Question about Quickbooks Online and CRMs

The Biz
1

I’m using Quickbooks Online for accounting and invoicing.

I’m using Square for collecting payments. It also does invoicing, but I don’t use it.

I’m eventually going to have a CRM (leaning towards The Customer Factor), which also does invoicing.

My question is, if I use QBO for accounting, will it mess things up if I use Square or TCF for invoicing?

2

I started out using QBO. I did a course for 1 free year of QBO. QB screwed up big when I did that and created a 2nd account, then refused to port over the information from the paid account to the free account, or simply delete the free account and attach the 1 year free promo to the paid account. For a technology company, they are the absolute dumbest people when it comes to simple tech problems. It took just one more issue they created when doing payroll and I have sworn off QB forever. You couldn’t pay me enough to use their software and deal with the headaches when problems inevitably arise.

I used to use Wave accounting, which is free and just as powerful if not more powerful (and IMHO more UI/UX intuitive) than QBO. It’s an absolutely fantastic platform, however this one little thing irritated me enough to switch - I can’t have a customer “click to accept” a quote. They refused to roll it into their quotes and after a year of waiting I left them behind.

I now use Xero accounting. Really fantastic platform. I would highly recommend it to any service based business.

Using Square for payments can be tricky. You want to track and expense the fees. You’ll need to go in monthly and total up the fees that Square took while processing payments and create your own bookkeeping record to reflect this expense. Don’t forget to do it, because those fees add up. Personally, I would strongly suggest:

  1. Using your invoicing software to accept payment instead of a card reader.
  2. Accept e-Transfer payments (no 3% cut!!!) and set up auto-deposit to your email address. (We created an alias and set it up to our auto-deposit which is a payments@ email address)

For a CRM system I would highly recommend the free CRM Streak. Streak is a Google Chrome plugin and is extremely powerful at the free level. You’ll need to be using a Google Gsuite or Gmail email address, but the power of being able to assign emails to a contact and archive is game changing. Also, the flexibility you get with their fully customizable databases and stage progression is really wonderful. ALSO, they integrate with Zapier which allows for stage based triggering of automation that can integrate Streak with over 1500 different popular applications. Those words might not hit you right away, but this is EXTREMELY powerful. I don’t invest in any software that DOESN’T integrate with Zapier.

If you really like the software you’ve picked, QBO does integrate with Zapier, and I would recommend looking into the integration of Square and TCF. If they all integrate with Zapier there’s really simple ways you can create automation that propagates customer data across all 3 platforms, triggers events cross-platform, and just generally streamlines your workflow.

https://zapier.com/

https://www.streak.com/
Referral code: http://get.streak.com/RyanParanich4398 (discount if you need the paid version)

https://www.xero.com/ or https://www.xero.com/ca/

3

Thanks Roga,

That’s a ton of information and I’ll do some research on everything you’re talking about. I haven’t heard of any of the products you’ve mentioned, so I’ve got some reading to do.

Thanks again!