As of early this morning the equipment that runs Merchant’s Mirror is officially PCI-Compliant according to McAfee Secure, one of the world’s largest PCI Approved Scanning Vendors.

Why is this important? In 2005 the credit card issuers (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover) all banded together to get businesses that charged credit cards to adhere to some very basic rules for security.  The rules are mostly common sense.  Things like you must have a firewall, you must maintain appropriate software patches to your server equipment, and you should never store credit card information.  As of today still less than half of all businesses on the Internet are PCI compliant.

McAfee Secure provides a top-of-the-line PCI Compliance scanning service that goes through your web site and performs hack attempts, denial of service attempts, and identification routines all in an effort to simulate a hacker’s attempt to gain access to your equipment.¬† They then report to you any and all vulnerabilities, even if they aren’t really a significant threat, for you to address.¬† In order to be considered “compliant” you must have no current vulnerabilities shown.

These scans will be done at regular intervals throughout the next year to insure that we maintain our compliance.  This helps us as we maintain credit card industry requirements and it helps you feel confident that we are providing an appropriate level security for your data at all times.

For more on PCI Compliance please visit the PCI Security Standards Council web site by clicking here.

Today I am proud to announce that the Merchant’s Mirror Accounting solution has finally reached Release Candidate (RC) phase.¬† The RC phase is the final step before our full production release.¬† In this phase we will keep new feature additions at a minimum and the core system will be thoroughly tested.¬† For our beta users, if you find a bug or experience any type of problem please submit a message so that the team can address any issues.

In addition, we have also released our system prices.  The pricing for a regular monthly subscription is $15.95USD per month or you can save 10% by subscribing annually at $169.95USD.

Why yes.

Merchant’s Mirror got a fresh new look today. It still holds some of the old design but comes with a lot more pizazz and even a new mascot: the tree frog. Haven’t really thought of a name for him yet. But really, the entire website was revamped so it has a cleaner and more easily navigated feel. We even put in a quick two minute screencast of the product itself in action.

December 19th will be the date that we go to release candidate. January 1st will be our product launch. Press and bloggers keep an eye out for announcements. It’ll be your chance to get the word out.

We’re working out the last of the kinks and already planning on the next phase of development, we’re ecstatic to be able to share with everyone the “next evolution of accounting.”

Estimates and Quotes have been implemented as well as a number of minor bug fixes. The Beta team is driving a lot of feature requests which has been keeping our development team very busy. The key to a great product is constant communication between all customer groups, be it internal or external to the company. In this case, the testing group and development staff have been in constant motion which allows for a better product to be created.

A lot of behind the scenes action taking place as we break into December. Only a month left before full launch and we’re extremely happy to see things progressing smoothly.