Cloud-based invoicing platform (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) InvoiceASAP is out with some very welcome news for business owners and their accountants today: integration with QuickBooks. The new functionality works with both QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online, but here’s the killer feature – the proprietary solution supports syncing with QuickBooks as far back as 2004. Even QuickBooks’ maker Intuit itself, only supports back to 2009.
“No one has this,” says InvoiceASAP CEO Paul Hoeper of the new feature, “no one.”
Also new, the company’s updated mobile solution now includes support for mobile payment technology Card.io, which lets businesses “scan” credit cards without using a dongle.
The QuickBooks support will be great news for business owners. A lot of people out there are still doing manual entries, or at the very least, manual imports, into QuickBooks today. There are some expensive custom solutions, especially in larger organizations, that allow for synchronization on the level that InvoiceASAP is offering, but nothing that’s widely available.
“Everyone’s in denial. People believe that there must be a way to connect to QuickBooks, but the reality is, there really isn’t,” explains Hoeper. “Intuit themselves support their own connections going back to 2009 for the desktop version [via GoPayment].”
The issue has to do with the QuickBooks SDK itself, he explains. It doesn’t support going too far back in the past – a function of Intuit trying to force its users down the upgrade path. So InvoiceASAP had to write their own solution, in the form of downloadable software, in order to support the new functionality. It’s available now for $10/month and is supported in the InvoiceASAP iOS app, with Android support planned for later this month.
In addition, QuickBooks is only one of many future integrations planned for the company. Over the coming months, the plan is to roll out support for more accounting and CRM platforms including Salesforce, Netsuite, Sage Products (Peachtree, e.g.) and others.
The company is continuing to add support for multiple payment acceptance methods, too, including PayPal (which is now available on mobile, following support on the web), Zipmark (pending), and, also new as of today, Card.io.
For those of you unfamiliar, Card.io is the mobile payments solution that allows merchants to accept credit cards via mobile devices without using a dongle. Instead of swiping cards, Card.io “reads” the card through the phone’s camera and inputs the information into the correct places within the app.
“We’re integrating our backend to all payment gateways, so a business with an existing merchant account can use that solution,” says Hoeper of the Card.io integration, “so now you have a method to accept mobile credit cards that you can use with your existing merchant account…it’s something that’s very differentiated from Square.”
The idea with the new Card.io integration, PayPal support, planned integration with Zipmark, and all those still in the works (not yet public), is to make InvoiceASAP a payment agnostic solution for creating invoices on the fly, Hoeper explains.
The news doesn’t stop there: support for these solutions will be integrated into a forthcoming product called PayASAP.
While the company’s cloud-based invoicing service has been doing well since its reveal at Disrupt in May 2011, and subsequent launch on iOS in August (they have 5,550 registered users and host 5 million invoices in the cloud), Hoeper says they’ve been fielding demands for something that’s more of a mobile POS (point-of-sale) solution. That is, something akin to Square’s cash register iPad app, but with support for other payment methods.
The company considered making the POS system a feature within their current app, but then decided to launch a second solution instead: PayASAP will arrive April 30th (or sooner) on iOS and Android. It will be a simpler app that supports all the same mobile payment methods as the InvoiceASAP mobile solution.
Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, more details about the new integrations are available on the InvoiceASAP website here.