Desktop and Cloud: Together is Better
Businesses need software and systems to help them get things done efficiently. The global pandemic has been fuel for recent growth in the small and mid-sized business software market where companies of all types are adopting more applications and services to better support operations. Especially when users are no longer able to work in the office and customers demanding increasingly more personalized services, businesses are finding ways to get more done in less time and with fewer resources.
According to Intuit® research, “businesses, on the average, use four or more apps to run their business”. You could consider that business owners and managers buy software apps to get jobs done. Software helps structure the work and the information, creating workflows that improve efficiency and accuracy.
The key to getting the full benefit from any application or service is to have it connected to or integrated with your other solutions. Saving time and improving the accuracy of information means that data should only be entered once, and key data should sync between systems to remain up to date.
QuickBooks Desktop (Pro, Premier, Accountant and Enterprise), as well as other desktop accounting or ERP solutions like Sage100, AccountEdge and more, have a variety of 3rd party applications and integrations that offer additional functionality. Here is the good news: just because the central software is a desktop application does not necessarily mean that all integrated applications must also be desktop based.
To extend the functionality of desktop products, developers often create web-based applications and services that sync or integrate with the desktop product. In fact, many of the services inside of QuickBooks desktop itself are web-based application services which sync data to and from QuickBooks. Payroll, merchant services, and more are web-based services that are connected from inside QuickBooks but look like they are just part of the installed program.
When QuickBooks and other desktop applications are hosted with NOOBEH’s QuickBooks on Azure service, the system is running entirely on the Microsoft Cloud. This improves system reliability, flexibility, and security, as well as provides the optimum platform for desktop applications and web-based services to connect — the bandwidth they use is cloud-to-cloud (very fast) instead of cloud-to-your PC (very slow).
Connecting Your Systems and Workflows: Integrated is Better
Often, a business will implement new applications to handle particular tasks. Examples could be getting data from the field, as with a timesheet or a field service management solution; making payroll easier because the calculation, reporting and delivery of paychecks is automated; it could be a website that takes customer orders and manages their payments. With any of these or others, it does not necessarily mean that all those apps are “talking”, the business may not be considering the benefits of connecting the new app to the accounting system. If all the information from the app needs to be re-entered into the accounting system, then a great deal of additional benefit is simply not there. Data entry takes time away from other work and introduces the potential for errors that can take hours to track down (if they are even noticed).
When connecting any add-on solution with your accounting or ERP system, it’s important to make sure that the company fully supports the integration. Whether it is a direct connection to your QuickBooks or it is a “brokered” connection (as with a 3rd-party connector), make sure that the integration has the features and functionality you need and that the data will flow as you want.
Mendelson Consulting knows that businesses need more than a single solution to address their variety of needs. We also know that sub-standard or improperly configured integrations risk doing more damage than good to the business data. That’s why we offer consulting and deployment services for a wide range of add-ons and integrated products. Even if it is a solution we have not worked with yet, our specialists know how to validate and test the integration within QuickBooks to ensure that the data flows properly and gets the right treatment in the financial system.
Get your software connected and working better for your business. Mendelson Consulting and NOOBEH Cloud Services help you focus on your business and not the IT that supports it, so that you can get more done with the resources you have. We help you work smarter, not harder.
