QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments / Intuit Is Now Testing Bitcoin

QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments is a bitcoin service that enables small businesses to take bitcoin payments without ever having a bitcoin wallet or ever seeing any bitcoins.

 BEHIND THE INNOVATION

Small businesses just want to get paid. Cash is troublesome to keep track of, checks have lots of friction (writing, mailing, depositing) and card transactions have high fees.
Our team is constantly looking for ways to improve the lives of our customers. During incubation week, we experimented with bitcoin to solve the aforementioned pains associated with getting paid.

We came up with an innovative way to enable small businesses to accept bitcoin payments without any risk or a bitcoin wallet. We're still testing our bitcoin service. Stay tuned for more details! Sign up for the beta waiting list here.

Intuit Is Now Testing Bitcoin

 

There are two major barriers that prevent typical small businesses from taking bitcoin payments: 
1) They need a bitcoin wallet. With recent news about Mt. Gox in the media, trusting a third party bitcoin wallet provider can be scary.
2) They don’t want to deal with price volatility. When it comes to their revenue, small businesses just want to deal with dollars.
Enter QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments, a bitcoin service that enables small businesses to take bitcoin payments without ever having a bitcoin wallet or ever seeing any bitcoins.
With QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments, you:
* Only see dollars when you accept bitcoin payments.
* Pay less on all bitcoin transactions. Compare that to 1.75% to 2.75% + fees on card transactions.
* Never worry about chargebacks from fraudulent buyers. Chargebacks don’t exist in bitcoin.

 Intuit Reveals QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments Beta

Caleb Chen for cryptocoinsnews.com  writes: For years, Intuit has spent a large portion of its energy towards innovation.  Intuit Labs, understandably, runs “Lab Experiments” to test and implement the newest innovations and technologies, package them into user-friendly software, and deploy them to small businesses around the world.  Intuit Lab’s current “experiments” include  a mobile POS solution called ShopOwner, a mobile application to ease waiting called Buzzer, and much much more.  The newest of these projects, just announced today, is QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments.
 The Innovative team bringing QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments to life identified key problems and solutions:

There are two major barriers that prevent typical small businesses from taking bitcoin payments:

1) They need a bitcoin wallet. With recent news about Mt. Gox in the media, trusting a third party bitcoin wallet provider can be scary.

2) They don’t want to deal with price volatility. When it comes to their revenue, small businesses just want to deal with dollars.

Enter QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments, a bitcoin service that enables small businesses to take bitcoin payments without ever having a bitcoin wallet or ever seeing any bitcoins.

With QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments, you:

* Only see dollars when you accept bitcoin payments. * Pay less on all bitcoin transactions. Compare that to 1.75% to 2.75% + fees on card transactions. * Never worry about chargebacks from fraudulent buyers. Chargebacks don’t exist in bitcoin.

The innovators in this project are led by Charles Taira, who has worked at Intuit on mobile payments and payment platforms for the last year.   His team is pictured below, and the Bitcoin community is eager to see this experiment play out.

As of 2009, QuickBooks holds approximately 89% of the small business accounting software market.  In that same year, Intuit itself had $3.18 billion USD in revenue.  TurboTax, another one of Intuit’s software successes, owns 39% of the retail tax preparation software market.  Intuit also receives a large portion of its revenue from Quicken, which is a personal finance tool.  TurboTax’s blog released a post to help users account for Bitcoin in their tax returns.  This blog post was made on 3/26/14 and helped many people decide how to (or not to) report their taxes on Bitcoin.

Intuit Continues Making Big Moves

Intuit most recently made headlines with the 17th large acquisition of their corporate career.  As reported by TechCrunch two weeks ago, Intuit bought Lettuce, a platform that allowed companies to manage both the inventory and ordering aspects of their businesses online.  Intuit’s takeover of Lettuce, which cost Intuit a reported $30 million USD, represents a giant step towards ultimate consolidation of the business software industry.  Small businesses around the world need to balance their tight time schedules between regulatory compliance and actual business matters.  The former costs small businesses an arm and a leg while the latter is the only thing that brings in revenue.

With the announcement of QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments Beta for small businesses, Intuit is ensuring its continued success at the intersection of financial technological innovations and onerous regulatory compliance.  If you are interested in joining QuickBooks Bitcoin Payments’ Beta Waiting List, click here.

Learn about Epicom’s Quickbooks Integration for Sugar 7 – Available on Intuit App Center

Learn about Epicom’s Quickbooks Integration for Sugar 7 – Available on Intuit App Center

When: June 17th @ 11 AM (CST)

In this DEMO you will see the integration push and sync your QuickBooks Balance, Days Aging, Payment Terms, and Overdue payments with your SugarCRM system. We will also reveal the latest updates including compatibility with Sugar 7!

Click Here to Register Now!

Agenda:

• Review existing features for Basic and Premium Editions
• Discuss recent updates made
• Demo the QuickBooks plugin on Sugar 7
• Upgrade requirements for companies moving from Sugar version 6 to version 7

To learn more about the integration, email info@epicom.com. Or download the plugin from Intuit’s App Center, here.

Orion Client Portal Goes Open Source / Redesign Focuses on Visualization and Simplification of Data to Give Financial Advisors a Complete Picture of Their Clients' Wealth

Orion Advisor Services, LLC ("Orion"), the premier portfolio accounting service bureau, announces a complete redesign of the functionality and features of the client portal for its financial advisor clients. With this redesign, advisors have new capabilities to communicate more effectively with their clients, and give clients a complete snapshot of all their assets, whether managed by the advisor or not.

"We re-engineered the client portal from the ground up in order to present a more distinctive and appealing look," said Eric Clarke, President and Founder of Orion. "The new portal strips away unnecessary clutter and emphasizes the information that matters most to clients. We are confident the new portal will serve as a springboard for advisors looking to initiate more meaningful conversations with their clients."

The most significant new feature is the ability for advisors, and their clients, to interact with pertinent data right on the screen, rather than first running a report. Working hand-in-hand with this feature is a new integration that leverages Intuit's aggregation capabilities. For the first time, clients have the ability to add data on accounts not managed by their advisors into the client portal, giving advisors a deeper view of a client's total wealth picture and putting them in a better position to service all of their clients' financial needs.

"Embedding the Intuit account aggregation feature directly into the client portal for the investment client is truly a game-changer," said Mr. Clarke. "Giving clients the capability to add their own accounts and use the portal as a true, singular location to measure their entire net worth adds a level of value we don't see being offered elsewhere."

Orion's redesigned web portal will foster more efficient communication between clients and their advisors by permitting live video discussions of important issues that can't wait for a quarterly in-person meeting. Clients also have the option of sending task requests to their advisors through the Orion system, which can be immediately addressed or assigned to another team member at the advisory firm to complete as appropriate. A newly integrated RSS feed allows advisors to keep communication consistent by creating a blog or feeding important updates to their clients from within the client portal.

The redesigned portal also allows for locally stored files to be uploaded, and incorporates cloud storage integrations with Box and Dropbox for quick and simple file sharing. Advisors and integration partners can now also add their own web pages after accessing the Orion Portal Code published at GitHub, the web-based hosting service for open-source software development projects.

"This upgraded client portal is the latest example of Orion's ongoing commitment to fueling innovation for its customers," saidAaron Klein, Chief Executive Officer of Riskalyze, an Orion integration partner. "The Orion Portal Code published at GitHub is especially compelling because it demonstrates how Orion empowers integration partners like us to think outside of the box and further customize Orion's tools to grow our practices."

Those who wish to learn more about Orion's new client portal can attend a webinar hosted by the firm on May 1, 2014 at 1 P.M. CST by signing up at orionadvisor.com/events, or visit www.orionadvisor.com.