Carry The One Blog

Xero Added to the CarryTheOne Platform

2009-12-16T01:35:00.003Z

Hello,

We're really pleased to announce that Xero has gone live on the CTO platform.

You can now import from Magento, Shopify, CRE Loaded, Zen Cart and osCommerce into Xero.

Here's a short video (which are getting better!) to demonstrate how it works:

E-commerce integration with Xero is next!

2009-10-05T22:38:00.002+01:00

Just a quick announcement that Xero is next in line to get the CarryTheOne treatment!

When complete, you will be able to export orders from Magento, Shopify and osCommerce stores into Xero in real time.

Lots of people have already contacted us requesting information about when Xero will be available.

We've learnt the hard way that any prediction we give will be wrong - but we are working on it now and we hope it will be soon :-)

Magento Alpha Release

2009-10-05T21:38:00.002+01:00

We are readying the Alpha Release of Magento for this week.

If anyone would like to contribute their time by testing it and helping us to squish bugs, please use the contact form to get in touch!

It is available for KashFlow at the moment, but we will shortly be adding support for FreshBooks and Xero.

osCommerce & CRE Loaded Integration with FreshBooks - Video Demo

2009-09-27T21:30:00.003+01:00

Here's a screencast of our osCommerce & CRE Loaded integration with FreshBooks.

If you want to have a go yourself, please check out our live demo area:

https://www.carrytheone.co.uk/sites/crefb/

Announcing Magento is the next cart to be added

2009-09-18T14:32:00.005+01:00

We've had a lot of enquiries from store owners asking if or when Magento will be added to the platform.

Since the start of September we have been evaluating Magento and planning the integration.

It is complicated in that Magento is still very new, and much is not documented.

However, we have made good progress and expect Magento to launch in October.

Magento will integrate with both FreshBooks and KashFlow accountancy & bookkeeping software solutions.

If you would like to be notified when Magento is turned live, please use the contact form and let us know.

osCommerce store not set-up for tax?

2009-09-18T12:53:00.002+01:00

We have just implemented an update for osCommerce, Zen and CRE Loaded store owners.

A few of our customers had not configured their websites to charge VAT - but they were registered.

So we have put in an option to override the site's tax settings, and treat the order value as including VAT.

When the orders are imported, we automatically calculate the VAT component and insert it in the invoice.

Shopify Added to CarryTheOne

2009-09-12T10:46:00.008+01:00

Shopify is an incredible e-commerce platform that we've raved about for ages.

It is no accident that Shopify was the first shopping cart to be added after FreshBooks.

Both are pioneering Canadian SAAS software providers taking the world by storm.

But back to Shopify - if you want a well designed web 2.0 online store, then these are the guys to choose.

And that is the key difference - Shopify really emphasises the design of your store - if you sell beautiful products then it should always be in a beautiful setting.

They have lots of pre-made templates to choose from, or you can purchase a bespoke one.

Unlike many subscription based e-commerce services, there is no limit to the customisation you can do to get the perfect look and feel for your store.

If you need a perfectly formed e-commerce store then check out Shopify...and try out our automatic integration with FreshBooks.

FreshBooks Integration

2009-08-28T00:35:00.001+01:00

We are very pleased to announce that FreshBooks has now been added to the CarryTheOne platform.

FreshBooks has a stunning 1 million small business users in Canada, USA & internationally.

We are looking forward to welcoming lots of new FreshBooks users to the platform!

Zen Cart Added to CarryTheOne

2009-08-18T00:16:00.003+01:00

Zen Cart has always been one of our favourite osCommerce versions.

The developers have added all the best and most stable contributions to give a really full featured shopping cart.

So we are very happy to announce that we now fully support Zen Cart.

Out of the box it is compatible with all international taxes, vouchers & coupons and shipping modules.

Visit Zen Cart

CTO Version 2 is out!

2009-08-12T16:08:00.000+01:00

We've been very busy at CarryTheOne working behind the scenes to build a new and better version of the software.

Our first release linked OSCommerce and KashFlow. If we had wanted to add anything else, it would have required another standalone development.

So instead we have built our "general architecture" which enables anything to be linked to anything else.

What that means is that we can now link any shopping cart every built with any accountancy software developed...or yet to be developed!

And not just that...but we can add payment gateways, Point of Sale systems - anything you need.

We have also dramatically improved the interface and made it much simpler to set-up and configure your software integrations.

Hope you like it!

How much time could CTO save you?

2009-05-15T14:57:00.004+01:00

We did a quick survey of some of our users to find out how much time they used to spend on inputting invoices.

Previously we'd found that a staggering 80% of online store operators either copy and pasted orders from their admin to their accounts or printed them off and date inputted them.

60% took about 3 minutes but a hefty 25% took 5 minutes or more.

So we crunched some figures and came up with this little table (based on taking 3 minutes per invoice):

	Hours Per Month	Days Per Year	Weeks Per Year
2 Orders Per Day	3	5.2	1
5 Orders Per Day	8	13	Over 2
10 Orders Per Day	15	26	Over 5
20 Orders Per Day	30	52	Over 10
50 Orders Per Day	76	130	26
100 Orders Per Day	152	261	52

If you factor in the time spent correcting inaccurate invoices (data inputting always leads to some errors) and generating credit notes, then there are even greater savings.

These are back of the envelope calculations of course. We don't think many companies will have full time data inputters putting invoices in manually.

However, I used to run a store that regularly did 30 orders per day and at busy periods over 150 orders. We didn't input any invoices, but put in aggregate monthly figures into our Sage accounts.

The problem with that?
- We regularly over-estimated VAT due to returns or exchanges;
- After the VAT inspection we were told that our records weren't accurate enough and we *should* be inputting each invoice;
- Our web stores lacked the reporting sophistication to allow us to spot our best customers;
- We couldn't easily aggregate sales from our 2 different web sites and Ebay.

If you have a brand new store or only do a few orders a month, then CTO is still a great time saving solution - why not try our Free 45 Day trial!?

CarryTheOne Survey

2009-05-08T18:59:00.002+01:00

We have a little survey for you.

If you didn't get a pop-up invitation, here it is:
Click Here to take survey

Only 12 questions, so it shouldn't take much longer than 5 minutes.

It would be incredibly useful if people took the time to complete it.

While we have a couple of bug fixes and enhancements to get ready for the OSCommerce integration, we are rearing to go on....new shopping software, payment platforms and more.

I won't tell you which ones we're actively looking at...but if you open up the survey you can tell!

Thank you in advance.

Bugfix: Discounts

2009-05-02T14:08:00.004+01:00

[EDIT 27/5/09: The Tech Team have asked me to make clear that CTO does now support all OSCommerce Voucher & Coupon contributions in the known universe... although if you have an unknown one, we're happy to add it!]

It may be a Bank Holiday Weekend, but we are hard at work bug fixing and improving CTO in preparation for the launch on May 5th.

We expect the discounts bugfix to be implemented by Monday.

Currently CTO does not support discount coupons or vouchers. It would be impossible to support all the myriad voucher contributions out there for OSCommerce.

Instead, what we're doing is taking the total order value and subtracting the amount paid. Anything left over is a discount or coupon.

By default, the discount will show VAT - so a £10 voucher is £8.70 + VAT.

However, if you have a situation where you sell £300 of baby clothes (zero rated for tax) and charge £5 plus 75p VAT for delivery, and provide a 50% discount, the VAT on the discount will be the maximum VAT charged on the order.

Baby Clothes: £300
Delivery: £5
VAT: £0.75
Subtotal: £305.75

After applying a 50% discount, the total paid is £152.88.

The discount line on KashFlow would show it as: £152.13 + 75p VAT, so it would look like:

Baby Clothes: £300.00 + £0.00 VAT
Delivery: £5.00 + £0.75 VAT
Discount: -£152.13 - £0.75 VAT
Total: £152.88 + £0.00 VAT

Bugfix: OSCommerce Rounding Errors

2009-05-02T13:57:00.002+01:00

OSCommerce has s small rounding error bug:
- one occurs when doing tax calculations;
- the second when doing currency conversions.

They are small bugs and usually only means your order total is usually just 1p out.

However, it gets annoying when CTO pulls out the amount paid from OSCommerce for an order, but KashFlow works out that it is out by a penny - you then get "overpaid" or "unpaid" warnings.

What we have done to fix this is to put the OSCommerce figures in directly - without letting KashFlow calculate the tax or currency conversions, so the errors no longer show.

It works fine on our test accounts - but if anyone experiences any errors of this kind, then please get in touch.

carrytheone BETA Launch Date - 5th May

2009-04-16T22:28:00.004+01:00

As of this evening, the first stage of coding is now complete.

We will be contacting the remainder of our Alpha testers tomorrow to invite them to start testing the service - and thanking them for being patient.

We have been bug fixing and trying to break the system for the last two weeks and it is now fairly robust.

The Beta launch date is pencilled in for 5th May.

We only thought up carrytheone in February so it hasn't taken too long to get to this point!

Fingers crossed that the Alpha Testing goes smoothly - otherwise we will have a lot of late nights between now and launch!

Pre-Launch Controversy!

2009-04-13T20:15:00.007+01:00

There's been a bit of tooing and froing between Duane Jackson, CEO of Kashflow, and Dennis Howlett - a blogger who regularly writes about accountancy software.

Dennis is also alleged to be a major shareholder in KashFlow competitor, FreeAgent Central, although his regular attacks on their competitors (particularly KashFlow) are not on their behalf.

At issue was our initially incorrect subscriber numbers for KashFlow.

KashFlow has a total of 3,000 paying customers currently on their system and have had 20,000 in total since launch.

We quoted 15K customers - which was some way off the mark! (It is worth reiterating that CTO is completely vendor independent and is not affiliated to KashFlow in any way.)

Dennis wrote a particularly scathing blog about Kashflow mentioning CTO:
Numbers matter in on demand | AccMan

Then things got a lot more heated on the UK Business Forums:
Twitter Dangers

Duane was helpfully pointing people towards CTO during our pre-launch phase.

After all the controversy we had a lot more visitors!

Dennis did think we were onto something though: "[carrytheone is]...a good idea and one to be welcomed."

But he did go on to say that: "How long carrytheone can survive as a separate entity remains to be seen because in reality, such integrations are features that any competent developer can mimic."

That is quite wrong - because he assumes two things:

- the first is that your average small business owner has access to a competent developer (most do not); and

- the second is that your average small business would want to pay thousands of pounds in development costs to mimic a service that costs £12 a month.

And then what happens if the store owner needs support (at £50 per hour) or bug fixing or a new feature? Just 3 hours of development time and you have already surpassed CTO's annual cost!

A better way to do order exchanges in OSCommerce

2009-04-13T17:26:00.005+01:00

I have used OSCommerce for many years and always found the lack of functionality for Credit Orders or Exchanges difficult.

In the end, we used the "Edit Order" contribution to directly edit an order. But in the process we lost the order history and it went out of sync with our payments.

While a better system could and should be built into OSCommerce, at CTO we have defined a semi-automatic process to help.

It does assume that you calculate your sales (e.g. for VAT purposes) from Kashflow and not OSCommerce.

The logic is in 3 stages:
1. The customer places an order containing 1 or more items.
2. The customer returns 1 or more items for an exchange.
3. You create a credit note for the original order and then issue a new invoice from within Kashflow for the new item(s).

The process uses KashFlows "Assign Advance Payment" functionality to ensure you keep track of how much is owed by you or the customer for any balance.

Instructions
1. Go to your OSCommerce admin and create a new Order Status called "Exchanged".

Click to open full size in a new window

2. Go to your carrytheone configuration page:

http://www.yourstore/cto_osc2kashflow_access.php

Once you have logged in, scroll down to the "Credit Notes" section.

Configure one of the 3 potential Credit Note triggers for the "Exchanged" order status.

You will want to exclude the delivery charge - because typically if a customer is returning a non-faulty item, you will not refund the outward delivery cost.

Also exclude the payment - as this is an exchange, you do not want to automatically assign a payment to the credit note - you are holding back the monies paid in order to put them towards the exchanged item.

3. Place a test order on your system. I will keep it simple for now and order one item. If your customer order several items and only wants to exchange one, you will need to manually edit the credit note to remove the items not being returned.

I placed an order for a USB mouse - and the system uploaded the invoice to Kashflow within about 20 seconds:

Click to open full size in a new window

4. Next, we assume that the customer receives the item and realises that the USB mouse won't work on their old laptop and they need the PS2 version instead.

They send it back, and on receipt, you change the order status to exchanged.

This automatically creates a credit note in Kashflow - excluding the original delivery and does not assign a payment.

Click to open full size in a new window

5. Next, create a new invoice within KashFlow for the replacement item. In this case, it is the cheaper PS2 mouse.

The total including delivery is £77.19 - a bit cheaper than the first order.

When you have created your new invoice, scroll to the bottom and look for the "Apply Advance Payment" button:

KashFlow has spotted that this customer is owed £81.59 off their previous invoice. Clicking the button will assign this payment to the new invoice.

6. The final thing we have to do is account for the overpayment by the customer.

Unfortunately there isn't an automatic system for this, so I suggest you record it as a transaction under the relevant bank account.

Assuming the customer paid via WorldPay, you can do a partial refund through WorldPay for the oustanding amount - £4.40 in this case, recording it as a bank transaction.

Alternatively, you could hold onto the money and put it against a future purchase.

Replace OsCommerce Invoices with Kashflow Invoices

2009-02-16T16:40:00.005Z

Version 1 of the OsCommerce integration tool will allow you to automatically email the Kashflow invoice to a customer instead of/ as well as the OsCommerce invoice.

Why might this be useful?
- If you want consistency of invoices going to customers - for instance if you are using multiple online store platforms.

- If you prefer the Kashflow invoice, which allows the insertion of custom text in the email body and the attachment of a letterheaded PDF invoice.

- If you are not charging at checkout, but on 30 days (e.g. B2B customers), then the Kashflow invoice can contain BACS & cheque instruction and/or a Paypal link with the invoice number, order total and customer details automatically encoded.

For the latter, it should be possible to do this by simply turning off the automatic "transaction" update to the invoice. The default setting is to create an invoice in Kashflow, and then automatically add the transaction amount (while specifying the payment method, clearing time and bank account it is allocated to).

However, if your store has custom coding to remove the requirement to pay at checkout, there may need to be some installation tweaks for the service to work, as we assume that stores require payment at checkout.

One of the features of the auto-invoice is that you can specify a numerical prefix (not letters as Kashflow doesn't support that) for each store and/or payment module. e.g. 0001 for Worldpay payments, 0002 for Paypal payments etc.

We hope this functionality will come into its own when we integrate directly with Worldpay - replacing the rather poor Worldpay invoice, and opening up the service to non-OsCommerce shop owners.

If anyone has any observations or requests for functionality, then please use the comments box below this post.

Automatic Credit Notes

2009-02-15T20:52:00.006Z

If you've used OSCommerce for a while, then you know just how limited the functionality is for returns or exchanges.

Apart from moving an entire order to refunded, you cannot easily edit an order (you can with an edit invoice contribution), and you always lose the history of an order.

A product can be removed or added to an order...but you can't show exchanges.

For launch, we are preparing a very simple piece of functionality which generates a credit note whenever an OSC order is changed to a particular order status (usually "Returned").

It will automatically insert the entire order with negative values.

You also have the option to remove the delivery cost from the credit note. Most stores do not refund the delivery charge if an order is returned to them.

It occurred to us that generating a credit note that includes the delivery charge when an order is marked to "cancelled" would be useful...so you have the option to set up to 3 different order status triggers, and decide whether or not to include the delivery charge on each individually.

You can also choose to automatically assign a payment to a credit note.

If it is a straight refund from the same payment system used to make the order - then automatically assigning the payment will save time.

However, if you want to make the refund payment using another system (e.g. by sending a cheque) or do an exchange, you can choose not to assign the payment.

Let us know if this works for your store - or if you need any further functionality.

How we show discounts on invoices

2009-02-15T20:44:00.004Z

We've put a bit of thought into this, and realised that many sites would be using one of several discount voucher tools or discount coupons.

The integration tool will compare the prices of products in the database with the final invoice total - and if there is a discrepancy, will insert a line in the Kashflow invoice showing a discount.

If you are not registered for VAT, then that's where it ends for you.

If your store is registered for VAT, then it gets a bit more complicated.

The default setting for the discount voucher is to include VAT. That means a £10 voucher would be shown on the invoice as £8.70 plus VAT.

You can turn off this setting in admin, and the voucher will be shown as being zero rated for VAT.

By doing it this way we ensure the voucher always comes off the main products - and not the delivery - which is often zero rated for VAT if stores use Royal Mail.

The only issue is that the Kashflow invoice and the OSCommerce invoice may show different VAT amounts - although the totals will be the same.

Would be useful to get store owners' feedback on this.

Multiple Currencies in OsCommerce and integration with Kashflow

2009-02-15T20:34:00.004Z

If you have an OSCommerce store and support multiple currencies, then we'd love to hear from you!

Our surveys showed the majority of sites supported a single home currency - GBP if you are based in the UK, USD if in US etc.

However, OSCommerce does have the functionality to show lots of different currencies, and update the rates semi-automatically using XE.com.

Our experience of running an OSCommerce site was that while we showed customers in Germany all prices in Euros, and let them check-out in Euros...in fact they were charged in GBP - and the Germany customer would usually be charged a slightly different amount by their bank or credit card.

Even though the OSC invoice would be in Euros, we took the call to put the Kashflow invoice in GBP (or whatever the default currency is in OSC).

This is because the merchant is always charging in the default currency, even if the customer sees a different currency on their invoice.

The question is - does this work for everyone?

And how many people out there use multiple currencies and have multiple bank accounts denominated in various currencies?

Our thinking is that only stores using Paypal's Website Payments Pro (but possibly just Paypal IPN) would have multiple currency balances - and many will just have them automatically converted to their home currency regardless.

How many stores out there would like support for multiple currency balances. And how would you like those treated in Kashflow? Do you already use the multi-currency capability?

CarryTheOne Alpha Testing

2009-02-15T20:13:00.006Z

Welcome to the Carrytheone blog.

The site was built over a few days last week and the development is focused on getting the OSCommerce integration tool ready for testing at the end of February.

We have a small list of testers already, but if you would like to participate, please ping over your details using the contact form.

It is surprising - and very encouraging - to be getting so much traffic already - we hope this turns into a healthy demand for the service.

The initial functionality will focus on accurately taking sales from OSCommerce and putting them into Kashflow.

Remember - get in touch if you want to test the Alpha version - we won't be charging until the tool is in Beta.