I do bookkeeping for small business. One of the services I provide my clients is that they can call or e-mail me with questions. I can then walk them through the solution. With some clients I include this service in their regular fees, others I charge per time. Intuit (the maker of QuickBooks) offers phone support with a $50.00 per time fee or service packages.

Here's my question. If you have a bookkeeping or tech support question, does waiting for an email response or a call back fit your needs. I charge between $10-25 for a call, series of call or email solution.

Any feedback about this idea would be appreciated.

Rachel Martinez
RLM Services
www.KnoxvilleBookkeeper.com
Bookkeeping for Small Business
Getting QuickBooks to work for YOU

I'm not sure who you want to target but I know most companies have their own technical support in their corporate office or somewhere else within their company.

Sorry. Maybe I should have been more specific when talking about small business. My clients / target market typically have 0-25 employees, are sole proprietors or a privately held company, and are not affilated with any larger company. They are single retail stores, contractors, professional companies, etc.

A lot of the time the questions I get are "How should I set up ___ type of sale?" or "How do I give a customer a discount?" Not really technical support questions, more of a procedural thing.

I wonder if anyone here has ever had a need for this type of service. Did you call Intuit? Call a local accountant, CPA or bookkeeper to come out and fix the problem? Try and figure it out on your own?

I talk to people every week who tell me they know they aren't using QuickBooks right but have been doing things wrong for so long they can't afford to get the help they need. This would be a low-cost solution to help keep more companies from ending up in this situtation.

Rachel,

Just thought I'd make a quick reply to say that I think your idea about email support for Quickbooks questions is fantastic- - I speak from the fact that I've been a Quickbooks user for over ten years, and I've often thought that as a business idea there were many bookkeepers or accountants that could capitalize on it if the effort were made. Myself, I've always resolved my own questions by trial and error, documentation and such...offering your email support would be a great solution for many people that use a very popular small business tool.

One area that I think would be great to expound on would be the taxline exporting. As a selling point, the automation could be a huge benefit for a business, and I think many people would choose a service that offered close support for such a feature.

kgc