What happens when a cyber criminal gains access to the customer credit records that a business owner thought were secure? When it's your business and your customers, you must do whatever it takes to make things right. Unfortunately, the consequences that merchants face if their credit card data is breached may go far beyond a loss of immediate income. Setting things right for your customers may lead to a financial setback for you and your business. 

“Pensmore Software announces IntuitivePay, a fully integrated credit card interface to the QuickBooks Point of Sale market.”

Large scale data breaches have made for big time headlines in the past few months. The most notorious being the Target data breach over the holiday season with 40 million debit and credit card accounts compromised.

Time magazine reported on May, 23 that Ebay was also hit with a massive cyberattack that exposed the account information of 100 million users. The Attorney Generals of Florida, Connecticut and Illinois along with the authorities in the EU and UK have opened an investigation into this cyberattack.

Recently, credit card data breaches have been a hot topic in the news, and the consequences merchants face if their credit card data is breached can be quite costly.  Obviously, for merchants like Target, this is definitely not the publicity that they want.  Surprisingly, smaller businesses may be more at risk and have more to lose from such a breach.

Risk to Small Businesses

Though small businesses may not believe they have anything to worry about, they actually may be more of a target due to their lower security standards.  A USA Today article stated, ...

Intuit Premier Reseller Communities Have Been Heard:

Based on the feedback of the Pensmore dealers, it has become apparent that confusion has begun with regards to the new direction of Pensmore Software. To simplify the experience for you as the dealer, effective immediately, Pensmore will be becoming an ISO (Independent Sales Organization).  This new structure will offer you as a Pensmore dealer several new benefits.

Your business income relies on the sales and services you provide to your customers. But it won't run smoothly if you don't keep track of your finances. You must document and monitor customers, inventory, transactions, accounts payable and receivable, and so much more.

One very alarming white paper by the cyber security consultants at Ponemon Institute showed that 2013 was a particularly active year for hackers targeting U.S. businesses. The study focuses on worldwide costs of reporting, repairing and preventing data breaches.

“In this year’s global study, the average (worldwide per capita) data breach increased from $130 to $136. However, … US organizations on average experienced much higher costs at $188, respectively (second only to Germany).”

In light of the recent announcement that Intuit will no longer be supporting QB Pro, Premier, QB Enterprise Solutions 2011 beginning May 31, 2014, merchants who are currently using integrated payment processing will no longer be able to accept payments without an upgrade. Although sunsetting older versions of a product may make viable sense for Intuit from a sales, service and support perspective, it is not always the same case for the merchants who are currently using the product and experience an impact to their add-on payment services and no longer supported by Intuit for these versions.

As a small business owner, you probably understand that credit card capability offers a convenient way to make a sale when a customer can't complete the transaction in person. Offering a variety of payment methods can help your business grow; but if you have only occasional sales, credit card processing can also be cost prohibitive. It's easy to see why you may have decided to run a no-credit operation, but perhaps it's time to consider the QuickBooks credit card processing alternative.

With traditional merchant accounts, each time you accept a credit card payment, you also accept the list of fees that come along with it. There may be a transaction fee and a discount rate. You may be required to pay a monthly fee for the processing service or a fee for the equipment you use. Fortunately QuickBooks credit card processing offers an economical option with a list of attractive benefits for the small business owner. Here are just a few.

Botnets, a group of malware-infested computers that act together to pollute the world with spam and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, may become more threatening with the recent end of Windows XP support on April 8th.

Because Microsoft no longer supports Windows XP, an old and outdated operating system,