Stronico – Steroids for Networking We help the world’s best salesmen build better networks

Several days ago I decided to use PayPal’s Website Payments Pro system for the Stronico credit card processing system.  At the time, I thought PayPal was the obvious choice.  It had relatively low fees (about $60 per month), no setup fee, and it seemed to be the 800 pound gorilla in the space, so how bad coudl it behard could the setup be?

As it turned out, I was very, very wrong.   I spent part of the day Sunday and all day Monday wading through non-working sample code, looking at near duplicate setup guides for the 56 (how it is 56 I don’t know) versions of their Website Payments Pro system, installing all of the add-ons needed to get the sample apps going and so on and so forth.  All of that merely to make a Get request with the proper query string (which is all the Website Payments Pro System really is). Read more on Adventures with PayPal Website Payments Pro and Authorize.net…

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Quick Note: QuickBooks refers to an owner’s contribution (i.e. an investment in the business) as a “Capital Investment”.  Also, Bank of America charges for their QuickBooks integration.    HT: Recording Infrequent Transactions in QuickBooks

Read more on A lesson learned in QuickBooks – Capital Investments is a magic phrase…

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My weaknesses have made themselves apparant over the past few days, here is a preliminary list.  The first entry is the topic, the one below that is the specifics, and the one below that is the practical step to get me to an adequate level in under ten hours.

Read more on A partial list of my entrepreneurial weaknesses, and one time steps to correct them…

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The internet is filled with hatred of QuickBooks.  After doing much of the hating myself I realize now that people do not hate the program because of what the program can’t do; they hate QuickBooks because the program discourages them in small ways at every opportunity.  Using QuickBooks is like wading three miles through a swamp to pay your taxes.  If you took away half of the options and removed the unwanted spontaneous advertising you would have a nice program. Read more on Is it time to replace QuickBooks with Less Accounting?…

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For some reason the blog posts about QuickBooks Pro 2010 are the most popular ones on the entire blog.  As I’m doing accounting this morning, here are what I would change.

Read more on Top 10 things I would change about QuickBooks Pro 2010…

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As you might expect, most of the traffic comes from Google, and curiously most of the search terms are about problems with QuickBooks.  The How To Fix series is the second most popular.  Happily the search term “Visual Contact Management” is a prominent search term as well.  I’m still debating as to whether or not the photos in the blog posts are of any use or not.

Read more on A note about the Stronico blog traffic…

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The Problem: QuickBooks 2010 refuses to print to pdf when you attempt to send an invoice on Vista 64 bit.

The Cause: Quickbooks 2010 on Vista 64 bit does not work well.

Read more on How to fix Print to PDF problem in QuickBooks 2010 – Version Two…

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I intended the focus of the “How To Fix” posts to be Silverlight, but as I’ve encountered other problems while setting up the business, I’m posting those. The rule I established is “If it takes more than 15 minutes to fix, it gets documented” so here we go.

Read more on How to fix Quickbooks 2010 printing problem on 64 Bit Windows, (Error Code -30)…

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After recreating an XP 32bit Pro installation on two different drives, I finally get QuickBooks 2010 to work on my machine. Now to actually use it and see if it is the fun everyone tells me it is.

Read more on At long last QuickBooks will work…

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First Microsoft discontinues Office Accounting 2009 a mere four months after I install it and spend 40 hours trying to get it working over the network with XP. Then I make the move to QuickBooks due to this press release, and discover that their oh so magnificent data conversion tool will not work with either Vista 64 bit or Windows 7 64 bit. I now have to wrangle one of the old computers from the closets, do a clean install of 32 bit vista on that, install both Quickbooks and Office Accounting on that computer, convert that over on there, and then move the Quickbooks file to one of the two 64 bit computers I have here in the house. Such joy. No wonder I hate accounting.

Read more on QuickBooks Conversion tool will not work with 64 bit Windows, or Accounting software wants to kill me…

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