Comments on: Guided Tour of the New Small Business Invoicing Product from Wells Fargo

By: scacct

scacct — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:53:52 +0000

Just an update on this. We made an attempt at using it. It requires the person using it to be a signer on the account. It also requires an Authorize.net gateway account. An Authorize account is going to be in the $25 – $30 per month range plus possibly some setup fees. We already had an Authorzie account so there was no additional cost for us.

At any rate, we could not get it to work completely. It would process the card on the Authorize.net site, but then it would fail when it tried to return to the Wells Fargo site. Unfortunately Wells Fargo customer service was of no help at all. I’ll spare the frustrating details but suffice it to say, when we called them, they were never able to answer our questions. Never. Not once. They always put us on hold for awhile and then got back on and said they would have to talk to development and call us back. They never called back. We finally gave up.

My take on this is that there is a bit of a catch 22 going on. No one is using it so customer support is not getting any questions about it so when you call them they don’t know anything about it. I would be careful about committing to this as your only method of processing cards. If Wells doesn’t get enough participation they might just decide to pull the plug on it and put their resources into other products.

By: scacct

scacct — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:32:43 +0000

I investigated this as a possible request for payment solution rather than direct invoicing. The goal was to eliminate direct online processing of credit cards and the pci requirements/penalties that are now beginning to be imposed by our merchant account vendor. The idea was that we would send the online invoice as a request for payment of an invoice we already sent the customer from our QuickBooks system. Then if they wanted to pay by credit card they could go to the Wells site and pay, and we would never have to get involved with managing customer credit card info directly.

Unfortunately, the service is not designed to be used by a separate accounts receivable function. The login must be a signer on the deposit account. So if you have someone who only does billing and receivables and doesn’t have payables authority, you either have to give them a login from a signer or add them as a signer, and hence give them access to other online functions like bill pay, funds transfer etc.

Also looking at the rates for the service, it looks like the rates would probably be somewhat more than our current pci penalties, and if our business grows it could become significantly more.

By: Cenk Ipeker

Cenk Ipeker — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:16:56 +0000

The solution is definitely a step in the right direction, especially on the reconciliation on the receivables and applied payments.

For me the fundamental question remains on the fact that small businesses historically have had a low opinion of their bank and zero perception that the bank is a processing parter. will this be enough to sway the opinions?

By: Prashanth Bhat

Prashanth Bhat — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:52:32 +0000

While reading through what this solution is a number of questions on usability that cross my mind. How small is the small business we are talking about? What if i am a small business owner and i am invoicing on an average 40-50 small ticket bill lines, would i enter those things for each of my customers? what if my customers are not the customers with wells fargo? What if i have a small billing solution myself and i generate my own invoices, can i upload them? What is the advantage i am getting by using the banks invoicing, i know it makes reconciliation easy at the bank’s end, but whats in it for me?

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:26:04 +0000

Congrats to Wells Fargo! They ‘get it.’

Since they have the online banking relationship they’re in a privileged position to capture more workflows from the small business owner. And they seem to have made a simple solution for the very small invoicer.

That said, I think their pricing will price them out of the market for the majority of small biz owners for whom this service would work.

Three years ago Wells solicited input from potential vendors, including Intuit, on building this product. It’s been a long time coming. I’m glad they’re doing it but they need to speed their development cycles if they hope to make a dent in the market relative to the webby newcomers like Outright and Freshbooks.