Today is going to be short and sweet! 🙂

Today I want to give you a sneak peak of what I did today in the office, questions I answered and all other related things.

Why? 

Just maybe, their questions are your questions too or a specific thing I did was something you’ve been wondering how to do too. I’m also gonna be sharing a few nuggets about the things… So let’s see…

? Started the day with my cold brewed coffee.. (after the morning school rush of course!)

? Then I sent personal thank you emails to our clients who just signed up and those who just paid their invoices. This might be something you want to do too – doesn’t take much time really.

? After that, I tried to set up our Stripe to have instant payout. 

So for those who do not know, Stripe is a payment gateway or processor that will let you accept payments online. It’s kinda like Paypal but it is more about merchant services and business vs just transfer of funds. With Stripe, you can easily take credit card payments on your website. Note that there are countries where Stripe is still not available. Other options if you can’t or don’t want to sign up for Stripe would be Authorize.net, Moneris and Chase WePay.

Now, Instant Payout is basically one of the types of frequencies when your payment processor will send you your funds. Meaning, if a customer bought something via your site, the funds then get sent to your payment processor and your payment processor will then need to send it to your bank account.

The frequency of Payouts depends on your credibility with your payment processor. 

If you’re a starter then it could likely be their default frequency which could be anywhere from 1-7 days – again depending on the payment processor. With Stripe it starts at 7 days.

As you build your credibility it could go faster than that, up until you can do instant payout where you can get it in minutes. 

There’s one caveat to this though. If you get a number of refunds a day or a week or a month, this might not be a fit because you might be charged on both sides – your payment processor and your bank account fees. 

We barely get refunds. I think our last refund request was 3 years ago which isn’t a huge amount either. So instant payout will definitely work for us. I actually didn’t realize that we’ve been eligible for it for a long time now I just needed the right bank account for it to work. And that’s what I was trying to set up today.

? Okay, next I took a last runthrough of the 2 sites that we are partially launching next week. Partially because we’re only launching the shop side of it, and not the learning module/membership site just yet.

Checked that everything is connected and integrated. Checked if all plugins have the correct licenses and API keys (can’t explain it today, maybe next time), the front-end is perfect with correct colors, names, device responsiveness and if there are still things that we need the client to do.

? Found a few small details to change and sent that list to our Project Manager for her to create tasks for other members of the team.

? In the afternoon, I welcomed a new retainer client and warned him (in a good way) that he’ll be getting a bunch of email notifications from our Ticketing and Project Management tool – SMD Portal. 

I’ve been asked what we use as our project management tool. 

Short answer – we use iTop. 

Long answer – it’s an open source web app and requires coding knowledge. I like it because we can customize it to what we need. We can add anything we want by custom coding – which we are SO good at anyway! 

BUT… (here’s the but)

I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re not in the IT Services industry or a bigger enterprise or agency type industry. It’s a lot more complex and you need to know how to maintain it. So if you want easy flow navigation, designs, dashboards like how most applications are now, this isn’t for you. And PLUS, it was really built for organizations that run IT Service Management.

But if you think it’s for you, contact us. We might be able to set it up for you. 

Moving on. 

? Had a small convo with the AccessAlly owner, Nathalie Lussier. 

? Checked on the changes we’ve made to a client’s site that has Divi Builder in it to improve a section of her membership site. I wrote about the issues and difficulties of using Divi Builder here. Read it if you’re interested. Right now we can’t migrate her site yet but that’s in the queue.

? Answered a couple of questions from one of our clients about converting their membership site into a mobile app and how they can add quizzes to their public site. As for the apps, I’ll probably just write a separate post about this next time. For the quizzes, I suggested using AccessAlly’s quiz feature as it is very robust. There are so many different platforms that do quizzes now but she wants that it is hosted on their site. 

? Next, I checked out an issue on OAuth on one of our client’s sites. For this purpose, OAuth is to connect 2 sites together in a way that the user will not have to login to 2 different sites. In our world it is called Single Sign On. At this point, the issue is with the other site’s problem which is a third party app. We needed to contact their support for that.

? Replied to our accountant with the mountain of requirements they need from us.

? And lastly, I’m writing this blog. 

And now I’m done my day. 🙂

Charm

P.S.
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