentioned in the above mentioned bug link outside Quickbooks Online.

Original:
On June 7, Apple released version 5 of the Safari web browser. Safari 5 includes JavaScript performance improvements, a new Safari Reader feature, and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo! or Bing as the search engine for the Safari search box.

Unfortunately, during our early testing we discovered a bug in the new browser that causes some of our calculations to be off. Because of this, we haven’t yet allowed Safari 5 to log into QuickBooks Online. We have reported this bug to Apple, but we’re working hard to develop our own fixes so that you can be up and running with Safari 5 as soon as possible.

If you aren’t using Safari to access QuickBooks Online on your Mac, then this won’t affect you. If you are, you’ll need to take some specific steps until QuickBooks Online is enabled for Safari 5:

• If you still have Safari 4 and would like to continue using Safari with QuickBooks Online, do not update to Safari 5 yet. We’ll let you know when access is enabled for Safari 5.
• If you have already updated to Safari 5, you’ll need to use a different web browser to access QuickBooks Online. Both Firefox and Chrome work great!

We value the security and stability of QuickBooks Online as much as you do, which is why we are diligently testing. Once access is available for Safari 5 we will place an alert on your QuickBooks Online home page to let you know, so keep an eye out for it. Please stay tuned for updates.

First, don’t use any of the most common passwords.  This seems obvious, right? But  there have been studies looking at the passwords used by people, and these lists have been published. These passwords are easy to remember and quick to type, but they are also known to security professionals and identity thieves. Anyone trying to guess your password will be very likely to try these first.  So, protect yourself and don’t be tempted to use any of these.

Words that are unique to you, and potentially known to hackers should be avoided. It’s fun to have your password to be your high-school nickname, your dog’s name, kid’s birthday, or your favorite baseball team. But, remember with social networking sites like Facebook, this information is more than likely to be available on the internet.

Make your password hard to guess. Passwords should have a mix of upper and lower case letters, some numbers, and the longer the better. In QuickBooks Online, we require passwords that are at least 6 characters long, but longer is better.  If it’s a bit hard for you to remember, those hackers will have a heck of a time.

Going even further than avoiding words about you, or on the common password list,  it’s even safer to avoid words completely.  Random characters or mis-spelled words are better, as they make it much harder for password guessing algorithms to work.

One tip for making a seemingly random sequence of letters, but be a bit more memorable, is to use the first letter from each word of a phrase. For example, “To be, or not to be, that is the question” would turn into “Tbontbtitq”.

We’ve added a tool in QuickBooks Online to help you measure the strength of the password you’ve chosen. It’s a gauge of 5 dots that appear right below the password field in the change password page.  All dots are off until you have a minimally acceptable password, and will increase as the the strength of your password increases.  More dots means a more secure password.

The following video shows how to change your password in QuickBooks Online.

John Ruberto

About Me:  I’m part of the QuickBooks Online Quality team. When I’m not testing the best small business accounting online service, you might find me on my favorite trout stream.

1. Set a deadline to launch your business.  They decided in May that they would launch in September, and stuck  to the deadline even as they learned their initial expectations of “How hard could it be?” were inaccurate.  Push forward and…
2. Don’t expect perfection of yourself. It is good to strive for this, but is better to find a way to open your doors to customers so you can…
3. Generate revenue while you test. Launch and iterate on your business based on feedback from your customers, what sells, what you’re good at, what is profitable, what you want to do.
4. Solve for a narrow target. This is very difficult because our natural tendency is to think it is easier to grow by going after a big market.  Trust that solving for a narrow market helps you focus on the best opportunities and will help you create great products and solutions that your customers help you sell through word of mouth.
5. Focus on your customer’s problems rather than the tools you’re selling to solve them.  Having this mindset allows you to evolve both your business plan and products to meet their needs.  This allows you to see that a different tool (your product or service), rather than a better one, might be the solution that helps you grow your business.

Only time will tell what the impact is to small business.  With the credits and exchanges we can expect more small businesses to offer health insurance, but how many will depend on the depth of the savings from the exchanges.  We can also expect sole proprietors to have an easier time getting health insurance, which could indirectly encourage more entrepreneurship.  And for our larger small businesses (those with 50+ employees) the fear is that there will be an adverse impact on hiring given incentives to stay below 5o employees and 80k salaries.

Current state: The smallest businesses aren’t providing their employees with health insurance

Lots of small businesses aren’t offering health insurance…
Only 49 percent of firms with 3 to 9 workers offered any type of health insurance to their employees in 2008. In contrast, 99 percent of firms with more than 200 workers offered health insurance.

Those that do offer insurance are paying more…
Small businesses (less than 100 employees) pay up to 18 percent more per worker than large firms for the same health insurance policy.

And things aren’t looking up.
Between  2002 to 2008, businesses with 3 to 9 employees offering health insurance to their workers declined from 58 to 49 percent.

The reform’s intent is to lower costs for the smallest businesses with credits and exchanges and make insurance mandatory for bigger businesses

How small businesses will buy insurance:

• By no later than 2014, states will have to set up Small Business Health Options Programs, or “SHOP Exchanges.”
• A SHOP exchange will pool small businesses (less than 100 employees)  together  to buy insurance.
• The impact?  These are expected to have a small positive effect  (between 1-4%) on the premium cost and amount  of coverage offered.

Starting now until 2014, businesses with less than 25 employees will get a tax credit.

• If you have 10 or less employees that you are paying less than $25K a year, you will be eligible for a tax credit of 35% of health insurance costs
• If you have between 11 and 25 workers with an average wage up to $50K, you are eligible for partial credits.
• You don’t get a tax credit if you have more than 25 employees.
• Any employee who earns more than $80K/year will be excluded from the credit
• In 2014, if you have 10 or less employees, earning less than $25K, you could earn a 50% credit.

It is pay or play…for bigger businesses

• By 2014 if you have more than 50 employees, you will have to either offer insurance or pay $750 per employee.
• This coverage will have to meet minimum benefits and services, as well as handle 60% of costs.
• In 2011, employers will have to provide coverage for dependents of employees until the age of 26. (Now it is typically age 19 or the end of college)

If you are a freelancer/one person shop, coverage expansion will help you:

• By 2014 insurers won’t be able to set rates to exclude coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and can vary premiums only by geographic location, age, and tobacco use.
• Going into effect right now is a ban on lifetime limits on coverage, and on “rescission” (canceling policies already issued) except in cases of fraud.

Other stuff small businesses need to know:

• Part-time employees will be counted toward the 50-employee minimum (pro-rated)
• You will have to report the value of an employee’s health care plan on W-2 forms
• If you earn (as an individual) more than $200,000 a year, or are a couple earning $250,000 or more, there will be  a  3.8% surcharge on investment income to help pay for the bill
• This SHOP exchange will handle individuals as well.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects the number of people getting insurance through the new marketplace to start around 8 million in 2014 and to grow to 24 million in 2019.

Questions? Have a point of view on this? Please leave it in the comments.

The information cited here is the WhiteHouse.gov report, with recent updates included from CNN.com. http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/Health-Care-Reform-and-Small-Businesses
http://www.CNN.com

Check out the End of the Year guide to help you through these sticky questions.  And if you have gone through this, or have questions, please leave them in the comments.

You have to be logged into QuickBooks Online to see this!

The QuickBooks Online team just found a cool tool from google that offers a quick and dirty analysis of your website through the eyes of your customers.

Check it out. If your call to action button isn’t placed where most customers can see, that may be an opportunity to improve your conversion rates.

We started asking around the office and found out that the QuickBooks Online team is pretty good at making resolutions.  We’re excited to share our personal ones with you…and encourage you to share yours.

Intuit’s also put together ten tips for small businesses for the new year. Read them here.

A peak into the lives of your QuickBooks Online team:

Lance, Product Manager: This year I will expand my mastery of the Thai language beyond simply knowing what to order at a restaurant.

Emily, User Researcher: To save more money and to keep swimming 3 times a week.

Judd, Product Manager: I actually think New Year’s resolutions are funny…if I want to make a change, I don’t feel a need to wait until a certain date to make it happen.  That said, I have successfully avoided becoming a FaceBook user and hope I can stay untainted in 2010.

Marc, Senior Software Engineer:  Eat healthier and exercise more!

John, Quality Leader: To produce, direct, and film a documentary film about how we create high quality software at Intuit.

Shareen, Marketing Manager: My New Year’s resolutions tend to stay consistent year after year. . .lose weight, exercise more, and keep on practicing positivity!

Please share yours!

Google Chrome has been added to the list of supported browsers for Windows and Mac. From the chart above and below, it is clearly a fast browser. You  can try it from http://www.google.com/chrome. To learn about some issues and quirks in using QuickBooks Online on Chrome, check out this community post.

Original post:

Recently, we launched a new feature called Customer Center that mostly received kudos except for one area – performance. After doing some investigation, we found that lots of our customers are using Internet Explorer.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is pretty slow in Javascript processing and Customer Center uses quite a bit of JavaScript to provide interactivity. The following graph shows benchmarks for JavaScript processing for different browsers.

You can see for yourself… Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is about 54% faster than Internet Explorer 7!  Wait it gets more shocking! IE8 is 600% slower compared to Firefox 3.5.

In order to determine performance impact of different browsers on QuickBooks Online (QBO), I performed different actions on the same machine using different browsers. I used the same company to ensure that amount of data doesn’t impact any numbers. Here’s what I found:

As can be seen from the graph, Customer Center is almost 60% faster on Firefox! I also found that Safari 4 on Windows and Chrome 3 are significantly faster than Firefox and we’re working on supporting these soon. Till then, my recommendation is to use Firefox 3.5 on Windows and Safari 4 on Mac.

Try it out and tell me how much faster your new browser is or which browser you like. Let me know if you have any questions.

You can get Firefox 3.5 from here

You can get Internet Explorer 8 here

–

About me: I’m a software engineer on Quickbooks Online team. I recently joined the team and excited to enhance QBO (we love acronyms) with new features. I’m thrilled to be working with customers and accountants to make QBO even more easier to use and add new features such as Inventory, Purchase Orders etc.

These wise words come courtesy of seasoned entrepreneur, author, and Inc. Magazine contributor Norm Brodsky, in his bestselling book on entrepreneurial success The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up.

While many of us cringe at the thought of crunching numbers, it’s not breaking news that they provide valuable insight into the health and sustainability of a growing business.

QuickBooks Online has a feature that can help you discover trends and patterns in your financial data that can predict profitable growth.  It’s called Company Snapshot, and it’s located under the Reports Tab.

This page allows you to:

• Check the pulse of your business with graphs and charts
• Summarize income, expenses, receivables, and debt
• Compare your income and expenses to previous periods
• Find patterns and discrepancies to investigate further

Getting your Sherlock Holmes hat on

Every business (even if they don’t know it!) has a key number . What’s a key number?

Let’s do an example. Your revenue spikes every May, but you always have trouble paying your bills the next month.  You investigate further.  Your expenses increase drastically every May due to a particularly needy client you serve each spring.  This shrinks your gross margin, making you less profitable.

You play around with the numbers and discover the key number you should track is labor expenses per client. Now you can predict profitability and focus on clients that provide the best gross margin possible.

But maybe you already have your key number.  Feel free to share it with us!   What metrics do you use to gauge how well your business is doing?

What else would you like the Company Snapshot feature to tell you?  We’re here to help you peer through the fog of your financials; sharing your most important metric(s) will increase our ability to do so!

Bryan

I was running a small computer tech service and repair company in Madison, Wisconsin called netNerds. I hired really smart computer ‘nerds’ to go help people with their computer problems. It started with 2 contractors and grew to 9. It started with flyers and chalk on the sidewalks and grew into contracts with big clients and a booked schedule. It started an excel sheet and my cell phone and grew into QuickBooks Online.

netNerds has since stopped running. I still have the LLC and a website up (neednetNerds.com) but that’s to satisfy my emotional attachment and not my bank account.

[Fast forward a few years.]  I am now one of the product managers for the QuickBooks Online team…mostly focusing on our pre-accounting solution called Billing Manager, the easiest invoicing software you have used! Yep, I’m totally not biased or anything.  

The mission this team is tasked with is to “Help small businesses succeed.” Plain and simple we’re out to improve the bottom line of our customers.  So that got me thinking.  What did I learn from netNerds…my small business experience? What would I do differently if I could do it again?

It comes down to two things:

1. Play around with the numbers.

We have to acknowledge that sometimes accounting just isn’t a crazy amount of fun. (I know, a shocker!!) This makes us procrastinate actually doing it. Who hasn’t put it off for a day or two at some point? And then, when we do get into the product, there is a tendency to do just enter our invoices, reconcile the bank account and call it a day.  

If this blog had sound effects and animation there would be red lights flashing “ERROR!”  What I realize now is that I should have taken more time to play around with my numbers and find those business insights.
How much more do I have to spend if we increase our customers by 20%?Was that large client really profitable? (turns out he wasn’t!).  What is my employee turnover and training costs?

QuickBooks Online has since made it so much easier to find those insights just from logging in. The new Company Snapshot is enlightening!  Yes, accounting may not be that much fun compared to other things, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ‘play’ around with your numbers.

2. Know when to change your business processes/systems.

At one point I was answering the phones, grassroots marketing, hiring employees, answering our support calls, signing deals, managing the website and trying to grow the business. Just thinking about that makes me want to take a nap…but it’s the same story for all small businesses in the beginning. You do it all…except sleep.

There comes a point though, when you have to make a change. For me it was choosing an online scheduling system that automated the manual work.  (a Setster type app).  For you it may be just as simple as calling QuickBooks support to find out how you can better use your current tool.  What is it for you that is going to help free up your time and your sanity level so you can focus on growing the business?

 So the journey continues – full circle.  I am now working for the product I used to use.  Pretty exciting! More exciting is that the QuickBooks online team has the awesome charter to help make life easier and business better for lots of people, whether you’re the bookkeeper or the business owner.  We’d love to hear from you…in the comments or with your feedback on the product!  What are your 2 things you have learned about running your business?

Kristen
Twitter: @Intuit_Invoice