There are over ten versions of QuickBooks offered by Intuit for businesses of various sizes. These include four for QuickBooks Online, three for QuickBooks Desktop, and three more for QuickBooks Enterprise. It is not hard to imagine why it could get confusing for small and medium business owners to choose from one of these solutions. While Intuit itself is focusing on promoting mostly its flagship online solutions in the U.S as well as other countries such as U.K, Australia, and India, several businesses have specific requirements revolving around inventory management, keeping tabs on job profitability, restricting user permissions, building customized workflows, and generating specialized reports. Although most of these capabilities are missing from QuickBooks Online, some are available on QuickBooks Desktop. However, the best bargain would be to opt for QuickBooks Enterprise Cloud Hosting.
What to Know Before Choosing the Right QuickBooks Version?
Here’s what you need to know before you buy QuickBooks.
- Will you be using QuickBooks for managing inventory? In the case that you do, will you be tracking several of them based on locations, valuation, lot series, and other factors?
- Are you going to sell the same product to different customers at different prices? If that is the case, do you intend to give volume discounts or run frequent promotions temporarily?
- Are you going to manage payroll? If you are, do you need this capability to be built into QuickBooks?
- Which industry are you going to cater to? What activities do you perform that will generate revenue?
- What is the scale of your business, and what accounting solution do you currently use?
- Do your employees work remotely? If they do, can they work with a cloud Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution?
- What devices do your employees use? Do they use only PCs or Mac?
- What kind of custom reports are indispensable to your business?
- Do your employees frequently use their mobile phones for performing accounting related tasks?
- How do you track inventory items?
- What external integrations will you require to use QuickBooks more effectively?
Based on these questions, if your answers lead you to QuickBooks Online, you should start looking for apps that can work with the solution. However, if your answer is QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Enterprise, you need to know the version that is best suited for your requirements.
What Are the Different QuickBooks Enterprise Options?
There are 3 different QuickBooks Enterprise options.
- Choose QuickBooks Enterprise Silver if you do not need advanced inventory management features, use different prices, or payroll with the solution.
- If you need only the built-in payroll management feature and not the other two options, then choose QuickBooks Enterprise Gold.
- If you need any two of the three options, opt for QuickBooks Enterprise Platinum. This is because only this option has Advanced Pricing and Advanced Inventory modules.
Finally, if you are using an internal server for hosting the solution and have a legacy email system, you should consider upgrading to the cloud solution and perform an Exchange to Office 365 Migration for making the best use of the integrated solution.