Our first priority is to restore these websites and give you full and complete access to our sites and your data as soon as possible. We are also investigating the cause of the problem and will take measures prevent a recurrence. We appreciate your patience and will provide more information as it becomes available.

Get some repellent for those pesky insects from the Online Security Center!  With an increase in phishing scams (fake emails masked as though they are coming from Intuit), everyone needs extra protection.

Sporting a recently revamped website, the Online Security Center lets you bite back and report a fake email or Website.  I think this site is a solid resource for folks who are concerned about security risks.   It’s thorough and direct, yet calming, and quickly lets you know what Intuit does to ensure your online security.

The site gives phishing repellent tips on how to:

• Protect your information
• Protect your computer
• Protect your business, employees and customers.

A few other cool “bite-repellent” options the Center offers are:

• Live Security Alerts
• Malwarebyte’s Free Anti-malware
• Secunia’s Free Scanner

I don’t know about you, but  I’d much rather slather on some insect repellent, kick back in the sunshine and relax (knowing I’m fully protected), while waiting for a real fish to bite my line! That’s why I say the Online Security Center is worth a visit.

Only time will tell what the impact is to small business.  With the credits and exchanges we can expect more small businesses to offer health insurance, but how many will depend on the depth of the savings from the exchanges.  We can also expect sole proprietors to have an easier time getting health insurance, which could indirectly encourage more entrepreneurship.  And for our larger small businesses (those with 50+ employees) the fear is that there will be an adverse impact on hiring given incentives to stay below 5o employees and 80k salaries.

Current state: The smallest businesses aren’t providing their employees with health insurance

Lots of small businesses aren’t offering health insurance…
Only 49 percent of firms with 3 to 9 workers offered any type of health insurance to their employees in 2008. In contrast, 99 percent of firms with more than 200 workers offered health insurance.

Those that do offer insurance are paying more…
Small businesses (less than 100 employees) pay up to 18 percent more per worker than large firms for the same health insurance policy.

And things aren’t looking up.
Between  2002 to 2008, businesses with 3 to 9 employees offering health insurance to their workers declined from 58 to 49 percent.

The reform’s intent is to lower costs for the smallest businesses with credits and exchanges and make insurance mandatory for bigger businesses

How small businesses will buy insurance:

• By no later than 2014, states will have to set up Small Business Health Options Programs, or “SHOP Exchanges.”
• A SHOP exchange will pool small businesses (less than 100 employees)  together  to buy insurance.
• The impact?  These are expected to have a small positive effect  (between 1-4%) on the premium cost and amount  of coverage offered.

Starting now until 2014, businesses with less than 25 employees will get a tax credit.

• If you have 10 or less employees that you are paying less than $25K a year, you will be eligible for a tax credit of 35% of health insurance costs
• If you have between 11 and 25 workers with an average wage up to $50K, you are eligible for partial credits.
• You don’t get a tax credit if you have more than 25 employees.
• Any employee who earns more than $80K/year will be excluded from the credit
• In 2014, if you have 10 or less employees, earning less than $25K, you could earn a 50% credit.

It is pay or play…for bigger businesses

• By 2014 if you have more than 50 employees, you will have to either offer insurance or pay $750 per employee.
• This coverage will have to meet minimum benefits and services, as well as handle 60% of costs.
• In 2011, employers will have to provide coverage for dependents of employees until the age of 26. (Now it is typically age 19 or the end of college)

If you are a freelancer/one person shop, coverage expansion will help you:

• By 2014 insurers won’t be able to set rates to exclude coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and can vary premiums only by geographic location, age, and tobacco use.
• Going into effect right now is a ban on lifetime limits on coverage, and on “rescission” (canceling policies already issued) except in cases of fraud.

Other stuff small businesses need to know:

• Part-time employees will be counted toward the 50-employee minimum (pro-rated)
• You will have to report the value of an employee’s health care plan on W-2 forms
• If you earn (as an individual) more than $200,000 a year, or are a couple earning $250,000 or more, there will be  a  3.8% surcharge on investment income to help pay for the bill
• This SHOP exchange will handle individuals as well.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects the number of people getting insurance through the new marketplace to start around 8 million in 2014 and to grow to 24 million in 2019.

Questions? Have a point of view on this? Please leave it in the comments.

The information cited here is the WhiteHouse.gov report, with recent updates included from CNN.com. http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/Health-Care-Reform-and-Small-Businesses
http://www.CNN.com

These posts were no accident.

We are currently working on some features that will makes Billing Manager  will not work with IE6.  Its time to upgrade to get the most out of the Billing Manager.  You will also benefit with other web sites you use, many are discontinuing IE6 support as well.

If it were me, I would first download Firefox and start using it.  You can install Firefox without changing your Internet Explorer version.   Then, when you are comfortable with Firefox, upgrade Internet Explorer. You will end up with 2 excellent browsers on your system. This is only a suggestion, its OK to just upgrade Internet Explorer.

If you are using a Macintosh, then you are already covered.  The new features work fine with Safari and Firefox.

Online tools for strong offline relationships with John Jantsch
Wednesday, February 24 at 10:00am PST

Learn how to leverage social media and other Web tools to build stronger relationships with local customers, suppliers and prospects. John will cover how to create local communities with online groups, and how to access local bloggers and media to raise your brand awareness. He’ll also advise on how to use online communities to create offline events, mine social media platforms for local leads and how to enhance local search engine placement for your business.

Register here

Turn Clicks into Conversations and Relationships with Brent Leary
Wednesday, March 10 at 10:00am PST

Learn the tools and techniques needed to turn content into conversations, conversations into exchanges, and exchanges into long-lasting customer relationships. Brent will teach social listening, automating content creation and distribution, and steps for enhancing the customer experience with your company by facilitating opportunities for customers to connect with each other.

Register here

Find more free webinar events

If you go, share your thoughts or learnings with other Billing Manager  users. Leave them in the comments.

Information you should know: The deadline to send independent contractors and employees their 1099-MISCs and W-2s is Feb 1st.

For you do-it-yourselfers, we know it can be a headache to gather all the payments, worker info, and do the calculations between year end and the deadline  (QuickBooks definitely helps with some of this remember). But, the 1099-MISC is especially troublesome if you’re filing manually because the IRS requires using a special paper form with red-boxes, which can only be ordered in packets of 25 or more – not very practical for those of you with just a few contractors!

We’re happy to share an easier way to finish these forms quickly and easily. A new service from our friends in TurboTax called Quick Employer Forms provides step-by-step guidance to prepare 1099-MISC, W-2 forms and e-file for only $2.95 each.

Bonus: If you finish your forms before 6:00AM PST on Jan 28, they will even mail them to your contractors and employees by the deadline. We hope you like it!

Check it out.

If you have had that thought, consider upgrading to QuickBooks Online. 

What is QuickBooks Online?

It’s a complete online accounting solution in which you can:

• Invoice your customers (like Billing Manager!)
• Track expenses
• Sync up your bank accounts and download transactions
• Do Reporting (Profit & Loss, Balance sheet, many more…)
• Prepare for Tax Time

We’ve made it super easy to move from Billing Manager to QuickBooks Online by adding an upgrade feature to Billing Manager.  With just a few clicks we’ll create a new QuickBooks Online account for you and transfer all your contacts, services and products, invoices (not draft or trashed) and payments. 

But wait! How much is this going to cost me?

Your QuickBooks Online account is free for 30 days, after which it’s just $9.95.  Try it out—we expect you’ll love the powerful features you get with QuickBooks Online, but if not, don’t worry. 

What happens to my Billing Manager data?

The data in Billing Manager will remain untouched, so you can go back to Billing Manager if you decide QuickBooks Online isn’t for you.

How do I do it…sign me up!

Look for the green button on the top of your Billing Manager page.  We like to call it a little green dog ear. Click and go!

Some last words

Now a few notes on the things we don’t export to QuickBooks Online when you upgrade (and some help for how to reenter them in QuickBooks Online):

1) Estimates – If you want to recreate any estimates in QuickBooks Online, select Customers > Create Estimate and re-enter the information.

2) Recurring invoice schedules – See this help page  for how to re-enter them.  However, be sure also to pause or delete the recurring invoice in Billing Manager when you do this so your customers aren’t billed from two places!

3) Logo – Check here for how  to add your company logo in QuickBooks Online.

4) Product units (e.g., “per foot”) – custom units are not supported in QuickBooks Online.

5) If you have Intuit Merchant Services (accept credit cards and e-checks online), refunds are not transferred.  Look here for how to enter refunds into QuickBooks Online.

With your help, we introduced big product features in 2009, including:

1. FREE: Hello FREE. We won’t accept your money, spend it on your business. Billing Manager is free
2. Currency Localization: Where do you live?  We probably have your currency in Billing Manager now.
3. Sales Tax and Payment reporting: Need some reporting? You can now click to see a list of your sales tax and payments.

We’re excited about the New Year and what’s coming. There’s a lot to look forward to!

Thanks for your loyalty and consistent feedback.   Please continue to tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you want.

- Happy New Year from the Billing Manager team!

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

Any other tools you want to share with your fellow web design community?

1. Just clear your cache and cookies (follow the article’s directions)

2. Close all your open windows in that browser

3. Try again.

Wait, wait, how do I clear my cache and cookies? Great question.  This article explains it pretty clearly.  Let us know if you have questions.

How to clear cache and cookies?

Bermster

As you know, there is a universal need to collect money for the services and products that you sell.   And the currencies, which enable this, have been around since the Mesopotamian times. The face of it has changed from silver, gold, coins to paper money and so have the many symbols which represent them.

We’re excited to announce that today…Billing Manager has taken its first step to become universal. We are  including currency symbols in the product. Your invoice will now represent your currency. We have over 100 in the product, hopefully you’ll find yours!

How do I set this up?

It’s easy! Just go to your settings tab and change the currency. Almost every country has its own symbol, its own fractional unit, currency separators and formatting. We’ve spent  a lot of time ensuring these show up correctly and in all browsers.

In the comments, say HI and let us know what country you are from!

If you are US based and this currency update doesn’t apply to you, we are continously looking for product feedback. In addition, we’ll have one more release before the Holidays, so more stuff is coming!

1. Increase your reoccurring invoices and thus your profit. Learn how here.

2. Call a customer just to see how they are doing.  If you wait for customers to call you it’s like giving a 2 year old a can of red paint and putting them in a white room alone. When you check back later, you never know what surprise you are going to get!

3. Start using twitter and say hi to us. Your customers are on it, so should you be. Create an account and then update your status with 140 characters. Use @IntuitInvoice in your update to tell us hello! We’ll start following you back!

4. Relax. When your head is full with a to-do list your creativity decreases. (Proven fact! at least on the Billing Manager team). Take an hour and go for a walk, get inspired and energize

5. Check out the new Intuit App Center. This contains lots of business apps that help you run your business better. Most of them have free trials (and some are even completely free!!). Examples include web conferencing, email marketing, expense management.

6. Participate in the Love a Local Business campaign. This monthly contest awards local business big money just having loyal customers. Submit a story about your favorite local business (or get your customers to submit on behalf of you!).

7. Spend money. Yes, it may sound counter-intuitive but keep listening. If a new customer brings you $100 of new revenue…then you should totally fine paying up to $99 to get them in the door. (Now hopefully you pay a lot less than $99, but as a business just starting out, getting customers is the first task you have in front of you!)

8. Be inspired. Watch David Weekly (founder of PBwiki) talk about how to give your ideas ex-lax. It’s a funny and motivating talk!

9. Zen your desk. With a clean and pristine environment you can be more effective and organized. Take 20 minutes…dust it out.

10. Comment on this blog. What other things did you do today?

On December 5th we’ll be down from 8am PST to 5pm PST. This is a long time and we apologize for the inconvenience.

During that break, we’re taking steps to ensure we don’t have to go on break again.  As counter intuitive as that may sound, the team is working hard to ensure that our performance and uptime is best in class. To make that happen, there is a one time tradeoff off for an extended period to rejuvenate.  (We’re basically giving the app a boutique style spa treatment).

But wait…it gets better! We’ll also be releasing some highly requested features! You asked for it and we’re delivering.

But you’ll have to wait until Dec 6th to find out what these features are.   I know, we can’t wait to tell you either!

Thanks again for your patience.  We appreciate it.

My name is Brian and I have been on the Billing Manager team for three months now. I finished my degree at Cal (GO BEARS!) this past spring.

When I graduated, a lot of things stopped:

1. Skateboarding indoors
2. Showing up to meetings 10 minutes late
3. The 5 for 5 deal at Domino’s Pizza
4. Ringtones featuring hip hop artists.

Thankfully, my passion to make applications of technology more available to people has not suffered the same fate!

I’ve had some intense college projects, but this is my first time on a project that impacts the daily lives of so many different people. There is no longer an ideal solution.  Each Billing Manager customer wants something different and the challenge is finding the best solution.

To do this, I make several designs for the same page or feature and track how many users access each one. Using the data driven tracking mechanisms along with customer councils, I can tell which design is the most popular and scrap the other ones.   It’s a great feeling to find out what customers want and then give it to them.

Making Billing Manager run faster is another important piece of my work.  Time is money. You know that, we know that.  To give you more time in your day, we have been working on algorithms to speed up Billing Manager. To do this, we:

1. Get user information from our databases faster
2. Send our pages to your browser faster
3. Format those pages so that your browser can interpret it faster

This may sound complicated but the concept is pretty simple. Imagine you and your friend are talking. We’re talking it from slow motion to speed talking!

I am having a lot of fun using technology to create the best customer experience possible. Stay tuned to check out the cool new work that we’re rolling out very soon.

 And why, you may wonder, is that so appealing?  (And if you weren’t wondering, I still implore you to keep reading, this won’t take long).

 A while back I started a small business. It was computer service for the technically un-savey. Things went well for about a year and I really enjoyed it. I worked hard and the team helped a lot of customers fix their computers. But at the end of the day, the company just wasn’t pulling in the money. We had to shut it down.

 Retrospectively, I learned a lot. The operations weren’t built to scale, my larger customers were taking too much time away from the bread and butter business, the people I hired were good, not great. There’s probably 10 other reasons why we failed that I didn’t mention. Maybe 20.   Starting a business is hard stuff.  There isn’t a manual to help you do it.  YOU get to write the manual every day.  Which is admittedly a fun and exciting challenge!  But it’s not easy.  

 Which brings us back to my current job description. ‘Help new small businesses succeed.’

  As the product manager for Billing Manager, I’m not just here to ensure this is the easiest invoicing solution out there (although that is a goal!). At the end of this day, the team is  here and Billing Manager exists to help make your business succeed.  

 In light of that vision, we’ll start sharing some ‘help my business succeed’ tips here on the blog.  These will be bitesize pieces of knowledge that will hopefully be not only useful but also motivating.

 Feel free to suggest and share your bitesize tips and tricks for others in the comments of any post! Looking forward to hearing from you.

Bermster
Twitter: @freeinvoicing

—–

First Bitesize bit: Business plans are sometimes most useful for the purpose of clarifying your vision. You can be the primary consumer of your business plan, not the investor.  It’s just like shooting a free throw, you want to visualize making the basket before the ball is out of your hands. Business plans are just a visualization of you making the shot. Start visualizing.

http://community.intuit.com/library/articles/elements_business_plan

So, we’re having a contest on who can design the best Billing Manager logo.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to be an artist or a designer to enter, just be creative, give it some meaning, and if you’ve got any semblance of an idea, go for it!  The winner of the contest will have their logo used for anything Billing Manager (e.g. marketing, ads, tshirts, etc), and your company will be featured on the Billing Manager blog. Talk about publicity!  Here are the details:

• Objective: To create a logo for Billing Manager that represents Billing Manager and its users.

• Logo Guidelines: The logo should contain the phrase “Billing Manager” and somehow portray the qualities that you think Billing Manager and Intuit represent.  For example, something like: easy, innovative, quality, real, honest, committed, smart or spirited.

• Prize: Your logo will become the symbol for Billing Manager and you will receive your own spot on our blog to feature your company.

• Submissions: Email us your logo design and a brief explanation of the logo to info@billingmanager.com.  Title the email ‘Billing Manager Logo Design Contest’.  The logo itself can be hand-drawn, a photoshop image, or any form of media, but in the end must be in a proper image file format (.jpeg, .gif, .png, etc) attached to the email.

• Rules: All entries must be received by January 30th and will become property of Intuit.
  

The team is excited to see what you’ve got!  Good luck!

(Brian Tran is a software engineer on the Billing Manager team.  He hopes to one day own a restaurant called Bubbo’s, serving different kinds of comfort food from around the world.)

*all rules are subject to change