Price Comparison Chart for Online Payment Gateways
If you’re interested in accepting payment online (from your clients or customers), you may find this useful. It is a price comparison chart for common payment gateways for accepting money online.
| Cost & Fees | |
| PayPal | 2.2% ~ 2.9% + $0.30 |
| PayPal Website Pro | 2.2% ~ 2.9% + $0.30 |
| PayPal Palyflow Pro | $249 setup, $59.95/month, $0.10/tran. |
| Authorize.net | $99 setup, $17.95/month, $0.10/tran. |
| PSiGate | $199 setup, $29.95/month, $0.25/tran. |
| BluePayGo | |
| iTransact | $49, $99 setup, $10, $24.95 /month |
| 2Checkout | $49 setup, 5.5% + $0.45/tran. |
| Google Checkout | 2.2% ~ 2.9% + $0.30/tran. |
To find out how to choose which one is best for you, please check FreshBooks’ blog post “Which Payment Gateway Should I Choose?“
A Small Improvement in Habits Tracker
We have updated the site with a maintenance release over the weekend. Among the improvements made, I want to show you a change in the habits tracking feature. Please check the new edit form below.
You probably notice that we’ve added a new field, which specifies how many repetitions forming a habit should take. We used to have a built-in 21 days (or repetitions if the habit doesn’t repeat daily) for determining if a habit is formed 100%. Later we found this is too limiting for some users. So now you can have a few more choices, like 30, 60 or 90 days.
The choice you make here will affect the strength of the habits you are working on. For example, if you set a habit to take 60 repetitions, instead of 30, you will then need to check twice number of times for the same amount of formed strength.
We’re also working on a few other features for the habits tracking, one of which would be the ability to track negative habits breaking or removal. So please stay tuned for the next update.
PDF Reports for Your Goals and Tasks
Last week, we launched a new release. It has the PDF reporting features that we have been working on for a while. This new function allows you to view and print all your goals and tasks. We also re-arranged the reports section a little bit, so now the previous “Progress” section becomes a sub-section under “Reports” tab. We also added two more sub-sections “Goal Reports” and “Task Reports”.
On “Detailed report for active goals”, you will see each goal starting on a new page, listing information about the goal, its subgoals, and all its active tasks. This is ideal for a printout of all your goals and subgoals. Perhaps you may want to post it on your wall or somewhere you can see it everyday.
However, if your goal has too many active tasks, or recurring tasks, it may not be a good idea to print out the detailed report, as it will display all these active tasks.
Also there seems to be a little problem with detailed goal reports displaying certain picture formats. We’re looking into this and if you happen to have similar problems, please do let us know.
12 Goal Setting Mistakes in Five Minutes or Less
Selfgrowth.com founder David Riklan explains in this short video 12 common mistakes commonly made by people when trying to set goals. It’s interesting that most of what he talks about is exactly the guiding principles that we used in designing the GoalsOnTrack features. Please check it out and hope it can help with your goals.
Upcoming new feature: PDF reports
As always, we’re taking a “kaizen” approach to GoalsOnTrack development, which means we’re always making improvements and implement changes that can make the program work better for helping people reach goals. The word “kaizen” means “improvement” in Japanese, but it also sounds a lot like “gaishan” in Chinese, which also means “improvement”, “change for the better”, so I wonder there is any relationship between the two.
Anyway, we’re working on a new feature for the reports section, where you will be able to view all your goals and tasks in various PDF reports. We will do a few summary reports, and then a detailed report on each goal. Here is a preview of how the PDF report looks like.
If you have any suggestions as to how we can make these reports better suit your needs, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
How To Keep Focused And Motivated About Your Goals
Here I’d like to share with you a nice little video on how to focus and get motivated on your goals. It talks about three techniques that everyone can use to improve the chance of achieving any goals. Enjoy.
Improvement in Recurring Tasks
There has been some improvement made to the software in addition to the subgoal features, since we released a major upgrade a few weeks ago. One thing worth mentioning is the better support for recurring tasks.
Now you can edit a recurring task, and update all its instances linked to that orginal task. This makes it easier for you to make changes to all your recurring tasks because you no longer have to edit them one by one or delete all first and re-add them.
Also, when you delete a recurring task, it will ask you if you want to remove its other instances as well. You may choose to delete that one task only, or all its recurring instances.
We’ve fixed a few other small bugs around subgoal feature. As always, if you find anything breaks or not working as you’d like it to, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
New Feature Launched: Subgoals
It’s been another week. After quite some beta testing, bug fixing, and last-minute finetuning, I am happy to annouce today that we’ve launched the new “Subgoal” feature.
Subgoals can help you break down a larger, more difficult goal into much smaller goals that are easier to accomplish. While accomplishing your subgoals one at a time, you know you are making progress on the overall goal, and completion of the bigger goal is just a matter of completing these smaller subgoals. “Subgoal” feature in GOT is designed for exactly such purposes.
For GOT users, functionally, a “subgoal” is not much different than existing goals that you’ve setup already. You can add tasks, track progress on any subgoals just like you do on any normal goals. However, an important feature of subgoals is that any progress made on them is directly reflected in its parent goal progress. You will see it in action whenever you complete a task under a subgoal.
To creat subgoals, go to the main “Goals” tab, and under each goal, there is now an extra button called “Add a subgoal“. The subgoal creation form is similar to normal goal form, except that you don’t need to enter description and categories fields, but instead you need to enter a percentage value for the subgoal, in a field called “Parent Goal Completion %”.
It means how much progress completing this subgoal will contribute to its parent goal completion. It’s important that you enter a percentage so that the software can track how much progress is made on a parent goal whenever a subgoal’s progress is updated.
Once you’ve created subgoals for any of your goals, they can be viewed on your Dashboard page, as shown in the example screenshot below.
You should notice that each subgoal is listed under its parent, along with their goal status, due date, progress etc. This helps you see all your goal progress at a glance.
We added another feature which allows you to control whether a goal should be visible on Dashboard page. Now you can selectively show which goals you’re most actively working on to be displayed on dashboard.
I am planning to create a tutorial video to explain more about subgoals, so here is a brief introduction and hope it helps you get a general idea of how to use subgoals. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Upcoming new feature: Subgoals
We’ve been working on a new feature which allows you to break down a larger goal into subgoals. The purpose of this feature is to help you create action plans for goals that may seem too general, or too far away in future. Here is the quick peek of how it looks like when it’s available.
An important feature for this is that when you complete tasks that have made progress on your subgoals, the parent goal progress is automatically updated.
Also because of structural changes introduced by subgoals, we feel necessary to add a function that user can choose which goals to show on dashboard. That way, for any subgoals that you’re not actively working on, you can hide them on dashboard.
We’re in the process of final testing on subgoal features and it will be launched by the end of this week.
Top 10 Small Business Goals for 2010
Have you wondered what the top 10 goals are for small businesses for 2010? SmallBizTrends recently published survey results that show the top ten most voted goals. See if any of those may surprise you.
