Georgia,

If you use QuickBooks you can get a merchants account through Intuit. When I signed up I told them that my accountant was a QuickBooks advisor and she referred me and they gave me a merchants account plus online billing for $9.95 a month ….. I got a special deal because I was referred by our accounts who is also a certified QuickBooks advisors….. they never asked what her name was! Actually our account never referred us ..…… but our account is a certified QuickBooks advisors.

If you have a Blackberry and QuickBooks on your desktop you can add e-mobile payments for the BlackBerry for an additional $9.95 a month. With e-mobile payments you can process transactions from a Blackberry.

If you have an IPhone and QuickBooks online you can access all your QuickBooks information and edit it and process transactions.  With a BlackBerry you can only view the QuickBooks online information, but you can’t edit it.

Here’s what I have: QuickBooks on my desktop my account (located 2000 miles away) access the desktop remotely using LogMeIn http://secure.logmein.com/ . I have a QuickBooks merchant account with online billing for $9.95 a month. If I think I’m going to have trouble collecting and they’re going to use a credit card I do a credit card pre-authorization before I start work.

Another popular way of getting paid is by echeck , I use VCheck for virtual checks http://vchecksolutions.com/ . If you’re interested I can send you an example of the email I send customers for online billing.

No problem with the QuickBooks merchants account or VCheck ……..

I tried Global Payments and North American Bankcard and they sucked ! They gave me a wireless terminal and printer 50 % of the time the signal was non-existent. They were rude, arrogant, took weeks to get paid, they don’t return phone calls, expensive, and required a contract !

Good luck ……

Joe