Accountants Heart Technology: Mobile Credit Card Payments
Posted: May 25, 2011 Filed under: Accounting, Accounting Firms, Accounting Products, Accounting Professionals, Accounting Technology, Technology for Accountants | Tags: accounting, mobile payments, products for accountants, technology for accountants Leave a comment »
Getting paid is getting easier. And so is buying stuff.
Reports that Google is partnering with VeriFone and will be testing out mobile credit card payments using smartphones started making their way around the Web in March. But Google and VeriFone aren’t the first to explore contactless point-of-sale technology, and they aren’t the only companies interested in this emerging industry.
Intuit debuted its card swipe payment smartphone add-on (Intuit GoPayment) which lets clients accept credit card payments without being at a point-of-sale terminal or a PC keyboard, at the annual Consumer Electronics show this past January. Rather than waiting for a payment, accounting professionals can now immediately process a payment from any major credit card – right from their smartphones.
And it’s easy.
Consider Intuit’s application. Users log into GoPayment via their smartphones, enter the payment amount by keying it in or swiping their credit card, and immediately receive a confirmation receipt via e-mail or text message. Transactions are completed in seconds and credit card information is not stored on phones.
Other companies aren’t hesitating to take advantage of this extremely competitive sector. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Square, is poised to compete with its recent announcement of the elimination of per transaction charges for companies using its mobile payment service, which could be very appealing to the small- and mid-sized businesses they are targeting.
The company has raised more than $27 million in funding, including an undisclosed investment from Visa, and touts more than 100,000 new merchant sign-ups per month.
American Express is also investing in mobile payment technology. Shortly after launching its own digital payment platform, Serve, the company invested in mobile-payments provider Payfone, who has raised $19 million in funding.
Co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Savarin, recently generated $6.5 million in funds to finance Jumio, another online mobile payment start-up company. Other contactless point of sale start-ups include Boku (who acquired competitors Paymo and Mobillcash), Zong, BilltoMobile and mopay.
With so many companies interested in mobile payment technology, it’s hard think it won’t manage to permeate the business world before we know it. What about you? Are you or your accounting firm using smartphone mobile payment technology? How has it changed the way you do business?
Top New Technologies for Accountants in 2011
Posted: May 18, 2011 Filed under: Accounting, Accounting Firms, Accounting Products, Accounting Professionals, Accounting Technology, Technology for Accountants | Tags: accounting professionals, accounting technology, Lagniappe, LCPA, technology, technology for accounting professionals Leave a comment »Last month the Society of Louisiana Certified Public Accountants (LCPA) published an article called “Top Technologies for Accountants in 2011” in its magazine Lagniappe.
The technologies that made its list are designed to diminish the more tedious aspects of accounting professionals’ jobs, and to enable them to work smarter and more efficiently. However, as the article notes, most accounting professionals are too busy to check out new technologies that might save them time and effort, or they may simply be afraid of the change that the technology necessitates.
According to William Fleenor, CPA, Ph.D., author of the article in LCPA’s publication, top technologies to keep an eye on for 2011 include:
- Information consumption on tablets, smartphones and netbooks
- Cloud computing
- Security and confidentiality of business information
- Windows 7
- Microsoft Office 2010
- Improved utilization technology
- Paperless conversions
Some of these technologies have generated a lot of buzz recently in the accounting world (think cloud computing and information consumption on tablets), while others are simply going to become necessary upgrades to have access to new tools and features, and to avoid compatibility issues (think Microsoft Office 2010 and Windows 7).
Others are aimed at increasing efficiences in tools accountants are already using, like Excel and Adobe Acrobat. All of them are going to be important tools in combating the trend of decreasing numbers of accountanting professionals in a market that continutes to grow.
My question for you is this: are any of these technologies going to be a top priority for you (or your accounting firm) this year? If so, which ones and why?
