QBO App First Look: Recur360

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Recur360 was one of Intuit's 10 finalists in their $100K App Showdown. Recur360 automates your recurring invoicing workflow by simplifying the process, management and reporting. Create invoices to recur on any period you need, be that daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever.

You could be missing recurring revenue. Did you know that QuickBooks Online only records recurring Sales Transactions with Automated Payments as Sales Receipts? If the Payment on the Sales Receipt fails to process in QuickBooks Online, the transaction doesn't process at all. That means that you are missing out on earned revenue.

With Recur360, even if the payment fails, an Invoice is still posted to QuickBooks Online allowing you to process a payment manually in QBO or reprocess it in Recur360. The key point is that your earned revenue will always be posted, and you will clearly know that you didn’t get paid what you are owed.

Recur360 will automatically send out late/collection notices if a payment hasn't been received by the Due Date. So just sit back and relax while Recur360’s dashboard oversees all of your Recurring Invoices, regardless of payment type or recurring interval.

Speaking of payment type, Recur360 allows you to choose the credit card processor of your choice while still posting all Invoices and Received Payments into QuickBooks as if they had been created there originally. You aren’t stuck with Intuit Merchant Services as your only source for recurring credit-card charges. You will have the option of using an alternative if you wish including the Authorize.net, Stripe or Elavon payment gateways.

Recur360 not only tracks when your customers payment method expiration dates are approaching, but it sends out advanced notices to those customers so they can update their payment information in time to avoid a ‘missed payment’ due to an expired card.

Recur360 was originally built for QuickBooks Desktop to replace the troublesome, easily corrupted, Memorized Transactions, as well as the lack of Automatic ACH/E-check functionality and the manual process of Batch Emailing Invoices. You still have the option of using Recur360 with QuickBooks Desktop, even though the program has become one of the most liked Apps for QBO users.

Connecting and Exchanging Data with QuickBooks

You can begin the process by either signing-up via the Recur360 website or via your Intuit credentials, then once you make your selection of QBO or QBD you will be taken to the correct connection path. In this case I used QBO as my test environment, so I get the familiar OAuth process for authorizing QuickBooks Online to share my data with Recur360.

If you are wondering what information syncs between QBO and Recur360 the data includes your Customers, Items (Non-Inventory Products, Services, Other Charges), Sales Tax Codes, Sales Tax Items, Classes and Locations. By the way, if you are connecting to QuickBooks Desktop then subtract locations from the above list, and add Sales Reps.  In the future if you add or change data in QuickBooks it will sync to Recur360 with the next data exchange, if you add or modify data in Recur360 it will update QuickBooks during the next Sync.

When a recurring Invoice and/or Payment is generated in Recur360 a matching Invoice and/or Received Payment is posted into QuickBooks in the Invoices or Received Payments module. If you update an Invoice in QuickBooks that was originally generated by Recur360 by adjusting the Balance Due, applying a Received Payment or applying Credit Memo, the balance due will then be written back to Recur360 for that transaction during the next sync. This allows you to continue to receive and apply payments in QuickBooks or make changes to transactions and make Recur360 aware if there is still a balance due or not.

Each transaction posted to QuickBooks is appended with the Recur360 Transaction ID in the Memo field so that you can Search for Recur360 transactions inside of QuickBooks. When an Invoice is being posted into QuickBooks, QuickBooks will generate an Invoice # and then during the sync that Invoice # will be written back into the Recur360 Transaction as a cross reference so that QuickBooks Invoice #'s are searchable in Recur360.  You don’t see many other systems cross-reference transaction identification numbers like this. 

Is Recur360 better than Automated Payments in QuickBooks Online? How about ‘Memorized Transactions’ in QuickBooks Desktop?  You will just have to judge for yourself, but that’s why Recur360 gives you a 30-day free trial that works with either QBO or QBD.

I always try to ask myself when I write one of these first look articles if the App I am reviewing would be something I would use. In regard to Recur360 I can say that if I only had 3 or 4 recurring transactions per month I wouldn't probably mess with having an App outside of my accounting (QBO or QBD), I think I could handle it.  On the other hand, if I had 300 transactions to crank out every month then I definitely would consider it. I think the convenience and options would make it worth the monthly price tag.

I also might consider this App just as an Invoice method that afforded multiple payment options and I didn't want to use Intuit Payments. 

So, if you have been looking for some other way to manage recurring invoicing, payments and/or merchant accounting processing then you want to at least give Recur360 a first look.