Question: I am trying to set up my QuickBooks to charge customer's credit cards through our current payment gateway. Every time I try to charge, it takes me to QuickBooks Merchant Services, and tries to sell me their kit or services. We don't want to change our current payment gateway. Our current gateway is Verisign Payment Pro and our credit card processor is First Data. The QuickBooks we currently use is QuickBooks Premier: Wholesale and Manufacturing Edition 2009. Please help us with your expertise. Thank you.


Answer:
You can’t process your credit cards through QuickBooks unless you use QuickBooks merchant services.  You can, however, process them manually outside of QuickBooks and just enter them as a credit card payment (without entering in the credit card number).  Check with Verisign to see if there is a way to download the payments into QuickBooks, but you’ll probably still have a problem matching them up to specific invoices.

Some other things to be aware of. You’ll also have to batch your deposits manually, QuickBooks can only do it for you automatically, when you use their service, and it’s not easy to batch manual credit card deposits to match your bank deposits. Make sure to post separate deposits for Amex, Discover and MC/Visa because they are each deposited as separate transactions on different dates (Amex, for instance, takes a few days longer to deposit than MC/Visa). You should also ask your merchant service provider to use gross deposits (fees debited in a separate transaction) instead of net deposits (fees deducted from the deposit) otherwise reconciling your checking account is going to be a nightmare, if not impossible.

Using QuickBooks merchant services will save you a lot of time, so you should consider it. Intuit can generally match whatever pricing you currently have, plus I can get the first two months of monthly fees waived, if you’d like to try it out. You can always go back to your old provider if you aren’t happy with it.

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Written by Ruth Perryman, MBA, CMA, CFE, CFM

Ruth is the president of The QB Specialists, an Intuit Solutions Provider that has helped thousands of businesses nationwide get the most out of QuickBooks and payroll. Ruth has over 20 years of industry experience, including 5 years as a Chief Financial Officer. She is an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and a member of Intuit’s Trainer/Writer Network. She is also certified in QuickBooks Enterprise and Point of Sale.

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