Email Campaign Manager

One of the features that I would find really useful is an Email Marketing campain manager in the Customer Centre of QB.

Sending out mass emails isn't as easy as it sounds.  First it is difficult to draft up a professional looking email with good content.  Unless you are a marketing major, this is something that every small business owner is going to struggle with.

Second, there are little tricks that are used to ensure that your email does not get filed in someone's spam folder.  These can be found by googling, but it is likely that a SBO would not know them, and would not even realize that most of his/her customers are not receiving email at all.

Lastly, it is hard to track the success of your email campaign (unless you have really specialized tracking content as a part of the email). 

Having an Email Campaign Manager that makes it easy for SBOs to send out emails about specials, discounts, promotions, new products etc would add a lot of value to QuickBooks.

Confusion when Receiving Payments

I'm posting this because my wife is continually getting confused when using the Receive Payments window.

When she opens up 'Create Invoices', and she would press 'Prev' to get the last created invoice.  However, she then opens up 'Receive Payments' she presses 'Prev' by instinct, and expects to get the last invoice created.  Ofcourse, we know this is not true, and instead you get the last payment received.  After observing that the name of the customer is not correct, she then proceeds to edit the details of the Receive Payment window... thinking that she is creating a new payment entry, when in fact she is editing the old one.

Then when she clicks Save (and clicks through the warning), we have just lost an old payment.

I know this is as designed, but in my opinion, it really shows the weakness of the whole "Prev/Next" buttons in the invoice and payments windows.

Interesting Observation #1: Sales Dashboard

Angel uses a separate spreadsheet to track her orders and sales.  She uses colors to track which orders have been paid for but not ordered yet, ordered but not arrived, arrived and awaiting alterations etc.

I told her you could probably use QB and the inventory tracking to achieve a similar result, but she preferred the spreadsheet method as it gave her at a quick glance the status of all her orders and other information.  She uses it as a sort of dashboard, that easily allows her to keep track of things from a high level.

No support for Quick method GST

I know that QuickBooks handles all your GST items and calculations for you, however, I'm also aware that there are a number of small business owners that are using the Quick Method for GST filing (including myself).

The Quick Method means that the SBO simply remits a reduced rate for GST instead of having to calculate GST collected and Input Tax Credits.  

I'm sure that there are a lot of contractors out there that are using this method, and I'm really surprised that QB does not handle this at all.

This basically means you will have to calculate your GST remittance manually, and then enter a adjusting journal entry to correct the balance afterwards.