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Bowing to feedback from small-business users, Intuit Inc. this week added the capability of accepting credit and signature debit cards to its QuickBooks Online product. The new capability allows users to accept Visa and MasterCard cards in addition to the existing ability to accept bank-account transfers through the automated clearing house network. Payment acceptance is administered through the Intuit PaymentNetwork (IPN), a system for small-business payments Intuit established in 2009.
QuickBooks Online is a version of Intuit’s popular accounting software that can be accessed online from any Internet-connected computer or from a smart phone. More than 300,000 businesses, or about 7% of all QuickBooks users, use the service, which has been available for 10 years but began taking off in popularity two years ago as businesses began to shift to so-called cloud-based computing services.
IPN lets QuickBooks Online users serve invoices via e-mail to consumers and other businesses. The invoices include a payment link that lets customers pay electronically, though up to now only ACH transfers have been possible, with a 50-cent transaction fee charged to the QuickBooks user. With the new service, users pay no monthly or authorization fees or setup charges to accept cards, but are assessed a 3.25% transaction fee. To turn the service on, they must go to their “Profiles” page on IPN. From that point on, all invoices they send from QuickBooks will offer both a credit card and ACH payment option.
The service has a number of limitations. Only Visa and MasterCard are accepted, ruling out not only American Express Co. cards but also the relatively lower-cost cards of Discover Financial Services. “Most of our users have asked for Visa and Mastercard; we have little to no feedback on Discover,” says an Intuit spokesperson in an e-mail message to Digital Transactions News. “If there is enough interest, we will consider the functionality in the future.”
Also, no overseas cards are accepted, forcing users to wait for checks from international clients or accept expensive wire transfers. And though the user can turn the service on or off at any time, once it is on it is on for all invoices.
In a blog post announcing the new card-acceptance feature, Intuit says it is reacting to pressure from QuickBooks users who have been asking for the option. The company’s post offers a number of comments from users in this vein, including this one: “We NEED the ability for a customer to pay online with a credit card. . . seems like it should be a very basic part of Quickbooks online [sic]. . . People are scared of giving out routing numbers and bank info. Let them pay by credit cards!”
Comments to the post itself are running largely positive, with suggestions for further refinements such as an ability to handle recurring payments and to tack on so-called convenience fees to cover Intuit’s 3.25% charge. Another user asks for the HTML code so she can accept payments directly on her Web site through the service, while another complains about the exclusion of AmEx: “It is also imperative that Am Ex work as well as about 70% of our clients use it. Please (begging on knees, release this soon!”
The launch of the card-acceptance feature for QuickBooks Online follows Intuit’s introduction last month of a prepaid card for users of its GoPayment mobile-acceptance application, which was introduced in the spring of 2009 and heralded a market that now includes such players as Square Inc. and VeriFone Systems Inc.
