One of the pleasures we have at Ubersmith is being able to deliver functionality which makes our product more powerful and more useful, as well as integrating further into the modern business landscape. One such feature, which has been requested in great number, is the ability to integrate with accounting platforms like QuickBooks Online.
Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of Ubersmith 4.4, featuring our QuickBooks Online integration, as well as many other important improvements like a new MRR Report, integration with OnApp 6, and improved handling of credit card payments.
QuickBooks Online
With the ability to synchronize client data, invoices, credits, refunds and tax information, our new Quickbooks Online integration is a significant addition to Ubersmith. It allows for asynchronous, background initial export of data, as well as continuous synchronization so any changes in Ubersmith is accurately mirrored in Quickbooks Online. We’ve also made sure Ubersmith tax information gets exported to QuickBooks Online using individual line items linked to tax-specific accounts payable accounts in order to facilitate tax reporting.
As we made the decision to build this integration as a plugin, we worked tirelessly over the last months to add the necessary hooks and functionality to the Plugin Framework to accommodate its requirements. We look forward to sharing these improvements for all to use in the Plugin Framework, allowing our users to build their own accounting system integrations.
You can learn more about how to get started with the QuickBooks Online integration here.
MRR Report
Another big addition to Ubersmith 4.4 is the new MRR report. It features key metrics we feel all modern subscription-based businesses need to better guide their day-to-day operations and growth, as well as better understand their current, past and future growth:
- Revenue
- New business
- Expansion & Contraction
- Churn
- Net Growth and Net Growth Rate
- Gross Churn & Gross Churn Rate
- Net Churn & Net Churn Rate
- Total MRR
It allows you to view these metrics in both graph and tabular format, period-over-period. Like all other reports in Ubersmith, you are allowed to control access to the MRR report using permissions, so only people who have a need for these metrics have access to them.
More information on how to use the MRR Report is available in the Ubersmith documentation, here.
OnApp 6
Ubersmith 4.4 also offers an updated integration to OnApp 6. This integration was built using the Plugin Framework datasource mechanism. Transitioning our OnApp integration to the Plugin Framework will allow us to react more easily and update it as OnApp releases new versions.
Using the Plugin Framework also allowed us to fulfill another long-time goal on our roadmap: the OnApp plugin will be the first integration we release as open-source. We decided on this approach because we saw an opportunity to interact more closely with our users, and let them have a say in how we build integrations by working with us to further improve them. We also felt that it was great to help our users build their own plugins, by showing them how we build ours.
Therefore, we are inviting you to head over to the GitHub code repository, and get involved!
Improved Handling of Credit Card Charges
We took the opportunity in 4.4 to improve how Ubersmith handles credit card charge attempts. First, Ubersmith will now detect “hard” declines when attempting to charge a credit card, such as when a payment gateway refuses a charge attempts because the card is reported as cancelled, stolen, invalid, etc. When such a “hard” decline is detected, Ubersmith will mark the card as “hard declined” in the Payment Methods page, and will not attempt to charge the card again unless manually reset.
We’ve also made the charge attempt retry logic more flexible. You can now configure how many times the system should retry charge attempts, or even if it should retry them at all.
Both improvements were designed to help Ubersmith users obtain better rates from payment gateways, by reducing load and decline rates.
You can read more about the changes to credit card charges handling here.
All in all, we feel that the 4.4 release is a significant step forward for Ubersmith, and we are confident that all our users will benefit from the additions and improvements. From helping you run your business more efficiently, to helping you reduce your payment rates, we hope that you will be as excited about the new features in this release as we are!
