Another feature straight out of our industry’s only Idea Bank—you can now use your Authorize.net merchant account to accept payments from your clients inside Táve Studio Manager’s Client Access system without having to send your clients to PayPal, Google Checkout, or your PickPic.

Digital Wedding Forum members, you can use your members-only DWF Credit Card Processing solution, as it includes an Authorize.net account. 

To set it up, just head on over to Settings and look for the payments link.  Once you enable Authorize.net, it’ll ask for a few pieces of information from your Authorize.net account.  As always with new Client Access features, we suggest creating a test client and booking it online (perhaps with a $1 payment) to get a feel for what your clients will see.  You’ll be able to preview client access behavior in our next release.

Recently Released

While most of our work is going into our big mid-April release, with some huge new features and great usability improvements, we’ve managed to release a few other little bits since last week’s post:

• Email Reminders. Just set a date and time and we’ll send you a reminder by email.
• Get rid of your sample data. There’s always the “Delete Sample Data” link on the left, but if you’re ready to get started and you want a clean slate, including all the stuff you created during the trial, you can use the “purge account” tool in Settings, with the new “Re-create sample data” option unchecked. This tool is like formatting your hard drive; once you do it the data will never come back even if you’re browsing deleted data.
• Extend your trial. If you have less than a week left on your trial, or it’s already expired, and you’re not quite sold yet, just head on over to the “purge account” tool. Whenever it runs, we now make sure you have at least a week left on your trial, extending it if needed. And then why don’t you give us a call at 800-560-TAVE or Skype-to-Skype user TaveStudio and we’ll walk you through the system and answer any questions you have.
• An updated look! Okay, it’s not that big of deal, but we think that it makes the application a lot less drab and easier to follow.

You joined the revolution and told us you wanted integration with Intuit QuickBooks® in the photography industry’s only Idea Bank:

So without further ado, we’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of QuickBooks® export.   Just head on over to the Settings section and you’ll find it in the data management section with our other export tools.

We believe it’s your data and we’re just providing better ways to make use of it, so you can look forward to even more import and export options in the future.

IMPROVED: PayPal Website Payments Basic.  When using the PayPal payment gateway, your clients’ payments will automatically appear inside Táve Studio Manager so you’ll no longer have to manually enter the payments.

NEW: PickPic payments.  You can now process payments through your PickPic system.  When enabled here, users will be sent to your PickPic cart with the amount already added to their cart.   You’ll then be able to process the payment as you normally would inside PickPic.  These payments will not automatically appear inside Táve Studio Manager, so you will have to log the payments manually.

NEW: Google Checkout.  Basic Google Checkout support has been added and can be enabled here.  Once the “integrated cart” feature is completed, payments will automatically appear inside Táve Studio Manager.  Until that time, you’ll need to manually add the payments. 

While several users have voted for Google Checkout support in Idea Bank, there has been some debate in our users-only forum about using Google Checkout because of potential issues with their seller policies.  Also, if you wish to only accept the retainer through Client Access, you’ll find a new setting for that in the page editor.

If you’re a quarterly reporter, your sales related taxes are probably due soon.   We’re glad to help you with this tedious task with a new Tax Liability report.  

Here’s an example of how this report looks for some demo values with two taxes defined, one called “State Sales Tax” and another called “County Sales Tax”:

The report makes a few assumptions, which are listed below the report.   Managing and paying your taxes are important aspects of running your business, so always consult an accountant and review all amounts when dealing with your tax liabilities.

We’ve cleaned up the financials module on the job editor. Instead of seeing full expanded views of all your sales orders, the quotes and sales orders are all now listed in a simple table. When you click on a sales order, you’ll be brought to the new sales order viewer:

We’re writing a workflow overview for our blog. Until then, lets recap: after adding a lead on the homepage, you want to add a quote. When the client approves the quote you then click the book icon or button to book the quote and the job. The quote becomes a sales order now that it has been accepted. When money is due, or when you’d like to send an invoice for money that’s due soon, create an invoice for that amount. Soon the system will automatically schedule future invoices for sending and followup based on the sales order’s payment terms.

As always, there’s more on the way, including emailing the invoices and sending users to a special page where they can view or pay the invoice online. Have other ideas or things you’d like to see? Be sure to join the user forum.