Have a website? Improve your website conversion rates

Posted January 11, 2010 by Bermster
Categories: tips

We know from our customer research that a lot of you have websites to promote your business. And…a good bunch of you are actually web designers using QuickBooks Online to manage your business.

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.

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

If you find your website is in need of some assistance, check out Intuit Websites.

What other tools do you use (or need)?  Please share!

Comments: Be the first to comment

Customer Center: The New Hub for Managing and Tracking Your Customers

Posted January 7, 2010 by May Cheng
Categories: features

We recently added Customer Center to QuickBooks Online.  It takes relevant customer data that used to be scattered in multiple places in the product, and displays it all in one easy-to-use page.

In the Customer Center, you can:

  • View your full customer list along with their balances
  • Find a customer simply by typing in a search box
  • At a glance see your customer information and enter notes directly in its place
  • Quickly see all the recent transactions for a customer with their status clearly visible
  • Create new transaction for a given customer on the fly

With all the important customer data now in one central place, making informed business decisions just gets easier.  So, if you haven’t already, please check out the Customer Center and see how it can work for you. 

Don’t forget to send us your feedback! We’re hungry to hear how you’ve been using it and how it can improve.

May Cheng
(QuickBooks Online interaction designer…making the world a better place, one pixel at a time.)

Comments: 10 Comments

Thank You for a great year! We’re looking forward to the next.

Posted December 27, 2009 by Bermster
Categories: features, feedback

As we reflect back on the year, we are thankful for your continued feedback and excited about the progress we’ve made towards it.  With your help, this past year we introduced many big product features, including:

  1. Customer Center: Your relevant customer data is now displayed on one, easy-to use page.
  2. Company Snapshot: Now get a quick overview of your businesses finances to help you save time and make better business decisions. * Plus feature!
  3. Inventory Tracking Quantities: In QuickBooks, you can now answer the question, “Do I have enough inventory to fulfill the order?” * Plus Feature!

We hope you noticed other changes as well:  our design refresh, browser compatibility…this new blog!

We’re excited about the New Year and what’s coming. There’s a lot to look forward to!

Thanks for your loyalty and consistent feedback.   Please continue to tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you want.

- Happy New Year from the QuickBooks Online team!

Comments: 62 Comments

We’re sharing ours…what’s your resolution?

Posted December 27, 2009 by Bermster
Categories: feedback, tips

It’s that time of year.  It comes around just after you’ve eaten all the holiday food and spent some serious holiday dough.  It’s the universal time to make resolutions about the upcoming year.

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!

Comments: 4 Comments

Using Internet Explorer? Time to switch to FireFox or upgrade to IE8

Posted December 17, 2009 by dgoel
Categories: tips

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.

Betanews Windows Browser Performance Index
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:

Performance in seconds for Customer Center

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 hereGet Firefox

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.

Comments: 29 Comments

Love a Local Business challenge (5,000 grant up for grabs)

Posted December 11, 2009 by Bermster
Categories: news

Hey QuickBooks Online users!

We want to let you know about a great contest Intuit is sponsoring…and encourage you to take part. It’s all about promoting GREAT local small businesses. And since your business most likely falls into the GREAT category, we are pretty sure there’s an opportunity here for you.

A little background:

In November, Intuit put out a Thanksgiving Challenge to fans who nominated businesses for a $5,000 small business grant on LoveALocalBusiness.com.  For December, the Holiday Challenge offers loyal customers a chance to send a gift that really matters to you.

Get someone to nominate you:

  1. Direct your customers to LoveALocalBusiness.com
  2. After they have nominated your business on LoveALocalBusiness.com, have them send you an email with the subject line “I Love Your Business.”
  3. When they do this (and cc: LoveALocalBusiness@Intuit.com) they will be in the running for a $250 drawing.
  4. This is cool for you because it gives your customers an incentive to nominate you.   Everyone wins.
  5. Oh and the deadline for participation is 11:59 pm PT on December 31, 2009

It would be awesome if a QuickBooks Online business took home the 5,000 grant. First step…go get yourself nominated.

Happy Holidays from Intuit!

Comments: 2 Comments

We are getting a new URL!

Posted December 1, 2009 by kpaulsenintuit
Categories: features, support

Want to look behind the curtain?

Here is a sneak peek at the new page!   We understand that change can be disruptive, but we’ve worked hard to make sure this one is an improvement.  These changes will allow us to make the service faster, more secure, and provide more features in the future.



So, how does this affect me?

1. Your login page will have a new address along with the fresh new look. Please bookmark it so you can get back to it easily.

2. By the way, you are going to have to allow for pop-ups for our site again. This should be easy and the Help will walk you through it.

What if I need help?

We’re committed to making this change as easy as possible for you and anticipate that you will be able to go through this process seamlessly. Nonetheless, if for some reason you have a question, we are only a click away!  You can access support directly from the login page or from our Support site at www.quickbooksonline.com.

Look for the unveiling of the new login page soon!

About me:  I’m Kathy from QBO Support, and when I’m not helping our customers I just might be driving that Mustang that passed you this morning.

Comments: 51 Comments

Your Guy on the Inside

Posted November 30, 2009 by groovemarshal
Categories: feedback, product management

As a new product manager for QuickBooks Online, I have spent the past few weeks devouring as much information as I can to get up to speed on literally every aspect of the application.  I’ll be perfectly honest—my knowledge at this point, although expanding at a healthy clip, is about as deep as a hummingbird feeder.  But I am not yet panicked, for I have discovered a secret weapon to aid me in my insatiable quest for product understanding—you, our customers.

For someone faced with a seemingly endless array of options for enhancing QuickBooks Online (cue “The Candy Man” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to get a sense of how amazing this is from a product management perspective), your feedback and comments are my CliffsNotes—they cut to the chase to provide me with invaluable, real-world insights that could conceivably remain undiscovered by yours truly for a very long time.  As much as I wish I could research and test every conceivable addition or modification to the product that comes to mind, the reality is that your collective wisdom is far more accurate and profound than a lifetime of educated conjecturing on my part.  For this I am truly grateful.

I have worked for quite a few companies, both large and small, over the course of my product career, but I have never encountered an environment as attuned and responsive to customer needs as Intuit.  To a person, everyone I have met during my time here is deeply committed to creating the best possible product to satisfy your needs—and with any luck, occasionally put a smile on your face in recognition of great design, seamless functionality, or something just plain cool.  When you tell us what you think about the product, we really listen.

As for my role on the team, please consider me the Lorax of QuickBooks Online.  Only instead of the trees, I speak for you.

Lance

Comments: 13 Comments

I Lost My Number…Can I have Yours?

Posted November 30, 2009 by btubbs22
Categories: features, tips

“To be successful in any business, you need to develop a feel for the numbers.  You need to get a sense of the relationships between them, see the connections, figure out which ones are especially critical and have to be monitored accordingly.  Numbers run businesses.” - Norm Brodsky, The Knack

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

Comments: 4 Comments

New Feature! Inventory Quantity Tracking

Posted November 19, 2009 by ghosh99
Categories: features

Consider this scenario: Your customer has placed a big order for those excellent “gadgets” you sell. You are excited but wondering “Do I  have enough of those “gadgets” in stock to fulfill the order?”

Wouldn’t it be nice if Quickbooks Online can answer that important question for you anywhere, anytime? Well it does now.  In two simple steps.

1. Enable the preference called “Quantity on Hand”.

  1. Company Menu –> Preferences –> Product and Services.
  2. Check “Quantity on Hand” preference and Save.

This will enable this feature in your company for all users.

2. Enter Sales and Purchase information and Initial Quantity on Hand

Follow the steps below:

  1. Customers Menu –> Products/Services list –> Select “gadget” and Edit
  2. Now you can add Purchase information for “gadget” ! It’s one of the many new features  we added to enable quantity tracking
  3. Check the “I track Quantity On Hand” and
  4. Enter How many “gadgets” you have in stock
  5. Enter the “Date” you think that count was done

(e.g I found that I have 125.00 ‘gadgets’ on the shelf behind me today which is 11/15/2009).

That is it! Next time, you can turn on Quantity Tracking in less than a minute.

To track Quantity, remember 2 golden rules

  1. Every time you buy ‘gadget’ from your vendors, select “gadget” in the new  “Itemize by Product/Service” table of Bills, Checks, Cash, Credit Card and Vendor Credit transactions.

  2. Every time you sell this “gadget”‘ to your customers,  select “gadget” in the Product/Service column when creating Invoice,  Sales receipt,  Charge and Refund/Credit transactions.

How can I see how many “Gadgets” I have in stock at any given time?

  1. The current QOH is displayed in the Product/Service List page
    1. Customers Menu –> Product & Services List and look for “gadget”.
    2. Notice now we have a new “Quantity On Hand” column which will tell you exactly that!

2.  The current QOH is also displayed when you click Edit on the “gadget” from the list

QOH displayed on Product/Service edit page

There are some detailed questions you may have that we won’t go into now.

  1. What happens when I try to sell more “gadgets” than I have in stock ?
  2. What if I want to update the QOH at any point in time ?
  3. What if I want to change the Purchase Account to a COGS account and make that change be retroactive ?
  4. What if i want my Initial QOH to be backdated and QBO can calculate and tell me what the current QOH is ?

Great questions!  If you need/want additional info  check out QuickBooks support. But we won’t go into those details now.  Please leave feedback on the feature or this overview in the comments. Would love to hear from you!

—–

About me : I am a software engineer in QuickBooks Online working on enabling the Inventory workflow.  I love to solve our customer pains and delight them.  When not coding you will find me racing on the foothills of San Jose near my home !

Comments: 47 Comments

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