No More QuickBooks or WorldPay
Why a site about migrating away from QuickBooks and WorldPay?
After a few days of evaluating options and filling out merchant account application forms, I realised I would probably lose track of why I reached whatever decisions I reached. This site is about that decision process – I hope it proves useful to you, and serves as a reminder to me.
How did I get here?
A few years ago, my company needed to process recurring credit card payments (subscriptions). In 2005, pretty much the only option in the UK was WorldPay and, the accounting option touted as being integrated with WorldPay was QuickBooks.
Now, almost four years later, both parts of that solution are causing us problems
Main QuickBooks & WorldPay problems
- QuickBooks doesn’t integrate easily with any of our other back-office applications
- QuickBooks isn’t available when we’re not in the office
- QuickBooks is no longer supported (the version we have anyway)
- WorldPay presents a diabolical interface to our clients
- WorldPay hold onto our cleared funds for 6 weeks (#1 cause of small business failure – cash-flow problems)
- WorldPay charge terrible commission rates - currently 3.75%, almost double the industry average
In all honesty, it was just points 1 & 2 that caused me to go looking for alternatives to managing invoices, expenses and credit card processing. So much time had passed since implementing WorldPay and QuickBooks that I needed to remind myself of how the pieces of our puzzle fit together.
Sections
This site is arranged in sections – each dealing with one major component of the problem or solution:
- Payment gateways – Connecting our internal systems to a Merchant account
- Merchant accounts – The banking part which actually processes credit card information
- Online billing applications – Moving invoicing and book-keeping to an online application
- Open source billing applications – Hosting our own invoicing and book-keeping application
- Middleware – Existing applications which help to bolt all this stuff together
Getting started
I started by diving straight in to evaluating over 30 online billing applications which led me to investigate the various payment gateways associated with each one. This led me to rethink our merchant account and raised even more questions about continuous authority and taking credit card payments for subscriptions.
Getting confused
As I got to the end of evaluating the online billing applications, there was no clear winner and not a single one which would do all that we wanted it to do. This led us to consider using some kind of middleware to connect our own systems to a payment gateway and also interface to some kind of an open source billing application now that we were likely to adapt our own systems to generate invoices and probably move the book-keeping part to another application.
Next: What’s wrong with QuickBooks?
27. January 2009 at 3:16 pm :
We are having a heck of a time getting our Ruby app to talk SOAP to Kashflow. Did you have any issues and if so how did you resolve them?
Maybe releasing a Ruby Kashflow plugin would be nice?
Thanks!
27. January 2009 at 3:24 pm :
Hi Phil – we haven’t got that far yet ourselves – but releasing a plugin makes sense, I’ll add it to our project requirements. If you get there before us, please keep us updated
27. January 2009 at 3:36 pm :
Just added a screen grab of our trac wiki showing what we did to test the Kashflow API if that helps?
http://www.nmqb.co.uk/online-accounting-applications/kashflow-api/
30. January 2009 at 12:28 am :
Have you looked into Using QuickBooks Online? It is an online version of QuickBooks that you can access anywhere, and because it’s online I don’t think you would have to ever worry about your current version becoming obsolete.
16. February 2009 at 2:44 pm :
We were inspired by the NMQB website and our experience with Kashflow to start developing an integration tool that automatically imported sales from OSCommerce into Kashflow.
Would be interested to know what software you use for your online store, as we are on the lookout for new applications to integrate with and expert testers.
The next stage is integration with Worldpay (so you don’t need to integrate with a shopping cart software, you can just import orders directly from the Payment processor).
We plan to test at the end of February and we’re keeping a blog of development issues and functionality on the site:
http://www.carrytheone.co.uk
Would appreciate any feedback. There is an honorary mention (and link) to NMQB in our About Us page.
20. February 2009 at 11:19 am :
Hey Ed, thanks for the mention and hats off for putting something new out there
I can see carrytheone being really useful glue between the shopping cart / payment process/ accounting pieces.
Unfortunately for us, a cart doesn’t really fit with our subscription business model – but I’m sure people using OS Commerce will be glad of a bit of relief from carrytheone.
22. May 2009 at 6:38 am :
I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned Xero (http://www.xero.com/).
It’s an extremely popular solution that’s won heaps of major awards (2 Webby Awards – including People’s Voice, Top 10 Apps of 2008 – Nielsen Norman Group,…)
People are flocking to Xero from Quickbooks…
http://twitter.com/jeremyjarvis/statuses/1311272917
http://twitter.com/domsawyer/statuses/1432622197
http://twitter.com/alexmacaulay/statuses/1186107552
http://twitter.com/jennie/statuses/1071696520
Two case studies of people switching from Quickbooks are featured on this page http://xero.com/mac
It’s free to try, so well worth it – http://xero.com/tryfree
9. July 2009 at 12:36 pm :
Hiya,
Firstly, thanks a stack for this website. I’ve read it top to bottom as finding good solutions for these problems is a veritable nightmare.
I’m also interested to hear opinions on Xero. Don’t think it integrates with many payment providers though but otherwise seems to be a fantastic app.
We’re looking into Moneybookers too as they offer a great deal of 1.9% in partnership with cubecart http://www.moneybookers.com/partners/cubecart/
Anyway, thanks again for the info. Really useful stuff here.
Tim
31. August 2009 at 6:09 pm :
Moneybookers does look like a nice option, actually. Certainly their fees are competitive. Even though they can handle recurring billing (essential for us), it doesn’t look like they pass a credit card token back to the merchant.
Unfortunately, what this means is that we’d have to reply on Moneybookers to initiate the recurring transactions (as we currently do with WorldPay) rather than having our own systems in control of the recurring process.
So far the Protx (now SagePay) gateway is the only one we’ve found which will pass a token representing the credit card details to the merchant – although we’ve yet to try integrating that part.
6. October 2009 at 1:59 pm :
Just thought I’d write an update to my message above.
We now have integrations between cart software including osCommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen, Shopify & Magento and accounts software KashFlow & FreshBooks.
We are adding support for Xero shortly.
9. October 2009 at 2:15 am :
Great site. So good that you are sharing all the information you collect on your journey. Small businesses are time poor enough without helping each other so thanks!
You may or may not be aware, saasu.com is a pure (and easy!) online accounting software provider with thousands of users and works in about 50 countries. It has a big ecosystem of interoperable software and software as a service too. e.g. links to salesforce.com, magento, point of sale (touch cashier), integrated inventory and salary/payroll, multicurrency and add ons for business intelligence/reporting. Also has had a great API for years.
Saasu are worth checking out, they are not flashy but are big on features.
Cheers, Pete.
9. October 2009 at 3:43 pm :
Applause!!!
The SO! team here really liked what you are doing here.
In fact all of us should get together as a tribe and take Sage to task as well, especially as they are picking on the folks at Kashflow. This might cause a stir and could be fun.
As far as I know QB online isn’t available in the UK.
Our stuff at salesorder.com is a for a certain type of small business who have looked at NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics and decided they cannot afford it or in notsweets case put up with the attitude
.
We are more small business ERP as opposed to a pure accounting play. We have customers all over the planet and we just opened offices in the US, but everyone who stops by at salesorder.com will get a warm welcome.
Keep it up and count us in…..
Nick
salesorder.com – small business heroes
20. June 2010 at 11:46 am :
Hi….And I thought it was just me. I just love this site.
I have posted the following on Amazon. I was going to persevere thiking that if QB was only released 13/06/2010 thay would soon fix the problem with running QB 2010 on Windows 7 64bit. However, a quick look on the USA Amazon Site reveals that QB2010 in the USA were unhappy with the instability of QB2010 a year ago, and it still has NOT been fixed. So my guess is it is not going to be fixed in the near future.
I am getting a refund from Amazon
I am using Windows 7 64bit which came installed from Dell on a brand new Dell Precision 1500 with 8GB of RAM. I have 25 programs that run perfectly on my new Dell. However Quickbooks 2010 is far from perfect. The only reason for buying/upgrading from 2008 to 2010 is to run our new Machine and make use of the superfast Windows 7 64bit
Quickbooks 2010 installs OK but on trying to open the software it go into an endless Windows installer routine but never opens the program
3 conversations to a Call centre lasting 5 hours produced no results. So A manager came to the phone and asked to be allowed to install remote control software..but even this did not work. Does not inspire confidence
There has got to be someone on the software team that has tried and tested this on Windows 7 64bit but the people I spoke to in the call centre were not able to offer any cure
The Call centre sent me a downloadable file which was able to install if you then downloaded the latest .Net framework from microsoft,but if you leave your Windows updates turned on “You have 13 updates do not turn off your computer”, the installation is ruined by the update and Quickbooks 2010 goes back to the endless cycle of the windows installer routine.
The Quickbooks disk from Amazon uses the Window Installer, whereas the download from the Call centre uses Installshield which appears to work better.
We have in the UK the choice of Sage or Quickbooks. Quickbooks 2010 running on Windows 2010 64bit is being let down by software programming glitches that for a company of this size is just not good enough. As for the helpfulness and knowledge of the call centre staff…..they well meaning people, but they are just not up to it
For a major piece of software with 4 million users having this standard of representation must be pretty embarrassing
I need help from people who KNOW rather than have a list of things they can “try” while running my phone bill up.
So for this one program we have had to abandon using Windows 7 64bit and go back to the slower Windows XP
At our account year end we would like to abandon Quickbooks 2008 altogether and go for an Online Accounting Solution.
I have given this one star because I cannot give zero