Thoughts from the Gurus

I’ve been a regular seller on eBay for the last 7 years. During that time I’ve been a big advocate for eBay – even singing the “on eBay” song when I’m out in public. :) The only time I’ve ever not had anything listed for sale was when I was on vacation and out of town. Until now…

eBay recently changed one of their “rules” and it’s put me at odds about listing new items. The new rule is that Buyers will only be able to receive positive Feedback. For those of you familiar with selling on eBay, you know that sometimes you get the faulty buyer who doesn’t pay you, or refuses to pay you through your accepted payment methods. In cases like these, I now can no longer leave negative feedback for the buyer to show other sellers to be careful. This also means my option to automatically block bidders with a less than zero feedback total will no longer work.

Granted this will probably apply less than 20% of the time, but it still worries me. There are some not so honest buyers out there who like to “play” on eBay and leave negative feedback for sellers for unfair reasons and without the thought of return negative feedback I think we might see more of these unruly individuals crop up.

Does anyone else sell on eBay? If so, what are your thoughts about this new policy?

Ever wish that QuickBooks could do that one thing your business needs but most businesses don’t? It might. Check out the QuickBooks Compatible Software Center to see if there is an add-on product out there specifically for you. What kind of things do these add-on products offer you ask? Well let me tell you….

QuickBooks Compatible Software currently available includes consolidated reporting, timecard management, inventory control, point-of-sale solutions, and much more. So check it out – you might find exactly what you were looking for! :)

On April 1st, many websites have fake articles, jokes or other pranks.  Sometimes the jokes are subtle enough that you can't quite tell if it is a joke or not.  Don't worry, someone has gone to the trouble of figuring it out for you.  Take a look at this page for a complete catalog of April Fool's pages:
http://aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com/2008.html

This one from ThinkGeek is my personal favorite:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/betamaxhd.html

As an additional bonus, here is the most popular video so far for 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI

Thanks,
Nic

Have you been looking for a specific product or service that you haven't been able to find anywhere? The QuickBooks Community Classifieds might be the place for you to look. Below I've listed the different classified sections and a summary of what you might find.

Warehouse/Inventory
Inventory and Order Management, Integrated bar coding for Quickbooks, Mobile Inventory solutions and eCommerce solutions that integrate with QuickBooks.
 
Retail
Integrated Retail bar coding for QuickBooks, Ability to process level 3 purchase cards, Integration of Quickbooks with different shopping carts

QuickBooks Developers and Programmers
Sending items from an ASP.NET application to Quickbooks, SDK programmers, Custom Programming; Bar Code, Warehouse, Hand Held Scanners, QB with Excel formulas, ISO QB Developer

PDA and Mobile Applications
Integrated Mobile Bar Coding, Customer Order Picking System, Custom mobile solutions,bMobile Sales for QuickBooks, Time Tracking for Windows Mobile/Pocket PC

Non-QuickBooks Hardware and Software Products
 
Marketing and Sales
 
Legal

Independent Contractors
Various services from Bookkeeping and Online remote Bookkeeping to Programmers

Forms
You'll find various custom form and report builders

Productos y Consultas en Espanol
The Name says it all - Products and Consultants in Spanish

Education and Training
Training and Seminars covering a wide range of subjects, some of the training can be done remotely and you can find training in Spanish.

eBay Tools
eCommerce, Pay Pal and Customer retention tools

Business Coaches

Add-ons and QuickBooks Integration
This is probably the largest section in the classifieds. You will find a large variety of products that add-on and integrate with QuickBooks.

Accounting and Bookkeeping
Find all your Accounting and Bookkeeping needs in this classified section.

I hope you join us in the classifieds sections of the communities. You will be surprised with all the products and services you will find, so stop in and peruse for a while.

Best Wishes,

Bryan

I recently had a root canal (yikes – I know) and that made me stop to think about my dental and medical insurance. Luckily my insurance is really great (thank goodness), but with the growing healthcare issues in America, not everyone is so lucky.

Offering good benefits can be an important part of keeping employees, and it makes good sense too. You don’t want your employees to get sick and not go to the doctor because they don’t have health insurance and risk getting everyone in your office sick. Or even worse – getting your customers sick. Not a good experience if you have a customer facing business and you get a week’s worth of customers ill.

Not sure what kind of health benefits to offer? Or want to see if you are offering adequate benefits? One idea is to network with some of the users in our Healthcare forum.

Good luck and stay healthy!

We are contemplating a change in our site design, based on our TurboTax site.  What do you think - should the QuickBooks community be in more of a Question & Answer format, or do you prefer the way our community currently works?

Let us know by taking the survey here.

Thanks,
Nic

Do you take the time to thank each of your employees on a regular basis? Recognition is an important part of making someone’s job something they want to come back to every day.

 

Here are some simple, no-cost or low-cost ways to recognize your employees:

 

    
• Highlight one of your employees in the company newsletter
    
• Create a real bulletin board to spotlight the employee of the week or month
    
• Take time to thank each person on your team individually, in private, for something they did that week
    
• Stay on top of sending out promised rewards or bonuses
    
• Make a formal announcement to the entire company who the employee of the week or month is
    
• Note card of thanks
    
• Use kudos kards
    
• Rotating trophy
    
• Offer to have lunch with staff individually
    
• Develop awards to encourage specific performance, i.e. valuable support-"Behind the Scenes" Award, Hang-glider Award for risk-taking, cool under pressure award (with sharks circling), rude awakening award, painting yourself into a corner, etc.
    
• Play money recognition - highest amount at end of year gets award
    
• Establish an annual employee and family picnic for the business
    
• When giving feedback on anything, remember to end with a positive note

I want to take a moment to talk about a feature that has been in place for a short time on the forums and that is the "Best Answer" option that is available. If you create a discussion and another community member answers the question. The original poster can mark the answer as a "Best Answer" if they feel that this answer was. This is a great option we now have because not only will it let the respondent to know that they helped the other user but if a new forum member comes in they can give the "Best Answer" a try first. Let us know what you think.

Bruce

What do you do when you have more work than you have time?  You could run yourself into the ground trying to keep you, or you could acknowledge that some work just won't get done.  This brings up two questions:
1. How do you decide what doesn't get done?
2. How do you juggle everything so that you can function without being overwhelmed?

We've been working on re-prioritizing our work here on the community, which answers the first question.  For the answer to the second question, I'm trying to be more disciplined with my favorite project management system:  Getting Things Done.

For a good introduction to his work, I recommend his book.

The idea is that if you don't have a good system for tracking all of the work you are doing, then you'll try and store it all in your head.  Having everything bouncing around in your skull leads you to feeling overwhelmed, and pretty soon you have trouble moving forward, not to mention losing track of projects. 

The other key concept is that every item on your to-do list should have a next concrete action.  If not, then you'll be worrying and wondering how to move forward on that particular project, and that worry takes up space in your brain that isn't available when you actually need to get some work done.

Thanks,
Nic

Did you know that in addition to the reports available within QuickBooks, there are also report templates you can download? Our Reports Library has over a hundred different reports already created at your disposal.

The reports library contains memorized reports files you can download and import into QuickBooks 2005 – 2007. It also contains three special Excel workbooks you can use to pull transaction data from QuickBooks and then create your own custom detail or summary reports. These work only with QuickBooks 2007.

If you haven’t already visited the Reports Library, go check it out!

Do you have any ideas of other reports we could offer in the reports library?