Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar. We are recording it so that we can release a video if you wanted to watch it later today, The video will also be available to people who weren't able to make it to today's webinar. I'm happy to be here today to talk about our partner, Atandra. Atandra has been in business for over 7 years now serving several thousand happy long-term customers. They have a great product that fits nicely into a lot of Miva Merchant’s users business needs. The product is called T-Hub and it’s an elegant way to connect web stores sales data to your QuickBooks records. For those of you who know and or use our Synchro product, it’s similar to Synchro, but it's a lot more powerful. It has a much richer feature set, it supports QuickBooks Online and Quickbooks Point of Sale and T-Hub also helps connect other marketplaces like Amazon and eBay all from the same user interface. Now Synchro does none of that, so you can understand how excited we are to have T-Hub available to our Miva Merchant users. So to tell you more about what T-Hub has to offer, I'd like to introduce you to Manish Jha, the President of Atandra.
Thanks to everybody for T-Hub integrating with your Miva stores. So we have T-Hub as a desktop product and an online product. I will go over briefly both T-Hub Desktop and T-Hub Online, showing you how you configure the application, how you do the QuickBooks Synch, how you ship packages and inventory update for the T-Hub Desktop. T-Hub Online has some amount of limited features compared to T-Hub Desktop. It does do QuickBooks Synch and ship packages with your Miva Merchant store. I would also compare T-Hub and T-Hub Online and then get into the different versions, pricing and questions. First, before we get started, for those of you who aren’t familiar I’d like to use this image to show you where T-Hub fits into your eCommerce world. If you’re selling on Miva Merchant website, T-Hub connects your website on one hand, Quickbooks on the other hand and your shipping providers for shipping packages and it does accepts phone orders directly into T-Hub.
So if you can see the arrows flowing - so the orders flow from your Miva Merchant store right into T-Hub. From there you can review the orders, send it to QuickBooks which could be QuickBooks Accounting, QuickBooks Point of Sale or QuickBooks Online. Then you send the orders to shipping carriers to print shipping labels right from the same interface. One you print the label it will automatically update Miva Merchant with your order shipping status and tracking. It will also notify the customers of the tracking information. If you manage inventory in your QuickBooks or QuickBooks Point of Sale, it can also update inventory stock availability from your QuickBooks to your Miva Merchant store. So, if you run out of products in your QuickBooks, it can automatically take it out of your web site. And if you sell something on your web site, it will automatically reduce the quantity in your QuickBooks. So that’s the overview of where T-Hub fits in.
This is the main screen in the T-Hub application. To connect to your Miva Merchant store you go into “Add Online Store” and select Miva Merchant from the list and the instructions are right here. For this example I have the store already set up. So you will see there’s a url for login and password that you create and an order download start date. So you provide a date from which you want to start downloading orders. So if you say 1/1/2017, it will start downloading orders on 1/1/2017. So that’s all the configuration you have to do to connect your Miva Merchant store.
If you’re selling on multiple channels like Amazon, eBay, etc. you can connect all of them from this one interface. The next thing you would do would be to connect to your QuickBooks. The QuickBooks information is right here. You provide the QuickBooks Company name, the edition and the version. The next thing you have to do is set up all your preferences. Before you go into setup I’ll walk you through how you process orders and then I’ll walk you through some of the preferences that you can control.
On a daily basis you will go into this Process Orders screen. Everything is here on this one screen where you work with your orders. On this screen you have two or three icons to work with. You click on this “Download Orders Link” and that will connect to your Miva Merchant store and Amazon, eBay or other channels you might sell on and bring all your online orders into this one interface. From here you can see the Order Details. Here you can select this post and post selected orders to QuickBooks. You can post multiple orders and post orders to QuickBooks. So this goes through all your preferences and it will post the sale in your QuickBooks. You don’t have to do any file import/export. Here I’m doing this by pushing a button. You could automate this every 15 minutes to run automatically and send your order to QuickBooks. You don’t even have to come to this screen to post to QuickBooks. The posting status is a column and will turn green. If you click on that column it will tell you what transaction was created in your QuickBooks and if you double click on that reference number it opens up that transaction from your QuickBooks. It will record the shipping, tax, discounts and everything about the order in your QuickBooks file. So that was sending your orders to QuickBooks. The next thing you might want to do from the same interface is to ship your packages.
To ship packages you can select one or more orders. The workflow is the same. So for this order I’m just going to do USPS with Endicia. You click on that link and it opens up the shipment screen where all your shipping methods will be populated by default. The weight comes from the web site default which you can override obviously. Now you can get rates, you can validate your addresses if you want and then you get rates. So this displays all the rates for the selected shipments. The default is already selected. You can override that if you want. Then you say “Generate Label.” So basically it’s a 2-step process. You get rates and then generate your label. That will go through your account and generate your label. You can then send it to your printers. So here I have it setup to print the shipping label and the packing list on the same sheet of paper. You can peel off the shipping label and put it on the box and put the packing list inside the box. So there are two labels and two packing lists. You can print with a regular laser printer or with a thermal printer. You can configure your printing all in one place. I’ll walk you through that in a minute. So that was processing orders, sending to QuickBooks and shipping the packages.
Now let’s go through the preferences and then I’ll walk you through the inventory part. All these preferences are set up in one place, under Store Preferences. This is where you configure how exactly you want to send your Miva Merchant orders into your QuickBooks file. So you can send a sales receipt or an invoice, marked invoices as paid, enable drop shipping, create purchase orders in your QuickBooks, you can use the website order number in QuickBooks or let QuickBooks generate the number. For customers it uses a customer naming scheme to create unique customers in QuickBooks. If you want to record individual customers, or some merchants don’t want to grow their customer list in QuickBooks and they would just create one customer in QuickBooks called Miva Customer or Web Customer and all the online orders will go against that one customer in QuickBooks. What that does it - it does not grow your customer list in QuickBooks because QuickBooks limits the number of customers, but you would still record all of the transactions. On the transaction, the actual customer’s name and address will still be there and you can record the email in QuickBooks. So that is our option for recording the customer. Now for products, it matches the product code from Miva Merchant to your Quickbooks item name. If it cannot find the product in QuickBooks you have two options; you can let T-Hub prompt you so you can do a mapping one time between the product code and web site and the product name in your QuickBooks. If you want you can just use a default catchall item for your QuickBooks or you can tell T-Hub to create the product in QuickBooks if it’s not there. For creating the product in QuickBooks a type, inventory part, not inventory or service type item. Here you record the shipping charges, what you as a merchant charge your customers for shipping, your shipping income. This is where you define that in Quickbooks as a line item. Here you define how you record taxes. If you charge sales tax on your web site to your customers, you record that here in QuickBooks as a line item or at the bottom of the invoice. And you can also attach tax name by state. So for California you can use one tax name and for New Jersey use another tax name if you have multiple locations.
The last screen has some other settings in QuickBooks. If you’re selling on multiple channels you can assign classes in QuickBooks and assign the class you want to assign for orders coming from Miva Merchant so that way you can run reports in QuickBooks that tells you how much sales you are doing per channel. You can assign a template, you can assign deposit to account, and you can alse define some custom fields that you can map here with your QuickBooks customer feeds. So these are all settings with QuickBooks. On the same screen you also define your shipping methods and how you ship out packages. So this is where you define whether you want to ship with UPS, FedEx or USPS. For each shipping provider you can assign as a default and this is where I mentioned you can change the template for the shipping label and the printer name that you want to use for your printouts. These are all settings for order postings to QuickBooks and order shipping.
Let’s get into the inventory part now where we manage inventory between QuickBooks and your Miva Merchant store. So all your inventory is displayed on this product, upload and synch to web site screen. So on this screen there is an option for updating quantity on web store. So this is where you tell T-Hub that you want to update quantity and price from QuickBooks to website. Or you can choose to only update quantity from QuickBooks to your Miva Merchant store. So once you have the options set up, you can select a product here. These are all your products here in your QuickBooks item list. At the bottom you can update this product on the web site. So that connects to your Miva Merchant store and automatically updates the quantity of that product on the web site.
I’ve just logged into my Miva Merchant store. Let’s go into the product screen. So the product code is the one that matches up - so from QuickBooks I have a quantity of 189 and here on Miva Merchant let me change the quantity. So I changed the quantity to zero and I will update it again from T-Hub to Miva Merchant and you’ll see the number was updated. Now this I’m doing from the screen, but you don’t have to do it from the screen. There is a T-Hub automator that runs in the background. If you look at the settings here for Miva Merchant, I have said every 15 minutes download my orders from web site automatically. So it automatically sends the orders to QuickBooks and updates the orders from QuickBooks to my web site. Now, if you have all these settings in your automator, then you can right click and say “Start” and then it will run in the background and keep updating your Miva Merchant store every 15 minutes with your quantity from QuickBooks. So your inventory in your QuickBooks and your web site will be in synch so if run out of stock or product, it will take it out of inventory on your web site.
The other thing I forgot to show you is on this same screen you can also push products from QuickBooks to your web site. So you can select any product and at the bottom you can see “Add this product to web store.” If you click that, it will add that product to your web site. Now, it creates a product on the website with basic information, like product name, description, price and quantity. You will have to login to your Miva Merchant Admin and fill in more detail like assigning images, categories, seo details and all that. So this product I just pushed from my QuickBooks to my web site and as you can see it created the product with a code, name and the description. You’ll now have to go in and add images and make the product live or “active.” That completes the overview for T-Hub Desktop.
Let me quickly show you some of the features in the T-Hub Online version. So as I said, the T-Hub Online only works with the QuickBooks Desktop and it does not do inventory updates from QuickBooks to web site. The paradigm is similar to the T-Hub Desktop. The first thing you do is to go under Settings. Once you create your account on T-Hub Online, and by the way, T-Hub Online and T-Hub Desktop have a free trial you can try, once you login there are two videos that show you how to configure the different options to get started. The other one is a quick overview of your autoprocessing and T-Hub Online. So you go into the Settings screen, all your settings are in one place, you go to Online Store Connection and setup your Miva Merchant connection. There’s a help link here to help walk you through how to connect step by step. Same as before you have the url and Order Start Date that you can select. Once you have connected to your store, you go into the Orders Screen and here you can filter your orders based on store, based on shipping status, based on whether it posts to QuickBooks or not. You can also define customer filters. So you can assign filters for orders over $100, or orders with multiple items. You can even create your own filters if you want to process them separately. This is what the screen looks like. It’s pretty straightforward, you just have to click “Fetch Orders.” This connects to your Miva Merchant store and any other channel you may have and download orders from all these channels. You can select the orders from here. You can print your packing list from here. So that will print all these selected orders, packing lists, etc. It prints one page per order. You can put your company name, logo and address here on the packing list.
To ship the packages you just select the orders, choose “Ship Orders” and on this screen you click on “Validate Address” if you want to validate the shipping address. You can click on “Get Rates” and you can select the Shipping Method, this is connected to UPS and then you generate the label. Here’s I selected the template just to print the Shipping Label and you can print this to your printer. Once you print the label it will automatically send the tracking to your Miva Merchant store.
On this screen, if you see I shipped this order, 1008, so the shipping status was changed to “Shipped.” There’s another icon stating this was shipped successfully, which means it was updated to your Miva Merchant store. To post orders to QuickBooks from here, it’s a similar process. Just select the orders, you click on this Post and Post to QuickBooks and that will get sent to QuickBooks. It will also have a history of what transaction got created in QuickBooks and gives a reference of what transaction number got created in your QuickBooks file. That’s Order Processing in T-Hub Online. Let me quickly walk back through the settings. I showed you how to connect to online store. The QuickBooks connection is straightforward. You go to this QuickBooks connection and there is a wizard that walks you through how to connect. All the settings for posting orders to QuickBooks is under QuickBook Settings. So it’s a similar process as the T-Hub Desktop. Click on Edit. The Settings are different for each channel. So here you select whether you want receipt or invoices, create new customer, create the item if it’s not there, record shipping charges, record taxes and other settings for discounts etc. So this is configuring how the orders flow into your QuickBooks. Some of the other defaults that you can set up is at the product level. You can assign default rate, dimensions for products and assign shipping default that you want to use for your products. You can define filters as I mentioned. Filters are nothing but special categories that you want to put orders under. So I have filters defined as orders under $100. So if you go can define criteria by $ amount. So you can use these filters to assign shipping defaults. For example, any order below $100 or below 5lbs, ship USPS, others ship via UPS. So you can define with those filters which is the shipping profile you want to use. For some condition I want to use FedEx, for others I want to use UPS or Endicia. You can configure which profile you want to use based on your work flow. The only other thing left here is you can assign flags. On the order screen you can select a few orders, and you can assign them a flag. Flag is any user defined name. So you can say, Flag is something for review, or Fragile, so you can add a flag and say “For Review.” You can also assign multiple flags.
Here you can define email templates. So if you have online consent with customer’s emails, you can define multiple warehouses, so if you’re shipping from multiple locations you can define multiple warehouses and ship from the same account.
Let’s go back to T-Hub Desktop and T-Hub Online and compare what editions are available. We have T-Hub Standard, Professional and Advanced. And the difference is, the Standard brings orders into QuickBooks, the Professional also works with Shipping, and QuickBooks Enterprise and QuickBooks Point of Sale. The QuickBooks Standard only works with Desktop and the T-Hub Advanced does all the Inventory stock from QuickBooks to Website. The pricing is available on the web site. The T-Hub online is based on use, so if some months you have low order volume, you only pay for the usage for that month.
Q&A
Q: Can you import all products from Miva to QuickBooks?
A: When you have an order it will download to QuickBooks. If it can’t find it will create the item. But it doesn’t download all the items from Miva Merchant. The best thing to do is to get a spreadsheet of all your products in Miva and QuickBooks already has a file import utility that you can use. In QuickBooks just click on “File,” “Utilities,” “Import,” “Excel File.” This will guide you step by step to import your customers from an excel file and that gives you flexibility for products that you can assign to different accounts, vendors, so it’s much more flexible.
Q: Can T-Hub push custom products from QuickBooks to Miva?
A: No. It only creates products on Miva from QuickBooks and updating existing product on Miva from QuickBooks. So creating products from QuickBooks to Miva, it will only create the product with name, description, quantity and price. Then you add images and other info from Miva’s Admin. For updating the product, you can only update the quantity and or the price.
Q. Are merchant accounts, batches, sales, daily fees, etc. recorded?
A. T-Hub does not record credit card fees. It only records the sale or income. For credit card fees you have to run reports from your merchant processor and create one bill for the month which will record all of the expenses.
Q: Is there a way for T-Hub to bring products down from Miva to QuickBooks? Is there a way to synch products from Miva into QuickBooks? How long would it take to synch 15,000 products from Miva into QuickBooks?
A: T-Hub does not bring products from Miva to QuickBooks. It only brings orders and through the orders it can create the product in QuickBooks.
Q: Is T-Hub compatible with QuickBooks Enterprise Edition 2014?
A: Yes, it is compatible with Enterprise 2014.
Q: If you switch from another QuickBooks connector, is there a way to start at a specific date so you don’t get data duplicated?
A: Yes, where you set up the connection for Miva, you can specify the date for which to start the order download both in the Desktop and the Online Version.
Q: Is there any way of adding a feature to download all items to QuickBooks with T-Hub?
A: We can certainly discuss this. I’m not familiar with how that might work. We could talk via email after this call.
Q: How does a product that has multiple color and sizes variants work to reconcile inventory?
A: In QuickBooks each product variant should have its own item. So in QuickBooks accounting, each variant is its own product. So for example, this one here under apparel; I have a black shoe which has it’s own sku. The variant in your Miva Merchant store should also have the same sku. The QuickBooks matches the code in Miva Merchant.
Q: Does it work with QuickBooks 2014 for Mac.
A: No, T-Hub does not work for Quickbooks 2014 for Mac, only QuickBooks for Windows. QuickBooks for Mac does not support integration with other applications.
Q: What is the security when purchasing an online product? How do I keep people out of my QuickBooks account?
A: If you’re running QuickBooks Desktop it’s running on your local computer which cannot be accessed from outside. What T-Hub is doing is pulling your orders from your web site locally and then connects to your QuickBooks locally, so your QuickBooks is not exposed from outside. T-Hub Online also does not connect to your QuickBooks directly. So T-Hub Online posts orders from your Miva Merchant Store and sends your orders to your Intuit Online Account. Intuit then syncs to your QuickBooks account. So we just send the order information to Intuit’s web servers and Intuit sends your info to your QuickBooks on your Desktop.
Q: Can you edit, add or remove items from your orders?
A: Yes, in T-Hub you can edit the orders. You can double click on the order, for example, this customer ordered one quantity, so you can double click on it and make it two. You can change the description, the price, but if you change the price here it will not go back to the web site and collect more money or update the order on the web site.
Q: Can T-Hub update stock by attribute? For example, attributes like size, color, design, material, etc.
A: Yes, as I mentioned earlier, each attribute combination change should have a variant on the web site and that variant has a unique sku and product code which should match the QuickBooks item name. So if you’re using QuickBooks Accounting, it matches the item name in your QuickBooks. If you are using Point of Sale then it can match on item number in your point of sale or the alternate look up. So let’s take this for example. So this is my point of sale for those using point of sale. So in point of sale you have a point of sale item number and there is the ALU or Alternate Look Up. So T-Hub can match either on Item Number or Item Lookup from the Point of Sale Site and from the web site it would be the product code.
Q: What if you currently have customers name, last name, office name, zip code, can T-Hub automate orders from these existing customers?
A: So in T-Hub you can create a naming scheme for customers. Just go into QuickBooks to create last name, first name, and zip code. So it will create a customer name such as Smith, Jane - 92019 and it will see if that name exists in your customer list. It only checks for the customer name on top, it does not check first name, last name here at the bottom. So it will check this name and if this name matches, then it will use that customer. Other wise it will create a new customer in QuickBooks.
Q: Which versions of Miva Merchant will T-Hub support?
A: I believe it is version 5.5 or 6. I will double check on this and send out an email.
Q: Could T-Hub handle orders that are partially backordered in Miva Admin partially shipped?
A: The orders will get downloaded to T-Hub, but it would not know which items had been shipped and which were backordered. So if you are looking to ship some items directly from Mvia and some items out of T-Hub, that probably wouldn’t work. It would download the full order information and you can ship from within T-Hub.
Q: Do you have to have products set up in QuickBooks for this to work or can it be used just to enter orders into Miva Merchant automatically.
A: You don’t have to have products set up in QuickBooks. If you go back to the settings under items, you can tell T-Hub to create the product in QuickBooks if it is not there. Or you can create a generic item and have everything go against a generic item in QuickBooks if the item is not there.
Q: I do not use QuickBooks. Can you edit the orders and add or remove items from T-Hub?
A: If you do not use QuickBooks and you want to edit the orders, you can. So look up the order and double click on it. You can type in here and make changes to the order right here. So you don’t need QuickBooks. If you don’t have QuickBooks and you want to add something, you can just type it in here. So yes, you can type in the information directly into T-Hub in the Order Details screen.
Q: From within T-Hub Admin, does it support partial order shipment? If an item is put on backorder, would we be able to print a packing list?
A: Partial Shipment is supported in the T-Hub Online version. On the Shipments screen the default is “Ship all items,” but you can override that and click “Ship selected items.” Just click on the item you want to mail, then click on “Ship,” so the quantity order was two and you could just select one. And that will allow it to only ship the items selected and will appear on the packing list. However, the partial shipment is not supported in the T-Hub Desktop version.
Q: Type of orders T-Hub can create in QuickBooks.
A: Sales Receipt, Invoice, Estimate and Sales Order. You can select which if you go back to the Preference screen. For Sales Order you can create an invoice and mark the invoice as paid.
Q: Can the invoice be marked “Pending?”
A: Yes, on the other Settings tab, there is a “Pending Status” flag. Just remember that as you mark the invoice as “Pending” the inventory is not taken out because it’s not an actual sale yet and also you cannot record payment for a Pending invoice.
Q: Is a phone order considered a different channel than your Miva Store?
A: No. A phone order is not considered a different channel. There is actually a setting for the same channel. For the same Miva channel you can say under the Order Download Settings, “Accept Phone Orders.” You can give a prefix for all your phone orders and now it will allow you to enter phone orders for Miva Merchant. So to enter phone orders you go to “Orders,” “Enter Order,” and you can search for your customers under QuickBooks, or previous orders that were already downloaded. So in this case I can select a previous order and then make changes to the customer details.
Q: Can you just use T-Hub to download the orders to QuickBooks and then actually process the order in QuickBooks?
A: You can use T-Hub to download the order into QuickBooks. I’m not sure what you mean by Process the order in QuickBooks. If you mean to charge credit cards in QuickBooks, then no. T-Hub will not bring the credit card information from that site to QuickBooks. But if you mean ship the order from QuickBooks, you can do that and if you use the QuickBooks Shipping Manager from inside QuickBooks. T-Hub can pull the tracking from within QuickBooks. So if you ship from within QuickBooks then T-Hub will pull the tracking out from QuickBooks to Miva Merchant.
Q: If shipping via U.S.P.S. will T-Hub automatically select Priority Mail if over 13 oz.?
A: You can define profiles based on filters. But that exact setting I need to check and let you know.
Q: We have two Miva Merchant stores with multiple channels. If we are pushing products to the site in T-Hub, can we select which products are available to each channel?
A: Yes, on the inventory screen, you can select each store here and push the product to each store separately. When T-Hub runs the update the products on the web site, it will only update those it finds a match for.
Q: Is there a reason you can’t bring credit card info over to QuickBooks?
A: Yes, most shopping carts don’t send full credit card numbers for security reasons. So we can not get the full credit card number from the Miva Merchant store.
Q: Do you have to go to Set Up to switch from Process Orders to send an invoice?
A: No. You can do everything from the Orders screen. You don’t have to go to the Set Up Screen unless you want to change a setting for shipping or QuickBooks.