Quickbooks OE Invoicing
Intuit’s Quickbooks Online Edition has become my most loved and most hated partner in this business. While I’m excited that OE provides a method by which each partner in the business can log in and see real time the current financial status of the company I’m frustrated by what I deem to be a lack of strategy for openness and a little bit of a “nickel and dime ‘em” theme going on.
Tonight, I decided to update the invoices that Quickbook generates for our customers. Luckily, there is a certain amount of flexibility in this. The big feature is the ability to attach your company logo to the invoice and align it as you see fit within the flow of the rest of the document. The problem with this is that there are no specifications whatsoever on how to accomplish this. Intuit’s only guidelines are that it doesn’t exceed 200k and that it be a common image file format. But nowhere does it specify or provide hints as to how it should be measured out so that it flows well with your invoice. I was simply reduced to trial and error. (Add to that the workflow process I had to use because I was photoshopping the file and getting it into my Windows XP install on my MacBook since QBOE only works on Windows/IE — but that’s another post). So there’s not much you can actually get out of this little feature. I’m wondering if my final rendering is even worth it. I might simply go back to plain text (less is more, right?). I’d like to take a fresh look at it again when I have a fresh mind but for now it’ll have to do.
