PennyPipe.com Blog

Quick update

Andy Jones — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 04:26:42 GMT

PennyPipe is excited to keep trucking along. We wanted to bring you a quick update about improvements and features that we keep rolling out.

(1) Shopify handled for QuickBooks

We now support Shopify with QuickBooks. We're very happy to offer this as Shopify is a very popular ecommerce builder. If you'd like to know how much money your Shopify business has made in QuickBooks, we can help. We support orders, fees, taxes, and more.

(2) Better handling of GST tax of income and fees in QuickBooks

PennyPipe can now handle GST taxes with regard to fees in QuickBooks. While calculating GST can be very complicated, QuickBooks helps simplify this. You can now automatically set a GST rate for fees within PennyPipe and we'll carry this into QuickBooks for all the fees which we record as expenses.

(3) Improved mutli-currency support for Stripe accounts

When you accept charges in multiple currencies with Stripe, PennyPipe gets it right. We use the currency of your connected deposit acccount as the currency for transactions within your accounting software. So whether you are sending direct charges to Stripe, or using their invoice and line items, PennyPipe will properly convert any amounts to the amount that your received in your deposit account.

(4) Improved Stripe connect support

We can now ignore charges that are made to your connected Stripe accounts if you so wish. We realized that most Stripe connect customer did not want charges from connected accounts attributed to sales income or otherwise. If you'd like to simply ignore these charges and only apply the charges that are directly attributed to your account, you can now do so with PennyPipe.

As always - you make PennyPipe great. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please let us know! You can reach us at support@pennypipe.com or 888-404-2904 during US/Eastern business hours. We're here to help you make sense of your payments gateways and accounting software. Reach out - we can help.

Shopify and QuickBooks supported

Andy Jones — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 00:15:10 GMT

We're proud to announce the release of our Shopify and QuickBooks integration.

As orders are placed in Shopify, we will create a sales receipt in QuickBooks matching that order to the penny. Here are the highlights:

Customers from Shopify are created or updated in QuickBooks as necessary (matching by name and email)
Sales tax rates and codes will be created as necessary if they are not found in QuickBooks
Shipping and discounts are handled and copied
The line items from the order are copied verabatim with any variants or properties and tax rates set
Any order notes are copied as the memo note for the sales receipt in QuickBooks
Select different deposit accounts based on the payment gateway used if you use different payment methods for your order (i.e. Shopify gateway and PayPal)

If you're using Shopify and QuickBooks to run your business, we do all this automatically to help save you time and sanity. No manual copy and paste or manual entry of orders is necessary. We will sychronize your orders so that you can see in near real-time how much money you've made from Shopify and account for discounts, shipping, taxes, and more.

If you have several Shopify stores, or need to integrate orders from multiple sources, we can help. Our simple pricing is based on charges, not the number of different stores and payment gateways that you use. Your business is one unit and we'll charge you that way. You can add several Shopify stores, add sales made through PayPal, Stripe, or more. Simply "create another pipe".

If you have historical orders from Shopify, we can help move those as well. We move up to 3 months of orders at no additional cost included with our business account ($19 / month). If you have more orders you'd like copied, contact me and we can work out the details.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly at andjones@pennypipe.com or call during business hours at 888-404-2904.

Stripe disputes now supported

Andy Jones — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 23:52:38 GMT

We now support Stripe disputes as an option to synchronize with your accounting software.

Disputes don't happen often, but they do happen. Any business running long enough will experience a mis-communication, shipping error, or just an unhappy customers, sooner or later. Since the customer initiates the dispute at their option, disputes bypass any normal refund and remediation process already in place. Disputes are unexpected events that levy their own fees, but we can help make accounting sense at PennyPipe.

Stripe has helped unify the dispute process by charging a single transparent fee of $15 when a dispute happens. Depending on the payment processor, funds may be withdrawn, reinstated, or held at different times. Stripe does a great job of informing customers - and PennyPipe - when these events occur.

We use all the events that occur - fees, withdrawns, and reinstatements - to create the appropriate accounting entries within your specific accounting software. Fees are entered as expenses or purchases. Withdraws and reinstatements are deducted or added to sales as they occur.

Although disputes don't occur often, they are still important to account for. By further checking for disputes, we hope to synchronize your payment gateway with your accounting software correctly to the penny.

7 tips for accounting with Stripe

Andy Jones — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 18:37:00 GMT

Stripe is a wonderful tool for accepting credit cards of all brands and - very soon - eCheck (ACH) payments online. They have a thorough API that provides real-time information about charges, fees, refunds, and transfers.

If you're an accountant for a small business, chances are some revenue is coming through an online payment service like Stripe, PayPal, Square, or their many competitors. Figuring out where charges, fees, and refunds should be credited/debited is not always clear. Since Stripe is one of the first services that we integrated with PennyPipe, we've had many chances to work with small businesses. Here are a few tips that we've learned that may help make accounting sense of all the data Stripe provides.

1) Consider a Stripe Holding account. Since Stripe deposits money on a 2 day rolling basis for most people, there is an amount of money that is due to you at some future point. Instead of throwing this in accounts receivable or straight into a deposit account, consider creating a separate Stripe Holding account to get an idea about what money Stripe curently has in flux.

2) Stripe has line items for invoices only. If you're looking for line items for invoices or sales receipt, these only exist in certain cases for each charge. If a customer within Stripe has as recurring subscription, or if the customer has line items created then the associated charge will have line items available. The most common case for Stripe is a payment method and an amount. Charges in this case have only the total amount charged and - maybe - a name, email, and description. Stripe is wonderful for simplifying payments, but this may leave much information to be desired if the accounting and ordering process are disconnected.

3) Think about where sales go. You can credit all charges to a generic sales account, or create a separate Stripe sales account. This may be useful, especially if use multiple payment gateway, like Paypal, Braintree, etc. If you're using invoices, or have a tight integration with the order process, you may be able to use the line item information to associate sales to individual items and their associated sales accounts.

4) When Stripe refunds a charge, they refund everything. That's right - the percent fee as well as the per transaction fee all come back to you. I don't if this works across the board, however Stripe behaves this way for my account and all others that I've worked with.

5) Disputes are a series of transactions with wildly different rules. Disputes are a series of related transactions. First, $15 USD is charged for the dispute itself regardless of whether the dispute is won or lost. When the dispute is lost, the full amount of the charge is withdrawn from your rolling balance and you don't receive any fees back. If your rolling balance is not sufficient to cover the dispute, Stripe may withdrawl the amount of money required from your connected bank account. If you win the dispute, Stripe may reinstate the fees, if they were withdrawn at the dispute creation, or do nothing if no amount was held. Each action depends on the card used for payment and the policies they have in place.

6) Check the currencies. Stripe accepts payment in a number of currencies including, US Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Great Britian Pound, among others. If you commonly accept payments from customers using these currencies, make sure multi-currency is enabled within your accounting software and that the correct exchange rate applies. Stripe can charge customers in their local currency and convert to your home currency, however additional fees may apply.

7) Use the description field. Stripe provides a generic description in which you can write anything. Use this to your advantage. If you're billing for an invoice, place the invoice number there. If you're billing for an order, place the order number or a short description of the order in the description. If you ever need to come back to Stripe to figure out what belongs where, this description will help you keep your sanity.

There is no one "right" way to account for Stripe charges, fees, refunds, etc as each person's business is slightly different. Hopefully these tips will help you setup a Stripe system that is manageable as your business grows. And, if we can help at PennyPipe - please give us a shout!

Did these tips help? Show some love and follow us on Twitter or sign up for a free 14 day PennyPipe trial.

How to properly use google adwords: the cat in a bucket campaign

Patrick Sheegog — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 22:45:29 GMT

So, we're not marketing experts at PennyPipe. We're two techy people trying to solve accounting problems and save folks time. That being the case, we're always exploring new ideas that may or may not have the greatest returns. Enter the "Cat in a bucket" Google adwords campaign.

Would you say no to that face?

So you need to market a product that helps people but don't have much of a budget. Maybe you're bootstrapping like we are or just trying to run lean. There are certainly easy wins like online communities where people are begging for help, your circle of peers that always listen to your ideas, and local organizations where you already have your roots. What about those cold introductions where you just have to jump and hope you land on your feet? Google adwords is one way to go about that, if you do it the right way.

Why Adwords?

Google adwords has a great history of getting eyeballs on new products for a relatively low price but its glory days are well behind it. We wanted to see what all the fuss is(was) about and gave it a shot anyways. I mean, it's Google right? We chose a "standard" Google Adwords campaign (a mistake) and started choosing keywords we've been hammering on the blog "integrate, sync, payment gateway, accounting" all of that good stuff. After a little bit of tweaking we used the neat tool that Google Adwords uses to scrape content off your website to pick an appropriate color, font, and image to use in your ad.

Google created this:

"Not bad Google robot", I said to myself, but then I thought about how I feel when an ad on the side of my screen. I don't care 98% of the time. The 2% is when animated dinosaurs pop up awkwardly. So, thinking of this adorable Woofoo dinosaur ad I feverishly looked through Google's stock photo collection. Among the few gems I also found some embarrassingly outdated images (exhibited below shamelessly).

And then I found this beautiful creature:

It was a cat in a bucket, and I loved it.

I thought to myself, who wouldn't click on that adorable cat in a bucket; the internet loves cats sitting in things. So I feverishly polished the text and pushed our Google Adwords ad live, letting it flow through the internet for a few days before checking back in.

In the end, I was right about the internet loving cats. We received 20% more clicks with the cat in the bucket campaign then our normal graphic. The problem is these users were only interested in this cat in a bucket and not truly interested in the product. The bounce rate was immensely high, around 90% and most users didn't stay long enough to read more than the first sentence of our website. The valuable lesson here is not just driving random cat loving clicks to your site, but attract your target market. In our case it was business owners who need to automate accounting reconciliation in the cloud. That being said, I do think this campaign could have been successful if we did a little bit more leg work.

Turning click-bait to a connection

To make these Google adventurers feel more at home we could have made a landing page that connected with our visitor. On that page we would come clean, admit we were being dishonest with this click-bait bucket cat and then try for a sale or even a recommendation. Something like an infographic leveraging cats and buckets to explain our process of reconciling accounting data. This kind of sense of humor and commitment to the joke could have showed our human side and helped us connect with these random visitors. Emotional connections in advertising create brand evangelists for the future not to mention it may just get your cat in a bucket landing page linked across the internet in a viral fashion.

Optimimizing some simple Google Adwords settings

To be fair this ad was doomed to fail, to no fault of our adorably contained feline friend, but because our "Campaign settings" in Google Adwords were not ideal.

1. You have an option to select the "global display network", "google search traffic" or both. We naively chose "both", because more is better right? Well, we should have read up that you need to make very targeted ads for each network. Simply put, if you are trying to sell a product with a limited marketing budget then favor "search". If you are doing public awareness for your brand or selling a product with a lengthy sales process then go with "display network". Here's a very informative article about the differences.

2. Don't go with the "standard" settings, click "all features" instead. This will allow you to select target languages. In one example, if you're in the US the standard settings will show your ad in Canada with French language audiences also. We could have easily saved some money if we had just targeted the right audiences of high value leads. This is an article that goes further into the details along with a few other helpful tips.

Best of luck in your Adwords adventures, here's to hoping you could gain something from our (adorable) mistake.

Did you learn something new or, dare I say, feel entertained? Show some love and follow us on Twitter.

August Product Update

Patrick Sheegog — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 17:45:50 GMT

It's been a busy month with new invoice and bank features along with new services!

New Services

- Pin Payments is now out of beta! You can now integrate Pin Payments with QuickBooks Online or Xero. We're still refining minor details, so if you see something give us a shout.

- Square is now out of beta! Check out our integration with Square and QuickBooks Online or Xero.

Features

- You can now create a new invoice and apply payments when a Stripe, Paypal, or Square charge goes through. Before we create that invoice we'll check to see if one with a matching invoice number exists in your accounting software. This is huge, as before we could only apply payments to an existing invoice in QuickBooks Online or Xero or create an invoice separately.

- You can now transfer bank account balances as credits and debits when a new charge is processed. This is now a feature we have exclusively for Xero. It's great if you have existing invoice and receipt integration that work with e-commerce sites but lack the proper reconciliation.

- The billing period will now show up in the the notes section for Stripe to QuickBooks Online sales receipts and invoices

- You can test your pipes with our test data before moving live data. Move some sample data to see how it looks in your system before you go live.

- We will now pull over invoice line items from Stripe. This means you can see your products in the invoices and sales receipts we create.

- We now search for the customer name as well as the email address in QuickBooks Online when matching new records to customers.

PennyPipe connects payments gateways to accounting software in the cloud. Check out our 2 minute demo video or sign up for a free 14 day trial.

We did not make $50,000 in our first week. We are bootstrapping slowly.

Andy Jones — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 18:47:17 GMT

The marketing grind of PennyPipe as a bootstrapped startup

As the title says, PennyPipe did not earn $X (a large amount) in Y time (very short). However, we are slowly and successfully bootstrapping ourselves.

We all love the instant success stories. They feel like winning the lottery. Perhaps by reading these stories we get to share in the glow and maybe some of that luck will rub off on us. I still like these stories knowing that I want nothing to do with sudden and miraculous success.

The problem with overnight success stories is that they are often transitory. We don't see too many articles titled "I made $50k in a week, now here I am 2 years later rolling in $50MM". I have two thoughts about why this occurs: either these folks are quietly enjoying their success, or their fortune was fleeting. I lean toward the later, although I'd love more input. More to the point, the "instant success" article in a prominent publication garners quick but fickle traffic. Like fairweather friends, these hits only stick around until the sun goes down.

The marketing grind

Marketing is hard work. There is no replacement for putting yourself out there. The maxim “build it and they will come” is patently false. If there is a silver lining, however, it is this: no matter how fast technology moves, business still moves on human time scales. Developing good relationships with people is something we all can do and something technology will never replace. With that in mind, here are a few things that helped along the way...

Getting to customer #1 with PennyPipe was the hardest thing. A very unsexy thing I learned through years of bashing my head against a wall is to get customer #1 BEFORE building anything. My gut instinct when starting a new project is to start programming. I'm excited about the idea and I just can't wait to realize its full potential and roll out my plan. However, without validating that someone will pay for my eventual work, I'm simply wasting time and effort.

Measurement was and is key to the success of our business at PennyPipe. We developed our own funnel - and no I don't mean something used to chug beer. At the top of the funnel is everyone who comes to our site. At the bottom is everyone who becomes a paying subscriber. In between we have certain metrics that we measure. Step 1: did the person sign up as user? Step 2: did the user actually create a pipe? Step 3: did the pipe actually move any data?

In the words of modern philosopher Mike Tyson, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face". With this in mind we constantly change PennyPipe. At each stage in our funnel, we can validate - and often invalidate - our ideas about what works.

Most of our marketing is targeted at increasing the very top of our funnel. Change to PennyPipe is driven by the feedback we receive from users and the conversion rates for each step. I may think that feature X is what will push our business forward, however if all our users say Y, we do Y. If change Z helps increase conversions at step 3, then we're sticking with change Z. I learned not to fall in love with my ideas about what people want.

Try and try again

Persistence has been key. I come from a software background. Writing blog article, posting links, and sifting through forums for frustrated users does not exactly make me want to get out of bed. When I talk about developing relationships, I don't always mean relationships with real human beings. Starting social media accounts, writing blogs, and posting links is no recipe for overnight success. But as search engines slowly pick up your "crumbs", the number of people starting at the top end of your funnel will increase. I've managed this by setting low but attainable goals like just 1 blog article a week or 1 help page. Ironically for an overachiever, setting low goals has helped a lot.

PennyPipe will never suddenly blow up overnight. However, as we gain subscribers this month, they will become next months renewals as we continue to gain new subscribers. Subscribers start to stack in a nice way given enough time. Meanwhile, we rest well knowing that we've saved people a lot of time and helped folks make sense of their financials. All bootstrapped slowly.

The Bull City's startup resurgence

Patrick Sheegog — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 18:37:31 GMT

What's happening in our hometown's startup ecosystem

A month ago, I sat in Durham’s Carolina Theatre for the Rise of the Rest Tour with Steve Case, former AOL co-founder. The historic theater dates back to 1926 and has witnessed the city’s history: tobacco boom, desegregation and the recent economic recession. Leading the “fireside chat”, Case spoke of underdog stories and cities coming back from the brink. With tech startups sprouting with increasing gusto, Durham has been home to their successes and privy to their growing pains. Tech leaders miss out on the city’s history—to their detriment.

Read the full article at StartupBlink.com

Summer Hours

Patrick Sheegog — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 22:39:58 GMT

Summer hours: We're launching a new website but we're still here!

During the next two weeks of July 6 - July 20 you may send support@pennypipe.com an email and receive a loving, yet, automated message saying we'll get back to you within 48 hours. This is because we're very excited to launch a new version of the site and during the next two weeks we're going pretty deep into it. This is our way of managing resources to launch the new site and keeping you in the loop.

Why post this? I mean, it's only 2 days...

Treating our customers right is a high priority and we love responding within a few hours (when we're not sleeping). If it takes two days for someone in CS to respond to you something isn't going right. That's why it's important for us to put this message out there.

Ok, so what's the deal with this vacation responder?

First of all, don’t cry. This will not be the vacation responder of your nightmares, and I’m not secretly ignoring your cries for help from a beach somewhere. I will reply to your email personally in a couple of days.

Right now at PennyPipe, we have just two employees: Andy (the founder) and me. We distinguish ourselves from other companies that work with APIs by providing awesome customer service and really understanding what our users want.

We’ve heard your feedback, and that’s why we’re making PennyPipe more user- and mobile-friendly. To make time for that, I’m going to step away from my email inbox a couple days a week. (Mostly because if I try to answer emails and modify a live website, I start to feel like I’ve had too many cups of coffee and I will become my favorite barista's least favorite customer.)

Here are some other things Andy and I are working on this summer:

Getting the new site up and running. [Yes a whole site including an updated dashboard and reports section that will be easier to use and look nice on your small screens.]
Launching a newsletter campaign
Pin payment gateway added to PennyPipe
Shopify orders and payments added to PennyPipe

Alright ya'll, we hope you're enjoying your summer. Feel free to reach out to us if you have feedback or if you just want to see our vacation responder :)

-Patrick and Andy

Product update 6/27 - 7/3

Patrick Sheegog — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 19:55:46 GMT

Invoice payment clean up, UI improvement, new site otw!

Features

-We just launched our feature that allows you to apply payments to existing invoices and now those invoices can be auto reconciled. Just check the "auto-reconcile" button and they will be truly reconciled automatically!

Design

-We've added some Oh, look here's an example of one! Tooltips are these things. They pop up when we want to show you more infotooltips. We're hoping they will help you through the pipe creation process. Thank you to feedback from users like Stephen at Pixy prints intagram photos and mails them to you ...did I mention we love tooltips?printwithpixy.com

-We're building a new website that's mobile friendly. Actually, the header for this update is from a draft of that new site. Look for that to launch in the next 4 weeks!

Questions? Comments? Want to chat about cloud accounting? Reach out to us at support@pennypipe.com.