Customer Stories: Uptown Partnership
Nonprofit utilizes QuickBooks® Merchant Service to help improve parking and revitalize a community
Established in 1999, The Uptown Partnership is a public benefit nonprofit corporation that manages a large parking district in San Diego, California. The organization receives revenue from city parking meters to invest in projects that will improve traffic circulation and parking availability, and revitalize the district's collection of eclectic neighborhoods and businesses.
In addition to constructing a much-needed parking structure to help alleviate the district's congested streets, another key job of the partnership is the selling and refilling of parking meter debit cards. The debit card, which one simply inserts into a parking meter to pay for time, makes parking easier for drivers since they don't have to carry coins. An added benefit is that they can get unused time credited back to their cards, thus making parking less expensive. As the debit cards became more popular, David Eng, Operations Manager for The Uptown Partnership, knew he needed a better way to process these sales. He looked to QuickBooks Merchant Service for help.
"We were looking for better integration of all our business activities," David said. "We were already using QuickBooks software and wanted a credit card processing solution that would interface with it smoothly and make our accounting processes more streamlined. QuickBooks Merchant Service does that for us.
"Initially, we were writing down our debit card sales on paper and then manually entering that information into QuickBooks, as that was the system I inherited at the time our sales began." said David. "That was inefficient to begin with. When the popularity of the debit card started to increase, we knew we needed a better way, especially when we reached 50% of our customers wanting to pay with a credit card."
David says that they started with another merchant service that was basically a card reader terminal. It worked okay, but he would have to wait for a monthly statement from the merchant service to see how his sales were doing. Again, the information would have to be entered manually into QuickBooks in order to run reports. An accountant on the Board of Directors recommended that David switch to QuickBooks Merchant Service. Now, everything is automatic.
"There was a learning curve at the beginning," David admits, "primarily because I wasn't that familiar with QuickBooks to start with. But the QuickBooks customer service team was very responsive and after a couple of days things were working smoothly. Now I handle between five and ten credit card transactions a day without any trouble."
David says there's much to like about QuickBooks and QuickBooks Merchant Service working together. He especially appreciates the way his accounting processes are now much more streamlined. In the past, if he needed to look up a transaction he would either have to pull out all the receipts or search the monthly statements from their previous merchant service provider. "Now," he says, "we can pull it up in QuickBooks in seconds. We can even track sales by customer name, which we couldn't do with our old service provider. It [QuickBooks Merchant Service] makes it a lot easier to reference sale items and handle customer service issues, such as disputes about charges or amounts sold. It's also make things cleaner in terms of bookkeeping, reconciling sales transactions with our sales deposits, and reporting our finances."
QuickBooks Merchant Service also makes conducting transactions much simpler for David. "Having the optional card reader working in conjunction with QuickBooks Merchant Service certainly makes things easier, enabling us to serve our customers faster," he noted, "and it saves us money. We just swipe the customer's credit card through the reader and click a button. The transaction is run through immediately, and it's done. Then we print out the receipt and the customer is on his or her way
By having all the transactions on the computer, David says that he's been able to classify all their sales as credit card, cash, or check payments, so at the end of the day, it's easier to see those categories. "When we were using the manual method and had everything written on paper, we would just have one big deposit for the bank. We didn't mark down what type of payment each one was. By using QuickBooks software and QuickBooks Merchant Service, our reconciliation is much easier. In fact, everything is much easier."