Donations, Groupon and refunds in QuickBooks

While our QuickBooks accountants were answering QuickBooks related questions on Yahoo Answers asked by small business accountants, they came across a few interesting ones regarding how to book income coming from Groupon and donations (the last for a nonprofit organization) or giving customers a refund. We thought to put the answers and questions together in case you find yourselves needing to book similar transactions in your QB accounting business software.

Q1: Customer refund in QuickBooks?
I make a customer receipt for every payment the customer makes. At the end of the day, I go to “record deposits” tab and check every payment; this will make my deposit amount. Sometimes I have to give a cash refund to the customer for the service they have already used and those money was already deposited before. When I make a refund in QuickBooks it does not reduce my deposit amount in the deposit screen. How do I reduce the amount of money in the “record deposit screen”?

A: If you use the “Use Credit To” functionality of a credit memo, it will only allow you to record the refund directly against your bank account, instead of grouping it with other Undeposited Funds. The simplest method to do this would be to create a Journal Entry instead of using the Credit Memo/Refund transaction. You would debit the Income account and credit Undeposited Funds for the amount of the refund. This will then show in the Payments to deposit window as a negative amount. Keep in mind that QuickBooks will not let you make a negative ‘deposit’, however, so you will need to have more to deposit than refund for the day.

Q2: How do you book income Groupon in QuickBooks?
I am a bookkeeper and I have a new client that is using Groupon to promote his business.
Two Questions:
1) I want to book the income as Unearned Revenue and as service is used book that amount as sales. Is that the correct way anyone else is handling Groupon Revenue?
2) What if the Groupon is not redeemed, the amount I assume stays in Unearned Revenue, but what if they customer never shows or uses the Groupon?

A: I would recommend treating the Groupon similar to a gift certificate. You can create another charge item and link it to a liability account. If the customer never redeems the Groupon, then you would move the amount from the liability to income. Keep in mind that you would have to reverse this transaction if the customer ever did show up.

Q3: Can you use Intuit QuickBook as a donation method?
I work at a non-profit charter school. We use QuickBooks for employee paychecks and use QuickBooks for an after school program for requesting payment. The payment is through QuickBooks. The parents get an invoice and they pay that payment through a billpay.quickbooks.com link.
We want to set up a similar method for people want to do donations. Can we do this? So instead of payments, it would be a donation account? A separate account where this money goes?

A: QuickBooks can track donations to a separate account, but you would first have to create an invoice for the amount in order for it to show up on billpay.quickbooks.com.
There is a preference you can turn on that will let you select which account a payment is going to be going to (by default, it’s Undeposited Funds). You can specify a separate bank account for any donation payments received.

Advanced Persistent Threat Work Against Cyber Terrorism

The Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) protection is one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity solutions. As digitalization brings a lot many threats along with it. This has resulted in the continuous emergence of data breaches and cyber terrorism affecting numerous sectors.

That is why it has become very important to get protected from the Advanced Persistent Threat. These protection solutions are largely used in financial and government institutions. The threat landscape is quickly evolving. And along with the APT protecting gaining a strong grip in the cyber world.

What do we understand by Advanced Persistent Threat?
We will try to understand Advanced Persistent Threat in a very simple way. The APT is a broader term that describes an attack by intruders who mines sensitive data from your network. They have a long-term presence in the network to slowly retrieve your data. These intruders mainly target government and large enterprises network.

What is the difference between APT attack and web application threats?
Advanced Persistent Threat is different from other web application threat. APT is a very intricate plan for attacking your network. They take more targeted moves. Basically, they are not dependent on hit and run attacks as most of the hacking is. Once an APT attack happens to your network, it will infiltrate most of the information.

They are not automated and are manually operated. APT attackers work in three steps that are infiltration, expansion, and extraction. The designers of the APT monitor their actions by altering its code to avoid detection.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection: all what you should know
Not to get confused with the Advanced Persistent Threat we talked above, APT protection is a type of security solution. In order to get protected from Advanced Persistent Threat, many solutions have been developed. One of them is an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection. These systems help to secure the network and shield the records from getting misused. The APT protection system is used worldwide.

Offerings that are given by the APT protection system Solutions
The solutions that are being offered by APT protection actually collects security data from servers and network devices. Then examines the data stored to discover trends, detects threats. Thus it helps the organization to investigate any alerts.

Services
The services offered by the APT protection system ensure holistic 360-degree protection. It helps the corporations to resist APTs, and identify signs at early periods. These services monitor both real-time events and past data to gain visibility into security.

Different types of solutions available for Advanced Persistent Threat.
Advanced Persistent Threat protection provides various types of solutions. Some of them are sandboxing, endpoint protection, Next-Generation Firewall, Forensic Analysis, and many more.

Endpoint Protection
Endpoint protection is also called endpoint security. It is a system of protecting the network of your computer. It is especially important for those networks that are distantly bridged to the client devices. It ensures a definite standard of compliance to be followed by any device.

Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)
Next-Generation Firewall is a third-generation protection solution. It is very beneficial in monitoring the traffic of the network. It involves deep pocket inspection in order to have proper control over the application of any network. The firewall has far-reaching control of applications.

Sandboxing
Sandboxing is a software management system. It gives extra security to the system. Therefore, sandboxing prevents suspicious applications and malware that can have a negative effect on the system. It is also helpful in testing unverified programs.

Forensic Analysis
Forensic analysis also helps in improving cybersecurity. Thus it is used in Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection. Forensic data are widely used to identify the IP addresses of cyber attackers. Thus the suspicious IP address can be blacklisted accordingly. This eliminates the chances of future attacks by hackers.

What could be the consequences of these types of threats?
The motive of APT is to gain sensitive information illegally.
It is difficult to detect because they don’t clearly appear to be malware.
Sensitive information of any organization will be compromised.
Trade secrets can be revealed.
Who mainly use the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection?
The Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection is used in Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI). There is an increased demand to secure sensitive data in this sector. Government and defense, IT, healthcare are some of the common sectors that depend on Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection to secure their sensitive data.

The bottom line
The Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection Market has been witnessing rapid growth due to increasing security breaches and cyberattacks. If you are worried about sensitive data, you must be aware of APT. APTs are one of the very prolonged cyberattacks with the intention of stealing some confidential. That is why protection from these Advanced Persistent Threat has become a matter of concern.

There are a variety of solutions and services that are being offered by APT protection. Some of the examples include sandboxing, endpoint protection, Next-Generation Firewall, and Forensic Analysis.it is widely used by BFSI, government organizations, and many other small and large enterprises.

5 Best Technology Used to Develop TikTok Clone App!

The TikTok app doesn’t need any introduction, everyone knows what TikTok is right? This Video sharing app has hit the market by the hurricane and it became the most trending app in social media. Users use this platform to express themselves for the world to see and get entertained.

Not even a day goes by in the lives of millennials without going through social media apps. The prologue of TikTok has evolved as a popular trend among people of all ages and set a new standard for upcoming video-sharing apps.

The application has millions of fans all over the world, and they spend hours creating content. The innovative social media platform has opened up numerous opportunities for enthusiastic entrepreneurs to launch their apps.

An app like TikTok in India

Since the ban of Hilton in the Indian market, the demand for the homegrown app has increased to the highest, amidst that Kurafat, an Indian short video app, but better has come along with other apps like – Moj, Chingari, Josh, Max Takatak, etc.

What is the best technology used to develop the TikTok clone app

Multiple modern technologies go hand-in-hand to develop a TikTok clone script. If you plan on developing a native mobile app, contemplate choosing Swift and Kotlin as your programming language for iOS and Android apps, respectively.

TikTok clone app development compels a bunch of tech stacks as mentioned below-

1. Programming language.

Short Video apps like TikTok can be developed by using Java and Kotlin for Android and C or Swift for iOS. If you choose to build the hybrid version, you can use React Native, Xamarin, or Flutter for both Android and iOS

2. Database management

For Database management integration, you can use MongoDB, SQL, or Cassandra.

MongoDB- MongoDB is an open-source document-oriented database that is constructed to store a huge scale of data and also authorizes you to work with that data very efficiently. The MongoDB database is developed and managed by MongoDB.Inc under SSPL. It also delivers official driver support for all the popular languages like C, C++, C#, and .Net, Java, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Motor, Ruby, Scala, Swift, Mongoid.
SQL- SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It is utilized to communicate with a database. SQL is a language to operate databases; it comprises database creation, deletion, fetching rows, modifying rows, etc. SQL is an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard language, but there are many various versions of the SQL language.
Cassandra- Apache Cassandra is an open-source, distributed, and decentralized storage system (database), for organizing very massive amounts of structured data that diverge across the world. Cassandra is a highly scalable, high-performance distributed database constructed to handle large amounts of data across many entity servers, giving high availability with no single point of failure. It is a type of NoSQL database
3. Cloud hosting

Cloud hosting architecture powered by Amazon Web Services and Azure

Amazon Web Services – Amazon Web Services offers an extensive set of global cloud-based products containing compute, networking, mobile, developer tools, analytics, management tools, IoT, storage, databases, security, and enterprise applications. These services help companies move faster, lower IT costs, and scale.
Azure- Azure is a social cloud computing platform—with solutions incorporating Infrastructure that can be utilized for services such as analytics, storage, networking. Azure is a fast, virtual computing, flexible, and inexpensive platform and its pricing and facilities make it the best public cloud subsidy on the market.
4. Analytics

F9r Analytics Apache spark is the best technology to use – Apache Spark is a data processing framework that can promptly perform processing tasks on very vast data sets, and can also administer data processing tasks across numerous computers. Spark is a lightning-fast assortment computing technology, manufactured for quick computation. It is designed to encompass a wide range of workloads such as batch applications, iterative algorithms, interactive queries, and streaming.

5. Backend development

For backend development Node. js is the most promising technology to use. Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment that operates on the V8 engine and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser.

Node.js can develop dynamic page content. It can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server. collect form data. Node.js can also add, delete, alter data in your database.

Hire the Best Mobile App Development Team for Your Business

Social media apps for TikTok, are getting more popular among every age group, the best target audience to generate dividends from. However, you must have something new in your app so that people are attracted to it and start preferring your design and features. To make your Tiktok clone app successful, you need to depend on a team that offers world-class mobile app development services at the most competitive price.

For that, you can choose ThinkStart Private Limited, this company works globally and has developed plenty of applications, they use all the latest tech stack, and understand your demands and need to create the app just like you want.