Month of June Roundup!

Small business owners were hit hard by the Covid-19 virus crisis. Unfortunately, many businesses had to close their doors because they could not survive the closure of their business over the past 2 months. As bleak as this sounds I saw this season in our business journey as a time to fine-tune different areas within our business. This month we took a look at how using a bookkeeping system can help you to pull reports so that you know how much you are making in your business. Additionally, we also took a look at tools you can use to automate things in your business. Today, I want to take a look at how you can get paid faster by your customers by getting paid online. Here are 3 tools you can use to get paid faster:

Quickbooks Payments - According to their site, Quickbooks payments allow you to accept debit, credit, and ACH bank transfers from your client. This is an excellent tool and has many features like recurring charging for customers that are billed the same thing each month. The pricing ranges from 1% per transaction for ACH bank transfers to 2.9 % + 25 cents per transaction for online invoicing. This pricing is for existing QuickBooks Online Customers. For new customers, you will need to set up a QuickBooks online account and then sign up for the payment feature. They do have an option to use the payment feature as a stand-alone product with Go Payment or their desktop offering. But if you want to use the online feature then you will need to have a QuickBooks Online subscription.

Freshbooks - Freshbooks is a cloud accounting software that has an invoicing and billing feature that can help you get paid faster online. You can use it with Stripe as the backend merchant servicer that pushes your customer deposits into your bank account. It has the option to accept credit, debit, and ACH payment methods and it also has a recurring billing feature. The pricing to use Freshbooks ranges from $15 to $50 for their most popular plans. Currently, they are offering a six month discount on all their plans and if you just want to try them out you can do that for 30 days and get your money back if you don’t like the service. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction.

PayPal - PayPal is a well-known site that many of us use for personal money sending transactions. The online invoicing feature for businesses makes it easier to get paid online from your customers. You can send your customer an invoice and they can pay via credit card or their PayPal bank balance. There is also a feature for recurring billing to your customer. There isn’t a monthly fee to use the service and the rates are 2.90% + 30 cents per transaction and you only pay the fee when you get paid by your customer.

There you have it! 3 tools you can use to get paid faster online and a quick recap of the month of June’s Blog posts. And as always…..Keep IT Sunny!

Tools You Can Use To Automate Things In Your Business

“Entrepreneurship can be a grisly, volatile mess of toxic ingredients on the verge of combustion, threatening to consume your health, relationships, and life” according to an article on Shopify.com.

This is true.

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart and is certainly much more challenging than being an employee.

Period.

With that said, it is important that we look for ways to minimize the stress in our busy lives and this can be managed in part with using technology. Here are 3 tools you can use right now to automate things in your business.

Boomerang - We all love email right? Most likely the answer is no but using this app will make it a lot easier to manage your email communication. Boomerang is an email productivity app that allows you to create email messages and then schedule them to be sent in the future. I use this often and it helps to take things off my to-do list. Once I see an email in my inbox that needs a response I can create a response on the spot to have it sent at a time that makes it easier for me to ensure that my clients are taken care of within 24 hours Monday through Friday. This means there is less of a chance that communication will fall through the cracks. They offer a free version across a variety of platforms like Gmail, Outlook, IOS, and Mobile.

Freshbooks - We all like to get paid on time right? Well, Freshbooks makes it even easier to get that done via their recurring invoicing process. You can set up customers to put a card on file and at a specified interval they will be charged instantly and your invoice will be paid on the spot. it makes everything easier for you and your customer. If there is an issue with the payment method then Freshbooks will notify you and your customer so that communication surrounding invoicing is not lost. They have an offer to try it for free right now.

Hootsuite - Hootsuite is a social media scheduling tool that makes it easier to manage your online content. Do you ever get stressed out thinking about writing and scheduling posts to your social channels? Well, this software will help to alleviate that stress. You can try it free for 30 days to test it out.

The entrepreneurial life can get complicated fast. It is good to know that there are tools you can use to help manage your communication, social presence, and to get paid on time. What tools do you use to automate your business? Share in the comments below.

Keep IT Sunny!