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Happy Holidays from OE Companion

This has been a wonderful year for OE Companion. This time last year, we were still writing code needed to create a marketable product. Now we have not only a solid product but also a rapidly growing user base.

We are working on a major overhaul of OE Companion. Over the first half of next year, we will release many of our most-requested features. We're also redesigning the user interface to make it much more user-friendly. Whereas 2009 was simply about getting a product into the market, 2010 is about making an amazing product.

Thanks to everyone for making this a great year, and happy holidays to you and your family!

QuickBooks Online adds Inventory Tracking!

As I predicted, QuickBooks Online has added basic inventory capabilities. To try it out, go to the "Preferences" menu and choose "Products and Services." There you can turn on the "Quantity on Hand" option. The functionality is a bit limited, but I'm sure that more robust capabilities are not far behind. According to their product page, you can create purchase orders too, although I have not seen that in the product yet.

What does that mean for OE Companion? Nothing really ... maybe a few less sales in the short-term. It definitely doesn't change our focus. As I mentioned in that prediction post, OE Companion was developed with the assumption that QuickBooks Online would add inventory capabilities in the not-too-distant future. In that regard, things are going exactly as planned.

We are committed to being the best add-on for QuickBooks Online, and we continue working toward that goal. We've got some exciting things planned for the next few months. As always, please email me at neal@oecompanion.com if you have any questions.

Stacy Kildal webinar on inventory in QuickBooks Online

Stacy Kildal is presenting a webinar Tuesday, October 13 about how to manage inventory using QuickBooks Online with OE Companion.

Stacy is an Advanced Certified ProAdvisor and also an Intuit Community All-Star. Her company specializes in the online version of QuickBooks. She has presented an Intuit Community Town Hall on QuickBooks Online Edition, and this week she is hosting Intuit's Ask the Expert forum about QuickBooks Online. Fortunately for us, she is also a big fan of OE Companion.

If you are interested in learning more about QuickBooks Online and OE Companion, you should consider attending this session. Stacy is always well-prepared, and I'm sure you will learn a lot.

Introducing Easy Edit for QuickBooks Online

Today we released a beta version of our new “Easy Edit” feature. You can find it under the Data menu in OE Companion. I’m really excited about this feature, because it eliminates a major pain point of using both QuickBooks Online and OE Companion. If you’re wondering what the heck it does, read on…

Have you ever tried to add or edit a large volume of data in QuickBooks Online? Takes a while, doesn’t it? Actually it takes a while in the desktop version too. I’m certainly not faulting QuickBooks. They have made it about as easy as possible. There just aren’t a lot of good design options for data entry on thousands of customer records that have 50-100 fields each. Similarly, in OE Companion trying to update inventory counts for hundreds or thousands of items individually is quite cumbersome. What you really need is to use software that was built for editing large amounts of data.

So we set out to solve that problem, and we did! Easy Edit is the result. It is a 3-step process:

1. Download your data to Excel (or another program).
2. Make your adds/edits in Excel (or another program).
3. Upload your data back to OE Companion, which then sends it to QuickBooks Online.

It sounds ridiculously simple, and it is. That’s the point. It’s very simple and it’s very fast. This will save you a TON of time if you do lots of data entry with QuickBooks Online. If you are paying someone to do data entry (and I know many of you are!), this feature will save you money. There is no doubt about that.

Right now you can only use Easy Edit for items (products/services), but we’ll have support for other things shortly after we gather some feedback from our users about the way Easy Edit works. Please email me (neal@oecompanion.com) if you have any questions, and be sure to let us know what you think about Easy Edit.

Recent Improvements to OE Companion

Those of you who regularly send us feedback know that we are extremely responsive to customer issues. We certainly don’t implement every suggestion that comes our way, but we do our best to incorporate your comments into the product. Here are a few nuggets we’ve added to OE Companion in recent weeks based on your feedback. Thanks again for sending it, and keep it coming.

• Added a discussion group (accessible via help menu)


• Improved display of sub-items and sub-customers


• Added estimated ship date to purchase orders


• Added ability to display purchase order numbers on packing slips


• Enabled an approval process for purchase orders


• Added ability to customize email messages sent with POs, sales orders, and packing slips


• Modified list screens so that they remember sort order


• Improved structure of help menus


• Modified purchase orders to include separate column for vendor part number


• Added setting to automatically CC all purchase orders to a specified address


• Added ability to specify that certain items should not synchronize with QuickBooks Online

PayPal Integration for QuickBooks Online

We just released a beta version of a really cool new feature. We’ve integrated PayPal with QuickBooks Online in what we call our “PayPal Automation” feature. Here’s how it works.

OE Companion now has the ability to receive PayPal Instant Payment Notifications (IPNs) on your behalf and process them according to your instructions. You simply enable the IPN feature in your PayPal account and instruct them to send the notifications to us. Then fill out a quick form in OE Companion to tell us how to process them.

That’s it! Your PayPal account is now linked with your QuickBooks Online account. For example, now when you receive a PayPal payment, OE Companion can automatically generate a sales receipt and post it to QuickBooks Online. Even better, if you track inventory in OE Companion, the software can automatically update your inventory counts as PayPal payments come through. Think about that. No more manual data entry or manually importing transactions. Set it up and forget it!

As with all our new features, we’ve introduced PayPal automation in a “beta” phase, which means we need you to try it and give us lots of feedback on how it works. We’ve tested it internally, and we know it works pretty well. Now we need your help to polish it and take it from good to great.

If you’d like to try out our PayPal integration with QuickBooks Online, go to the “Admin” menu in your account and enable it. Or if you don’t have an account, sign up for a free trial today.