QuickBooks software has two faces: QuickBooks desktop and QuickBooks Online. They are completely different products but they both have the name QuickBooks, so people make the assumption that they are fairly interchangeable and that the only difference is that one is cloud and one is not.
The differences between QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online are far greater than their platforms. Too often we see businesses electing to migrate their QuickBooks desktop files to QuickBooks Online only to find the functionality and operation of the software isn’t what they expected.
While there is a lot of interest in “moving to the cloud”, it shouldn’t be your IT people making the call to change accounting software. For any business looking at software to manage finances and operations, it is the functionality and business process support that should determine the fit. Whether it is cloud or not-cloud can be addressed in different ways.
QuickBooks Enterprise, along with QuickBooks Pro and Premier editions, is a desktop software product. You subscribe to the software and attached services and install the product on your own computers. Optionally, you can have your QuickBooks desktop software hosted, meaning it runs on a service provider network rather than your own, allowing access from just about anywhere.
Noobeh cloud services provides cloud-based deployment of QuickBooks Enterprise along with hosting support for other applications, add-ons and extensions the business might use. With Noobeh, QB Enterprise becomes the cloud-based solution businesses need, enabling support for multiple locations or remote and mobile users, and with better security and protection than running the software on in-house systems.
QuickBooks Online, on the other hand, is purely a software-as-a-service solution. When you subscribe to the software, you are also subscribing to the system it runs on. Your computer simply runs a browser, and the software runs on Intuit’s web and database servers. In this case, Intuit is the service provider, managing both the QuickBooks Online software and the systems it runs on.
QuickBooks Online is not at all like QuickBooks desktop. It is an entirely different solution, having been built with different technologies and offering capabilities not found in the desktop editions.
For businesses that haven’t used QuickBooks before, the online edition is a great starting place as it offers the basic functionality most businesses initially need. It is when the business needs more functional support for business processes or when other complexities are introduced that QBO begins to falter. Using QBO for basic financial management is great, and there are many add-ons and integrations that can extend QBO to handle things that it cannot do alone. But QBO with a bunch of add-ons does not make an ERP solution.
A cornerstone of small business accounting, QuickBooks desktop applications continue to be used by millions of businesses around the world. QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions is the member of the QuickBooks desktop family which addresses the needs of larger businesses, offering the same simplicity and usability as QuickBooks Pro and Premier editions but with more functionality and at a larger scale.
QuickBooks Enterprise is available in a variety of industry orientations and offers features to support inventory and warehouse management, advanced reporting capabilities, business consolidations and more. As businesses grow and become more complex, QuickBooks Enterprise can meet those changing needs without forcing the business to retrain users, convert data or disrupt the flow of work.
It is the scalability of QuickBooks Enterprise which enables growing business to address more operational needs with a single solution, and the number and variety of proven integrations extends the product even further.
Filling the space between small business accounting and enterprise-class ERP, QuickBooks Enterprise is the go-to solution with the functionality, extensibility and affordability businesses need.
Mendelson Consulting helps businesses advance their accounting and finance capabilities and get the most benefit from their investments in the software, the people using it and the processes it supports. Specialists in QuickBooks Online and QBOA (Online Advanced), Mendelson is also widely recognized as the “large business specialist” for QuickBooks Enterprise, helping larger and more complex organizations find and implement the tools to needed to propel their businesses even further.
When it comes to figuring out if QuickBooks Enterprise or QuickBooks Online is right for your business, Mendelson Consulting is the group you want to be working with.
