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).

At the end of Monday I reasoned that if it started out this bad there would no redeeming features down the road and signed up for Authorize.net.  I was approved and got their sample code working (with test data, but working) in about 45 minutes!

Lessons learned from the experience:

• Quick start guides are mandatory
• Descriptive URLs are more helpful than I previously thought
• If something is obsolete, be it a help file, or a download, keep it available, but mark every page  as obsolete.
• Call different things with different names.  For instance, Website Payments Pro is easily confused with Website Payments Pro, PayFlow Edition (which predates Website Payments Pro actually)
• Do not require third party software in sample code, even if it is free open source software
• Use the bare minimum amount of code as sample code
• If you have a knowledge base, answer the actual questions, do not refer people to guides, help files or similar questions.
• Do not require special permissions to run sample code
• Provide sample code in snippets, not solution files

photo credit: mangpages

Does anyone know of any good online only business banks?

1. QuickBooks
   Problem: I am terrible at accounting in general, and QuickBooks in particular
   Solution: Spend 10 hours taking free online classes, break this up into one half hour per day
2. Elevator Speeches
   Problem: Whenever I talk to someone about Stronico I start from scratch every time
   Solution: Create 10 second, 30 second, 5 minute, and 15 minute pitches.  Run these by interested parties and refine and rehearse
3. Uneven progress in the Stronico Venture
   Problem: The venture breaks down into long unfocused slogs of marketing and development
   Solution: Create master plan, with deadlines and goals
4. Fame and Goodwill
   Problem: Not enough people know about Stronico
   Solution: Continue prospecting, apply it to the intelligence gathering aspects of Stronico, and make contact with relevant bloggers, then refine the approach.
5. Metrics
   Problem: There are no good metrics for Stronico, either in profitability, marketing, sales, web hits, etc
   Solution: Create spreadsheet listing weekly goals for all of the above, have second row be the actual numbers.

photo credit: JoshuaDavisPhotography.COM

I had the above thought yesterday as I looked for a missing payment in QuickBooks.  Today I listened to Andrew Warner interview Allen Branch of Less Accounting on Mixergy.  Coincidence?  Yes, but a happy coincidence.    Less Accounting seems to have just the features that I, small business owner, would use in an accounting program, and nothing else.  The price for what I need seems to be steep, (considering I’ve already bought QuickBooks, but that is a sunk cost) but I suppose if it freed up time and energy the program would pay for itself in short order.

Does anyone have any experience with Less Accounting?

photo credit: wsssst

1. Remove the advertisements written directly into the program.  Click on “Learn about Payroll options” to see what I mean
2. Allow better sorting of invoices and estimates, currently the program throws everything at you at once.
3. Fix the printing problems – there is really no reason why creating a pdf is so error prone.
4. Allow easier access to templates – they should copy the sadly defunct Microsoft Office Accounting in their use of templates
5. Split off recurring invoicing and functions, avoid this whole “Memorized” metaphor, it’s simply not accurate.
6. Easier previewing of different invoice and estimate template options
7. Tell the user specifically what is being installed when the program auto updates
8. Tell the user about limitations of the product.  For instance the conversion tool does not work on 64 bit windows, etc.
9. Add progress indicators – at the moment there is no good way of knowing whether or not the product is working on something time consuming, or locked up, and the odds are 50-50 as to which it’s doing
10. Add more explanatory text on the credit card and bank synchronization.

And yesterday was the highest traffic day in the history of the blog.  I’m not sure why, but the middle of the week tends to do far better than other days.

And in case anyone was wondering,  I’ve been building out the public side of the site lately.

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

The Solution: Close all programs, go to the Task Manager and make sure that Outlook is not open in the Processes.   Reopen QuickBooks Pro 2010 and try printing the invoice to pdf again.  I have no idea why this works, and I have yet to single out which program is causing QuickBooks to malfunction, but that does seem to fix it.

The Problem: You finally get Quickbooks 2010 installed and your old data migrated, and you get the “Printer not activated, error code -30″ error window when sending an invoice, pictured below.

and

If you Google the error messages you will see that there are many, many reasons this error can occur.

The Cause: In my case, this was due to running Vista Ultimate 64 Bit. I assume it is the same on Windows 7 64 Bit or Vista Business 64 Bit. The cause is the pdf driver for Quickbooks not working with 64 bit Windows.

The Solution: You go to this QuickBooks help page and change a large number of properties. Why? Who knows, but that solved the problem for me. Intuit did not include any warnings about 32 vs 64 bit differences in their program, to their shame.