This past August, I wrote about the merchant services program offered by Quickbooks – many merchants are currently utilizing the Intuit/Quickbooks merchant services module to process their credit cards. As I pointed out at the time, Quickbooks is (somewhat) convenient but you end up paying through the nose for their service. With that said, there are a few products on the market that allows you to both store all the credit card information on Quickbooks BUT use an outside gateway that allows you to use any processor you choose.
Quickbooks exclusively utilizes the tiered pricing program - as outlined in May’s blog, any merchant on a tiered pricing plan is simply paying WAY too much for credit and debit card acceptance – period!
Quickbook’s & Plugins
There are a number of plugins on the market that allow merchants to Quickbooks, but chose a merchant processor of your choice (other than the Intuit/Quickbooks program). Plugins integrate with Quickbooks desktop and their POS version – the only version thus far that doesn’t allow for integration with anything but Quickbooks is their online version.
· Positives of using a plugin: works nicely with existing accounting software; no additional entry needed in to Quickbooks register; chose processor of your choice, and (hopefully) secure an interchange pass-through program that allows you to take advantage of all the legislative changes to take place over the last few years
o Interchange plus is the term used to describe the wholesale rates charged by the credit card associations (Visa®, MasterCard® and Discover®). With over 150 credit cards in the market today, each of them correlates to a slightly different interchange rate. As the name implies, Interchange plus pricing works by applying a fixed markup fee to the wholesale interchange rates from Visa, MasterCard or Discover cards. This includes two basic fees: one is often expressed in basis points (i.e. bps) and the other is an authorization fee (i.e. every time a business authorizes a credit card).
· Negatives: None
Bottom line, for those merchants that are utilizing Quickbooks, a transition to more cost effective pricing is easier than ever. Just remember to chose your merchant provider with care.