Category: Point of Sale

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QuickBooks Point of Sale End of Life by Intuit

Intuit has decided that the cost of running a point of sale software business is too expensive and complicated and will cease operations for the venerable point of sale software on October 3, 2023. The software will continue to work. It will not have support nor will it have any of the integrated services you may use currently including credit card payments thru Intuit, gift card services, consignment, integrated webgility ecommerce integration, and store exchange for multi-store among other functions. This means that if you use QBPOS, you will need a new credit card processor (at a minimum).

As your point of sale representative for many years, I would be happy to review your current setup and see if keeping point of sale makes sense for your business. It may be that you just need a new credit card processor. I’ll guide you in the right direction. If you need a new point of sale system, I can help with that as well. Our BTCRetailX point of sale is a full feature retail management system that has many of the same features you loved in QBPOS including in-depth reporting and integrated credit cards but with the added features of working as the store admin from anywhere in the world, as well as cloud backups and unlimited backoffice users.

Please send me a note to doug@mortonbusinessconsulting.com and I’ll reach out and talk about your options. If you decide to switch to BTCRetailX, I will provide a free transition of your product and customer database to the new system. I think you will like BTCRetailX a lot.

Sincerely

Doug Morton

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Integrating BTCPayServer

Do you want to accept Bitcoin and BTC/Lightning Network payments? Don’t make a quick decision thinking it will be a piece of cake implementation just because your Umbrel or Start9 Embassy has a one-button install. Just like any business tool implemented, you will want to be prepared. This provides some of the questions we ask our clients about how they want to run their implementations.

  • What is your estimated volume? Low (1-500 month), Medium (501-2500), High (2501 and up)
  • What system is btcpayserver hosted on or do you need us to provide a hosting platform?
    • Are you self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi via Umbrel, Start9, Nodl, Casa or other? If so, give thought to physical node security as well as bandwidth if you run a busy store with lots of transactions.
    • Are you hosting on a VPS system? Security needs to be hardened, as well as enough resources deployed.
  • Are you connecting to your own lightning node to facilitate payments?
    • If so, is it installed and running? 
    • If not your own node, are you using a service such as opennode or lnpay?
    • If connecting to your own lightning node, is it accessible via clearnet (www.mysite.com for example) or is it on tor onion site?
    • If on tor, do you have a VPS host so reverse tor proxy can be configured?
  • What system will be processing via btcpayserver? ( WooCommerce, Shopify, etc)
    • Will you need this system configured for the btcpayserver connection?

These are many of the questions that will help us understand your business model to adequately provision a system for your needs.

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Integrating QuickBooks or QuickBooks POS with a Shopping Cart

Generally, there are just a handful of good ways to connect QuickBooks Point of Sale to an online shopping cart, same for QuickBooks desktop (QuickBooks Online will be covered later). You have to use middleware. Middleware is the software that translates the data between QuickBooks and your shopping cart.

Preferably you are going down this path with the horse in front of the cart. Meaning, do some research before building a website and then wanting to retroactively connect to QuickBooks as you’ll find that not all shopping carts will connect to QuickBooks without spending a lot of consulting dollars to make it work.

To make all this work, you need QuickBooks POS or QB desktop (Pro, Premier or Enterprise) or QB Online; a shopping cart and website and middleware. My personal favorite is QuickBooks POS with a connection to QB desktop, my own website hosted on my domain name using WordPress as a content manager and WooCommerce as my shopping cart.

I am going to focus on the middleware for this conversation. Both QuickBooks POS and QuickBooks financial software are similar in how they connect. Of course there are some differences that I’ll mention as needed.

A lot of the middleware out there provides similar functionality. They all offer comparable functionality in levels such as basic, pro, multistore, etc… And they are all priced as an ongoing subscription service.

This is not an all-inclusive list of middleware providers nor are they rated in order.

Webgility eCC: Webgility offers eCC for desktop versions of QBO and QB, and eCC Cloud for QBO. Offered as a subscription service with levels based on features and order volume. Sync with QBPOS for inventory quantity starts on the first level of Premium (a step above Lite). A bit pricey in my book but offers a boatload of integrated features. Webgility is also a well-established company with top-notch support. I think it fits well with a medium to large scale company with lots of sales volume in ecommerce.
11/10/2021 – if you use QuickBooks Point of Sale V19 and a webstore, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to Webgility and their integration. They have provided a great pricing structure that is super economical for new businesses and increases as your business grows in volume – that’s fair. My clients on it are loving it. Saves time and saves money; and if you have to call support – it’s a breeze and they are super helpful.

A while back, a very inexpensive WooCommerce connector called 61Extensions came out and was a hit but they had bad business management and went under. Some of its customers got together and bought the website and now point to a connector called MyWorksSync. A moderately priced subscription service connecting WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento (and others) to QBPOS and QB.
6/17/2020 – so far so good on using a new connector between QBPOS v18 and WooCommerce. It has a wordpress interface that talks to Intuit’s Web Connector that then transfers data to and from QBPOS. Their pricing is very reasonable and they actually answer their phones, respond to email, and provide a Slack account access.
11/10/2021 – after running MyWorksSync for a year with a couple clients, I wanted to review the software again. Personally, it works pretty well and the price is competitive. We had some BIG issues with the sync tool not being able to handle matrix items from QBPOS. Because of this, we had to look for new solutions or review old ones because if you deal with size and color variations, you would have to build the matrix in MyWorksSync and then sync down to QBPOS. While this may be OK for new businesses, it was a complicated mess with existing merchandise at the store and on the web. As such, QBPOS V19 now has direct integration with Webgility that works AWESOME. I recommend that path first and MyWorksSync second.

Atandra T-Hub: Atandra offers an online version for QBO and a desktop version for QBPOS and QB. Offered as a subscription service with various levels – note that you connect to QBPOS with the Pro version, you can’t sync inventory quantities until the Advanced level. You pay for features – not volume. Pricing is reasonable to me for the Advanced feature set. Atandra has been around for a long time and support is reasonable in its turnaround.
6/17/2020 update – It is disappointing to say this but Atandra’s support has slipped a lot. It has taken a lot of brow-beating to get them to respond, if they respond at all. T-Hub does not sync categories from QBPOS to WooCommerce – what a major fail! Just based on this lack of support – I can no longer recommend Atandra T-Hub.

Connex for QuickBooks: Connex is a subscription service with various levels – note that you can’t sync inventory quantities or attach to QBPOS until the Pro level. You pay for features and for order volume. For QBPOS, it uses a proprietary web connection to send data between QBPOS and your shopping cart. For QB, it uses Intuit’s Web Connector.

If you want an assist on getting this up and running for your business, give us a call at 843-936-0632 or email sales@mortonbusinessconsulting.com

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Point of Sale, eCommerce and QuickBooks Online Integration Made Easy!

Oh yeah, who hasn’t pulled their hair out when trying to synchronize all the working pieces of their accounting software, point of sale software, shopping cart and middle-ware? If you can’t see me, I’m in the back office pulling out my hair. Ouch.

But there is a better way! MBC (that’s us at Morton Business Consulting) can make all the pieces work.

We offer two very distinct but very workable solutions:

QuickBooks Online with WooCommerce Shopping Cart and WooCommerce POS

This is the ultimate online solution. Use QuickBooks Online to manage your accounting and inventory control. Use WooCommerce to sell online via its shopping cart. Use WooCommerce POS to sell to your brick and mortar customers. All integrated!

QuickBooks desktop (Pro, Premier, Enterprise) with WooCommerce Shopping Cart and QuickBooks Point of Sale

This is a traditional way of doing things. Use QuickBooks desktop perform your accounting, use WooCommerce to sell online and use QuickBooks Point of Sale to manage your inventory and sell to your brick and mortar clients.

MBC can get all of this set up for you. Call us at 843-936-0632 or fill out the form and we will reach out to you.

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QuickBooks POS – Invalid Product Number: Error 176109

Solution 1: Delete the contents of the entitlement client folder

  1. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to: C:\Program Data\Intuit\Entitlement Client\v8.
  2. Press the CTRL+A on your keyboard to select all the files in the folder, then press Delete.
  3. Select Yes to confirm the action.
  4. Relaunch QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale and re-register the application.

Solution 2: Rename the WSActivity file

  1. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to: C:\Program Data\Intuit\QuickBooks Point of Sale XX\Ini
  2. Right-click WSActivity and select Rename.
  3. Enter OLDWSActivity and click anywhere to save.
  4. Close the window then delete the entitlement again.
  5. Relaunch QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale.
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QuickBooks POS Firewall Settings

Configure Windows firewall

  1. On your keyboard, press Windows+R to open the run command.
  2. Type in control, then click OK to open the Control Panel.
  3. Set the “view by” to Small Icons, then select Windows Firewall.
  4. Select Advanced Settings, then choose Inbound.
  5. Click New Rule.
  6. Select Port, then click Next.
  7. Enter the port numbers, then click Next (See Point of Sale Firewall Ports section).
  8. Select Allow Connection, then choose Next.
  9. Name your firewall rule (e.g. POS), then click Finish
  10. Follow steps 5-9 to create a new Outbound Rule.

Point of Sale Firewall Ports

PORTPORT NUMBERS
TCP
(Incoming)		8040, 8443, 8036, 8035, 8025, 8024, 46228, 46225, 46216-46220, 46203, 46204, 2638, 443
UDP
(Outgoing)		8036, 8035, 8024, 2638
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