In The Beginning
In their infancy, credit cards relied solely on manual imprint machines and the manual labor of a sales staff. A sales clerk placed the credit card on the machine's platform with a sales receipt placed on top that contained a carbon paper insert. Manually sliding the roller over the surface imprinted the card's vitals onto the receipt. This receipt would then be manually processed and the funds transferred between accounts. how could we have imagined where credit card processing technologies would be today and the way people would complete transactions.
How far We've Come
Today credit card merchants provide several means of completing all transactions. in order to accommodate transactions taken in person, they can supply a point of sale machine. They can offer online solutions for authorizing transactions. The one constant is that each and every one of those options requires some amount of manual labor at the end of the day.
In today's fast past, high competition markets, being able to work more efficiently and at a faster pace is always needed. unfortunately, most companies still have an immense amount of manual book-keeping and hands on tasks that must be completed to record the transaction. I truly feel that businesses who transact dozens of credit card transactions a day have already started moving to some assortment of automated bill acceptance. however, for smaller businesses the price of automation is too excessive.
New technologies are emerging that help companies trim the time and the amount of labor needed to complete everyday credit card transactions, without breaking the bank. Designed with a multitude of applications in mind, these new technologies run seamlessly with the most common accounting software packages on the market. The most obvious choice to focus on initially was QuickBooks.
A report a couple of years ago stated that QuickBooks commanded over 90% of the small business accounting software sales. (Ref: Wikipedia.org)
With such staggering market absorption, it is understandable why so much focus is given to QuickBooks. Intuit has created a software package that is extremely powerful, yet easy enough to use and understand by everyday people. From the start, QuickBooks never had the ability to be a company's seamless storefront due to its lack of a point of sale feature allowing vendors to accept credit cards. while Intuit has made significant strides in improving this functionality, they are still missing a main component.
Today
Technologies have advanced and are rewriting how small businesses accept and record credit card transactions. First, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) phone software allowed for a high level of automation for redundant tasks performed by customer service agents over the phone. IVR technologies, though overused at times, have proven extremely versatile. Secondly, QuickBooks began to see the advantage of providing a platform to help business owners accept and account for credit cards. however, these technologies never made it together to automate the payment and book-keeping process.
Now, new technologies have coupled all the features together. Today, with one touch, companies can take all the transactions processed from both their IVR system and their internet processing accounts and seamlessly integrate them into their QuickBooks Company file. to guarantee success all data from open invoices in the QuickBooks company file populates the data fields on the credit card processing server, alleviating concern over human error when entering data. Businesses can utilize these new technologies to maximize the efforts of staff and trim the waste created by human error.
New Technologies Make Credit Card Billing and QuickBooks Integration Complete
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