I’m looking into this to pay our seasonal contract employees and wonder if any Dopers have experience with it, either on the send or receipt side. It looks great -enter your vendor invoice in Quickbooks, select Payment Nework, enter an e-mail for the recipient, and it send an e-mail to the vendor telling them how to get the payment. Cost is $0.50 per transaction of any amount paid by recipient.
So, any downside to using this? Any caveats?
I don’t use it but I do use Quickbooks and they do seem to have at least one major* outage a year with their network. Luckily all that means to me is that I have to wait a few hours or a day to email some invoices, but for some people their business grinds to a halt since they can’t process credit cards.
Other then that, 50¢ per transaction regardless of amount seems pretty good. Can you link to the page with the rates on it. It doesn’t sound right to me. Is it limited to a certain amount (dollar amount or transactions) per month? A rate like that sounds like it’s for a very very small business. Maybe less then a thousand dollars a month.
Here is Intuit’s facebook page. If you scroll down, you’ll see how often they apologize for their services being down while they try to fix something and if you look at the comments, often times you’ll several very frustrated people venting about it.
*Major being at least a day or two. Between those, every couple of weeks, they’ll be down for a few minutes here and there, but I don’t usually notice those since I don’t process credit cards through them.
My first thought as a business owner, use your online bill pay from your bank account.
I have had a couple customers who have also had some issues with intuits merchant services and they pretty much got treated like criminals for what was in my opinion, a breach in intuits systems.
I’ve been using QB online for several years now and only once have they been down long enough to cause me concern - way better than the rate of “server’s down” issues with the non-online systems. Note that I work in non-profits, who are often reluctant to spend money on technology until the system blows up and loses a year of data.
It seems pretty straight forward. I’ve also sent it to my bank rep to look at and see if it raises any red flags. What I like about it is that I can link it directly to the vendor invoices in QB so there is no duplication of effort. In a perfect world, I can pay most of my 200 seasonal contractors this way and avoid printing & stuffing checks & pay stubs. Since they enter their recipient bank info there should be fewer security issues.
I knew 50¢ per transaction regardless of the amount didn’t sound right. That only applies if they do a bank to bank transfer. If they pay you with a credit card then they ding you 3.25% and both of these will probably also cost you whatever your bank charges for an ACH deposit.
You might want to look at PayPal. People are more familiar with it, you can send invoices and 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. Also, you can deposit the money whenever you want so if your bank dings you per deposit you can make less deposits to save money.
https://ipn.intuit.com/help/index
Under Payments, scroll down to “Fees”
I assume in order to get the 50¢ charge, the person will have to enter their routing/bank account number. Some businesses might do that, and some will probably just grab their credit card. You have the ability to turn off the CC side, but then people might just send it a check.
I use QB and just for the hell of it, I might look into turning that on (not the credit card part though). I think we pay close to that to deposit a check anyways.
Sorry - to clarify, I am only talking about bank to bank transactions. I use a service other than Intuit for my CC transactions (and pay a significantly lower rate). What I would be using IPN for is a sort-of direct deposit solution for paying contract staff during the summer rather than cutting checks from accounts payable.