QuickBooks Online - Get Paid Faster

Now that the new QuickBooks Harmony is online and rolling out lets talk about you can use its new features to get you paid faster. First up sending customers the invoice via e-mail.

E-mail your invoice with payment link

With the new release of Harmony you can easily send invoices via e-mail to your customers and if you're connected to QuickBooks payments you can also have a "Pay Now" link exposed to your customers.

Pros:

• Easily send customers semi-customized e-mail invoices
• Give them an easy payment link for QuickBooks payments
• Allows customers to send questions directly on an invoice through the web

Cons:

• Not automatic, you have to send out each one individually.
• If you don't use QuickBooks for merchant services you're out of luck for getting paid off the invoice e-mail.
• No invoice follow up after you send it, one and you're done.

We think this is a good start, but if you do any volume of invoices you might find this feature tedious and that it takes a long time to actually get your invoices sent out to your customers. InvoiceSherpa will automatically send out not only new invoices e-mails for you, but we also integrate with several payment providers to give you flexibility when getting paid. Not to mention the follow up e-mails, but lets stay on topic.

A New User Interface

With Harmony one of the largest changes is a new interface that not only has an updated color scheme and "flat" style web design, they also have moved many of the items around to make it easier for you to get your job done faster when you're in QuickBooks trying to get invoices inputed and your bills paid.

Pros

• A central menu that makes quick functions front and center.
• Intuitive right slide out panel that shows relevant related information.
• Improved dashboard making it easier to see where you stand.

Cons

• Still some quirks in the interface,
• Some items like deleting a vendor are hard to find.

Overall the new interface is a huge win, really nothing too bad here, you'll be happy to upgrade.

New and improved reporting

If you look at the current reporting tab, it's pretty much terrible. You have to weed through what seem like an endless list of reports that sound similar and it's nearly impossible to understand which one to run for what without a lot of experimenting and experience.

The new reporting interface is a huge breath of fresh air, each report now has both a visual thumbnail to give you an idea of what they look like and a short description of what it actually does. Reports are now divided up into major categories like "Recommended" and "Frequently Run" to make it easy to not have to look at every report, every time.

Getting paid faster with Harmony

The new version of QuickBooks does a great job making it easier to get your invoices entered in and the new e-mail features will work great for smaller companies sending a few invoices who have time to follow up after that with all of the necessary follow up steps like confirmatory phone calls and additional follow up.

As you ramp up your business or if you're a little larger the new system is still a win, but it still isn't designed and shouldn't be (in our humble opinion ;-)) setup to really handle large, complex, or really anything related to accounts receivable management. Give us a call when now or before you get onto Harmony to discuss how we can help you drive better cash flow in your business using QuickBooks, we know we can make you more money than what we will ever cost you.