QuickBooks - Virtual Terminal Plus
Are you familiar with Virtual Terminal Plus? If you have a QuickBooks Merchant Account, you have this as a 'free' product that goes along with it that a lot of people are not aware of...here is a somewhat brief synopsis of the Virtual Terminal Plus product...
Virtual Terminal Plus is a password protected website where QuickBooks Merchant Service customers can process credit cards outside of QuickBooks. This blog post will outline its key features and how it works.
Some of the benefits of Virtual Terminal Plus include:
- Process Credit Cards from any internet connection, QuickBooks software not required.
- You may process both “swiped” and “key-entered” transactions.
- You may save a record of payments for download into QuickBooks.
- Virtual Terminal Plus costs nothing for existing QuickBooks Merchant Service customers.
- QuickBooks will automatically apply payments to outstanding invoices.
With every product there are also limitations. Virtual Terminal Plus is not exempt. The biggest limitation is that credit card credits cannot be downloaded. Payments are the only credit card transaction type that can be downloaded into QuickBooks.
Typically the end user of the Virtual Terminal Plus product are QuickBooks users, but this is not a prerequisite of continued use of the product. This being said, QuickBooks is required in order to activate the merchant account initially. Other users of this product are QuickBooks users who do not run QuickBooks at the point of sale or perhaps the QuickBooks user wants an employee to process credit card sales without giving access to QuickBooks. You or your client also have the option, after they’ve activated the account, to never use QuickBooks again and continue to accept credit card payments via Virtual Terminal Plus.
With typical merchant services, you have “card swiped” and “key-entered” transactions. You get a lower rate because of lower security risk for “card swiped” transactions. The same holds true with Virtual Terminal Plus, you can buy the $89 card reader from QuickBooks and get a “card swiped” discount rate or you may “key enter” the credit card number and name and pay the “key-entered” discount rate. The reader is a plug & play USB device, making it very easy to install.
You can take a look at Virtual Terminal Plus for yourself if you have a QuickBooks Merchant Account, go to https://merchantaccount.quickbooks.com/virtualterminalplus/ to log in. You’ll find the ‘Log In’ button on the right; simply click it and you need to log in with your e-mail address that you started your merchant account with and your password.
Once you are logged in you’ll find the Virtual Terminal Plus screen very easy to navigate. It comes up to the ‘Set Up Payment’ screen which will allow you to enter payment amount, memo for easy recognition later, the option for later download into QuickBooks or not, and customer selection.
The customer selection is also a very nice feature of Virtual Terminal Plus in that it syncs with your QuickBooks customer list. If this is your first time to use Virtual Terminal Plus, log into your account, log out, and then go download Virtual Terminal Plus payments into QuickBooks (From the ‘Customers’ menu, choose ‘Receive Payments’, and then click Get Online Pmts on the top right of the toolbar), this will sync your customer list in QuickBooks to your Virtual Terminal Plus. When you log back into your Virtual Terminal Plus account you will find your customer list there. You also have the ability to add new customers directly from Virtual Terminal Plus which will be added to QuickBooks when you download the transactions.
Once you are done with your ‘Set Up Payment’ you’ll move on to the ‘Enter Card Information’ screen. If you have a card reader you simply swipe the card and the card information will appear in the online form. If not, then you will enter the information into the online form. After you are finished with this screen you click the ‘Process Payment’ button.
After the credit card has been submitted and approved you may download the transactions into QuickBooks. From the Customers menu, choose Receive Payments, and click Get Online Pmts on the top right of the tool bar. When you click on this button you’ll receive a pop-up screen that asks “Which payments would you like to download?” Obviously, you’ll choose Virtual Terminal Plus and click OK. At this point QuickBooks will go online and download the payments and update your customer lists.
