Thanks for the emails!

I very much appreciate those of you who have sent me email about your interest in OE Companion. I try my best to respond to each email, so if you have not received anything back, please check your spam folder.

As a small company just starting out, it is always very encouraging to hear from people that are interested in our product. We take all your feedback to heart, and we hope you will continue to help us build a great add-on for QuickBooks Online.

So thanks again, and keep those emails coming!

Creating a local copy of your QBOE data

Did you know that you can create a copy of your QBOE for download on your own computer? Go to the Company menu and choose Export Your Data. Then click the link that says "Local Copy Interview." Proceed through the interview, and you can download a copy of your data for local storage after it is prepared. Unfortunately you can't really do anything with this local copy, so it is more for peace of mind than anything else. For more information, search the QuickBooks Online help for "local copy."

Adding custom fields to invoices in QuickBooks Online

Did you know that you can include custom fields on invoices in QBOE? Simply go to the Company meny and choose Preferences. Choose "Sales Form Entry" from the menu bar on the left of your screen. Then select the Custom Fields option if it is not already shown. You should see something that looks like the screenshot below.

If you want to add a field, simply click the checkbox and enter a name for your field. After you click Save, your new field will show up on all your invoices as a place for you to enter custom data. QuickBooks Online still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of invoicing functionality, but this certainly helps!

Automated Alerts for QuickBooks Online

Today I am announcing the first major module for OE Companion - automated alerts. For example, you can ask OE Companion to alert you automatically via email or text message if:

• The balance in any account drops below (or exceeds) an amount you set
• A bill is past due (or coming due)
• A customer is late with payment
• A customer is due for a service call

And that is just a partial list! If you are like most small business owners, you don't sit around in QuickBooks all day double-checking to make sure everything is neat and tidy. I know I don't. For my service business, I am pretty much an absentee owner. Our general manager runs everything, and she does a great job. However, I still pay certain bills and manage a few other tasks in QuickBooks Online. Unfortunately I tend to get busy on other things and I forget about those tasks. That is one reason that the alert feature is particularly important to me.

I will post more detailed information including screenshots soon. For now, if you are interested in helping us test this feature before we release it to the public, sign up for our beta trial. I would also greatly appreciate any feedback that you have, including any suggestions for alerts that you would like to see added.

Need a logo or other graphic design work?

A little off topic today, but I wanted to mention something that might be useful to all of you business owners out there. I recently used 99Designs for some graphic design work that we needed. It was a great experience, and I would highly recommend it. Here is how it works.

Once you create your account to get started, you create a "contest" by describing what you need. Then you specify how much you are willing to award as prize money to the winner of the contest. Designers will enter your contest and submit one or more designs. Give them feedback early, and you will end up with a very customized design.

I have used other freelance sites before, and I found this experience to be far better. I got a good design at a very low cost. More importantly, I had lots of options in choosing the one I wanted. As I said before, I would definitely use 99Designs again.

How do applications connect to QuickBooks?

Somebody asked me a question over the weekend that I haven't really thought about in a while. I was discussing OE Companion with the owner of one of the companies that is helping in our alpha tests. He asked how applications are able to exchange data with QuickBooks and/or QuickBooks Online. Here is my answer.

QuickBooks provides a software development kit (SDK) that is free and open to anyone who is interested. This QuickBooks SDK provides all the information that is needed to exchange data with QuickBooks. It is basically a series of requests and responses in a specific format. If an application needs a list of all customers in QuickBooks, the app has to make that request in a format understood by QuickBoooks. Then the response will be sent in a specific format as well. Here is a specific example. Let's say that I include the following tag in a request to QBOE:

<CompanyQueryRq />

The response will come back with information about the QuickBooks Online company - address, phone number, etc. That's it. You have exchanged information with QuickBooks. There is obviously a lot more going on behind the scenes in any data exchange. But at the core, that is it. Please leave comments if you have any questions. Have a great week!

Do you have your 1099 and W-2 kits?

If you handle your own payroll, don't forget to order your 1099 kits and W-2 kits in plenty of time for them to arrive. You have to send out all those forms by January 31. Also, be sure to get the kind that are made to work with QuickBooks Online.

Using Shortcuts in QuickBooks Online

Have you ever wondered what that little blue arrow is for, just to the right of the Reports menu in QBOE? That is the Shortcuts menu. If you don't use it, you should.

It takes forever to get to some of my favorite screens in QuickBooks Online. Let's say I want to check my Accounts Receivable. I have to do the following:

1. Go to Customers
2. Click Customer Overview
3. Click A/R Aging Summary

Only three steps. Not so bad, you say. Well the problem is that the Customer Overview page can take forever to load. Also it sometimes loads rather clumsily, meaning that a click that is slightly off target can take you to the wrong page. Then it has really taken a long time.

So how do you avoid it? On one of your favorite screens, simply go to that Shortcuts menu (the blue arrow just to the right of the reports menu). Then click "Add Shortcut." Click OK or choose a different name. Now refresh the page and check out the Shortcuts menu again. Presto! You now have one-click access to your favorite pages in QuickBooks Online.

Scheduled Report Emails from QuickBooks Online

Here is one tip that I just discovered recently.

1. Go to your favorite report in QBOE
2. Choose "Memorize." You can find the memorize button in the top left corner of the report screen.
3. In the window that pops up, choose "Add this report to a group"
4. Click Add New and enter "Test" or whatever name you want.
5. Choose OK.
6. On the Reports menu, go to Memorized Reports.
7. Select the name of your report and choose "Edit"
8. Click the box that says "Set the email schedule for this group"
9. Fill out that form and set the schedule as you wish.

Congratulations! You have set up a report that will be automatically be generated and emailed to the people you choose on the schedule you choose. Very cool!

FAQ for QuickBooks Online Edition

I have started work on a list of frequently asked questions for QuickBooks Online. Drop me a note if there is one that you would like for me to answer. I will continue to update it regularly.

Why so few add ons for QuickBooks Online?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use QuickBooks Online to manage a service business that I own. Really I am more of just an investor, as the onsite general manager takes care of day-to-day operational tasks. However, I do take care of payroll and other accounting tasks. I certainly feel the pain of many of the limitations of QBOE. No inventory tracking, no purchase orders, no IIF import, no PayPal integration, and many other missing features make my life hard. So I went looking for 3rd party solutions.

I have used QuickBooks Pro since the late 1990s. There is a huge base of add-ons. When we needed extra functionality for QuickBooks Online, I naively assumed there would be a similar set of products. What I found was just the opposite. There are only a handful of add-ons even listed for QBOE, and most of those don't seem very full-featured. The ecosystem is nothing like the QuickBooks Pro ecosystem. At a basic level I understand. There simply are not as many users of QuickBooks Online as for the desktop versions. So most developers focus their efforts on the desktop. That's fine I guess, but it doesn't solve my problems. So I ended up developing my own solution. That is what OE Companion is all about.

QuickBooks Online faster since update yesterday?

Sometime very early in the morning yesterday, QBOE was down for a while, presumably for an update. To the naked eye at least, it seems much faster since that was completed. I hope this is a sign of good things to come once they finally become fully browser-independent.

Why the name OE Companion?

Why did I choose the name OE Companion for our software product? Pretty simple actually - when you are part of Intuit's Developer Network, they place restrictions on what you can name your product. You can't have QB, QuickBooks, Books, Intuit, etc. in the name. It is smart on their part of course. They are trying to protect their brand.

So when it came time to name OE Companion, I wanted something simple that described the product. I don't think they would accept QuickBooks Online Edition Companion, so I had to scale back. In any case, now you know.

Save a click when logging in

A quick tip for today: Instead of going to http://www.qboe.com or http://oe.quickbooks.com for logging in, try https://accounting.quickbooks.com.

If you do that, you can skip a step and go directly to the login page.

QuickBooks Online coming to FireFox and Safari

Yes, Mac users, you finally got your wish. QuickBooks Online Edition will be available for FireFox and Safari in the near future. You can read the semi-official announcement on the Intuit forums. The ActiveX control appears to be a thing of the past, which is a good thing.

Welcome!

I'll be honest. I really like QuickBooks Online Edition. I just do. I know it has its share of issues just like any other product, but I wouldn't think of using anything else. The convenience of online accounting and the reliability of Intuit far outweigh the drawbacks of using QBOE (which I will certainly discuss often on this blog).

With that said, if you use QuickBooks Online or have considered it, you know that it doesn't have all the features of the desktop versions of QuickBooks. That is by design. Intuit didn't really intend it to be a replacement for QuickBooks Pro (more on this in future posts). A more substantial problem in my opinion is that QBOE does not take advantage of many of the real benefits of a web-based accounting system.

In addition to my side-businesses that I manage with QuickBooks Online, I am a software developer. That is my "real" job. So I designed my own add-ins to do what I needed. Now I am developing those for release to the public. I will post much more information in the coming weeks. For now, if you are interested, go to the OE Companion homepage and sign up to be a beta tester.