I'm using this vehicle to try and warn others of the tremendously poor and misleading service that Innovative Merchant Services delivers in handling small business credit card transactions. As much as we appreciate and use Quickbooks as are our core accounting tool, we are are totally amazed that parent company Intuit steers Quickbooks users towards IMS as their fulfillment company of choice for the Billing Solutons service offered as an add-on to the Quickbooks e-billing function.

Several other posters have noted they are expensive. Unto itself, we wouldn't mind paying for the service, but sadly, the return on investment is sadly lacking. For a company with the words innovative and service in their name, they exercise very little "innovation", and next to no "service".

Our issues center around numerous transaction that clients have tried to make via credit card. The recurring symptoms (and these have become progressively more common) usually include:

- Inability for client to log in to the system to pay their bills

- Links on e-invoices to the online payment system are broken links, and steer clients into dead-end pages

- Most frustrating of all, we get e-mail alerts a client has paid their bill and we need to download the transaction into our general ledger. Yet when we try to do this from within Quickbooks, the online payment center states there are no payments to download.

We are bailing as soon as possible from using IMS as our fulfillment provider, based on the last episode we are enduring from this past week where a transaction showed up as an e-mail alert. Quickbooks was able to access the online payment center, but when the transaction was downloaded, there was no funding amount, and as such, no way to ascertain which client invoices had been paid via credit card. Fortunately I was able to log in and get details on the transaction. Yet when I called the IMS "help" desk (again a very large assumption on their part calling it that), the woman I spoke with (Hazel) basically made me feel as if it were my fault the transaction had gotten screwed up, instructed me to wait next next time until after 3:00 PM PST when the "batches run" (who knew that?) and then I'd have no issues. I followed her instuction, but the $8.5K transaction in question was not there for downloading and two days later, has failed to show up. Thus, I once again have to manually enter the transaction into Quickbooks, and suffer the humiliation of calling the client and asking them which invoices they paid on the amount.

We are setting up merchant services directly with our corporate bank, and as soon as they are in place, we will be very enthusiastically telling the IMS folks to shut down our accounts immediately.

THEY okayed 4000.00 worth of credit card purchases from a customer, 4 months later they took the money out of my account, 3 weeks later they sent a letter saying the card was fraudulent. I canceled the merchant account, they kept taking money from my bank account so I closed it. I opened a new account which they did not have any authority to use. Last week my bank statement showed they had taken 69.00 out of it. I have no idea how they got the number, and they did not have my authorization to touch and money in that account.