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QuickBooks 2009 Service Discontinuation

January 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Intuit has a policy of supporting the current version and two prior versions of their desktop offerings. As such, effective May 31, 2012, live technical support and add-on business services such as payroll, credit card processing, QuickBooks Email, and online banking will be discontinued for the following Intuit products:

  • QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Simple Start 2009
  • QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 9
  • QuickBooks for Mac 2009
  • Point of Sale 8
  • Credit Card Processing Kit 2009
  • Invoice Manager 2009

If you use any of the above products with any of the following add-on services, you will need to upgrade prior to May 31st to avoid disruption of service.

  • QuickBooks Payroll
  • Intuit Credit Card Processing (Merchant Service)
  • Bill Pay
  • Billing Solutions (formerly QuickBooks Online Billing)
  • Online Banking
  • QuickBooks Email
  • Third-party products
  • Enterprise Solutions Full Service Plan
  • Online Backup
  • The following technical support options:
    - Support for installation, upgrades, error messages, and product defects.
    - Active QuickBooks Care Protection Plan with automatic renewal.
    - Live telephone support on a pay-per-use basis.

Upgrading is generally a straight-forward task, but if you would like assistance in upgrading, as a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor, I offer QuickBooks support services and can perform most services remotely.

 

Links in the above blog post are affiliate links. It does not cost you extra to purchase through my links, nor are you obligated to purchase QuickBooks items and services through these links. But if you appreciate the information here, purchasing through my links gives me a small affiliate commission as well as giving you up to 20% off the standard QuickBooks price and free shipping.

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Is E-Mail a Secret Weapon for Social Media?

May 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In my daily reading of some of my favorite social media related blogs, I ran across a post by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist, about email and social media. It’s not “full of information” but I found his thoughts on the relationship between email and social media success very interesting. I thought it might be an interesting read for you also. Here is an excerpt with a link to the full post on Fred’s blog below.

…I remember four or five years ago, people, myself included, were asking if social media was going to lead to the end of email as we know it. In an ironic twist of fate, it turns out that email is social media’s secret weapon. And more and more social applications are leveraging the power of email to drive repeat usage and retention…

Social Media’s Secret Weapon – Email – blog post by Fred Wilson.

What are your thoughts on the relationship between social media and email? Have you found email campaigns increase the quality of the social media presence for yourself or your clients?

Filed Under: Blog Posts, Social Media Tips Tagged With: , ,

QuickBooks 2011 Release 6

March 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

QuickBooks® 2011 Release 6 will be available for download Thursday, March 17 at 12 p.m. PST. This major update introduces some significant improvements for many product versions.

For a complete list of enhancements and release notes or to download and install the manual update, click here, then select the appropriate product.

The automatic update in-product will be available on Tuesday, March 22, 2011. You are encouraged to allow this automatic update and to accept the patch.

RELEASE 6 DETAILS

Below is a chart that outlines what’s available with R6 for each product version.

Below are just a few of the enhancements highlighted in this Alert:

  1. Transactions in History Pane
  2. Improved Memorized Transactions
  3. Batch Invoice for Time and Expenses

 

TRANSACTIONS IN HISTORY PANE

Save valuable time when accessing important information related to transactions.

What Intuit did: The new right pane tab on the history window shows transaction specific information like the items above. In addition, you have the ability to create notes on supported transactions, saving you time when accessing.

IMPROVED MEMORIZED TRANSACTIONS

With this improvement, you’ll save time when entering the same transaction multiple times!
What Intuit did:
A new window displays a list of the memorized transactions that are due to be entered:

They also improved the wording of the scheduling options to reduce confusion.

BATCH INVOICE FOR TIME AND EXPENSES

With this new feature, you will reduce the time needed to invoice multiple customers for billable time and expenses.

What Intuit did: The previous workflow only allowed a single invoice to be generated.

NOW, you can view billable transactions for multiple customers and view the billable amounts for time, expenses, mileage and purchased items.

You select the customers to be invoiced, generate invoices and select delivery options (email or print).

NOTES

1. If you cancel your ProAdvisor Program membership or do not renew your membership, access to the automatic updates that are part of QuickBooks Accountant Plus will terminate immediately. You will continue to be able to use the QuickBooks Accountant software but will lose the enhancements included in previous updates and you will not receive enhancement updates going forward.
2. LaunchPad functionality will be available for QuickBooks Pro/Premier+ and QuickBooks Accountant+ for ProAdvisors by mid-April.
3. The release affects Windows desktop versions of 2011.
4. Batch Invoice for Time and Expenses is only available in Premier versions of QuickBooks.
Filed Under: Blog Posts, QuickBooks Tagged With: ,

1ShoppingCart Hit by Dreaded DoS Attack

July 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Many of you may know that 1ShoppingCart (and it’s many “white label” versions) was down for most of yesterday afternoon. When I logged into a client’s 1ShoppingCart account today, the following message from 1ShoppingCart popped up.

(1ShoppingCart has many “white label” versions/”private resellers” such as KickstartCart, Cartville, 1AutomationWiz, PracticePaySolutions, and others – anything that starts with “https://www.mcssl.com/” in the URL when you log in.)

Yesterday, July 14th 2010, we encountered a service interruption from approximately 3:18PM EDT until 7:20PM EDT.

We apologize for yesterday’s service interruption. We understand that it is our responsibility to ensure best-in-class service availability. We take this responsibility very seriously and therefore want to share with you the facts. It is important to note that throughout this outage, your data remained entirely safe and secure.

Yesterday’s service interruption was caused by a denial of service attack, which was aimed towards our systems. A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all. As you may know, every major provider is attacked every single day, and on occasion perpetrators achieve some or all of their goals. Even some of the biggest websites on the Internet are not immune to these types of attacks.

Our monitoring systems alerted us of a potential issue at 3:18PM EDT and immediately our Engineering teams began work to defend against this attack. We are confident that this outage, while it may have seemed lengthy, was mitigated as quickly as possible. During the entire time, our Client Services team was posting constant updates to our Twitter account in an attempt to keep you informed on our progress. We appreciated your support and understanding while we worked to get you back online.

The nature of these attacks are constantly evolving and each attack is different. We will continue to invest in our systems and continue to work endlessly to regain your confidence in our system and make 1ShoppingCart the most reliable and stable shopping cart solution available. We commit to you, our customers, that there is nothing more important to us than ensuring 1ShoppingCart is there when you need it.

If you would like to discuss this in more detail, please call 1-888-792-1961.

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Podcast Marketing Success Strategies

March 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

While podcasting has been around for about seven years, there has been a stigma that podcasts are only viewed by Internet Marketers and technology people. Well, that might have been true initially, but times have changed! One of the greatest catalysts for the rapid growth of business podcasting in 2010 has been the iPhone. Waves of people have purchased new smartphones over the last 12 months and are readily downloading podcasts more than ever before! In fact, 70% of all podcast downloads comes from the iPhone, if you can believe that.

Podcasting is a highly portable and easy-to-implement communication tool for businesses to effectively build brand, connect with a target audience and increase their customer and client base.

Of course, business owners often lack the time and skills to effectively set up, produce and promote their podcasts. It is for this reason that VAClassroom has created this innovative and timely mini-course.

Registration is now officially open for the PODCAST MARKETING SUCCESS STRATEGIES Mini-Course.

The two-week mini-course officially gets underway on Monday, April 5, 2010, and is priced at a very reasonable rate ($147) for the first run of the program.

Please visit this direct link to the VAclassroom Podcast Marketing Success Strategies Mini-Course (click the name) to learn more about the course.

And, as always, if starting a podcast is something you’re interested in, but don’t want to mess with the “behind the scenes” part of podcasting, schedule a consultation with me so we can discuss how I can help take that off your plate!

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Reading Clients' Minds

March 12, 2010 By 1 Comment

Sometimes I might as well be having the following conversation with a client when it comes to their projects.

Client – I need you to find someone to build me a fence.


Me – Where?


Client – Out around my property.


Me – Do you have a lot layout/dimensions of where you want the fence?


Client – Um, I’m not sure exactly where I want it yet.


Me – OK, moving on…What’s the fence for?


Client – Why does it matter?


Me – Um, well, is it going to be a decorative one, a tall one to keep stuff out, for livestock, chickens, kids, etc.?


Client – Oh, I just want something around the perimeter to define my property.


Me – OK, so, chain link/hurricane fencing, barbed wire, chicken wire, picket, privacy, split rail, stone, brick…???

Yeah, that conversation could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Seriously, clients and potential clients, KNOW what you want when you ask your VA to do something for you – and SHARE that information with him/her. Don’t give just half the information. If you KNOW you’re going to want a 4″ natural stone fence, pass that information on. It’s very costly for YOU (and frustrating to us) when we have to drag it out of you and end up on a snipe hunt!

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Services for QuickBooks 2007 to be Discontinued

February 5, 2010 By 1 Comment

After May 31, 2010 many of the services for QuickBooks 2007 will be discontinued by Intuit. Affected services for QuickBooks 2007 will be: Assisted Payroll, Basic Payroll, Enhanced Payroll, Standard Payroll, Employee Organizer, Merchant Service, Billing Solution (formerly QuickBooks Online Billing), QuickBooks Email, Bill Pay, Online Banking, Credit Card Download, Technical Support Plans and Services. If you are using any of these services and want to continue, you will need to upgrade.

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HTML Editor on a Budget

February 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

If you do minor editing of your clients’ web pages, html ezines/newsletters or like to tweak the coding in wordpress blog posts & pages but are on a budget, you may only be able to drool over Dreamweaver. Many people don’t know there are options out there other than hand coding in Notepad. Have you seen any of the products from Coffee Cup? I’ve used some of their products and have found them to be easy to work in and far less complicated than Dreamweaver. And best of all, they have a load of free stuff! And, what you do buy from them is much less expensive than their “name brand” competitors! For instance, as of the writing of this post, their HTML editor software is $49. For those of you who don’t even want to mess with code, they have a Visual Site Designer for $49 also. Of course, this isn’t going to turn you into a stellar web designer, but it can certainly make things a little easier for those of us who are not web designers!

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Off-Site Backup Solution for QuickBooks

October 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I was researching something earlier and ran across an interesting idea for backing up your QuickBooks file.

Set your QuickBooks to automatically backup every time you close it (make sure you’re using the data verification!!) and set it to save in your DropBox folder!

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, as I use DropBox and LOVE it! The free version comes with 2 MB of storage space, but honestly, I’m not anywhere even close to that right now (only using about 6% of my space).

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Virtual Events Training

September 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

It is always exciting to uncover hot and profitable new niches to tap into for your Virtual Business. Well, Internet Marketing, Ecommerce Support and Social Media Marketing continue to be very in-demand” services niches and will continue to be for quite some time, I am particularly excited about this new niche emerging in the Virtual Event Industry.

I personally believe that the “Virtual Events” field is one of the hottest avenues to building your business right now, especially in this down economy. The statistics are clear: There is currently a significant increase in the number of participants attending virtual events such as webinars, tele-events, live podcasts and web TV shows. However, there is a corresponding decrease in those attending offline events and conferences partly due to the economy, but for a host of other reasons as wells. The reality is that Virtual Events are more cost-effective to deliver and attend, have the capacity to reach a larger audience and can be re-broadcast for continued exposure.

Businesses are keenly interested in running Virtual Events right now, but many lack the knowledge and time to effectively set-up and implement the Virtual Events successfully. As a result, this has presented a very timely and unque opportunity for Virtual Professionals to position themselves as a “Virtual Event Specialist”!

On September 16th, VAClassroom will be hosting a “must attend” event with Craig Cannings and Virtual Event Expert, Michelle Schoen titled,

“Building a Profitable Niche as a Virtual Event Specialist (Even in a Down Economy)!”

They will be exploring the crucial skills required to effectively deliver Virtual Event Set-up and Management services to your clients.

In addition, they will be sharing some exciting news on our upcoming training program: The Virtual Event Specialist Certification.

So, go ahead and click on the below link to watch a short 5 minute video and then sign-up to receive some special bonus information including more details on the upcoming event on September 16th!

Click Here: http://www.vaclassroom.com/virtual-event-specialist/

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