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).”

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.

What do we learn from 40 million credit cards?

If you happen to be Target, hopefully you learn the importance of P2P encryption (also called point-to-point or end-to-end encryption).

40 million is the number of credit cards compromised when hackers exploited the chain’s point-of-sale system. Target’s not alone, either. Michael’s and Sally Beauty Supply have joined the ranks of companies realizing that in this data-dependent economy, appropriate security is vital to business. The best way to avoid credit card data breaches is with P2P encryption.

There are many electronic credit card processing options out there– that, of course, want to integrate with QB – but they are not always friendly to the merchant that doesn’t have large volume. In addition to the per transaction fee and discount rate, there is usually a monthly fee. For an author selling a book or a musician selling a CD, that becomes prohibitive because there are no guarantees of sales.