The Advantages of Hosted QuickBooks

One key benefit of remote QuickBooks access is the ability to increase your revenue by serving more customers in more locations with less travel time and travel expense. However, the available remote-access solutions vary greatly.

The following sections compare Hosted QuickBooks solutions, like our offering, with QuickBooks Online edition, remote-access web plug-ins, and the built-in remote access features of the Full-Featured versions of QuickBooks. The comparison places special focus on how well the varied remote access solutions support outsourced bookkeeping.

Easy Remote Access

Ideally, remote QuickBooks access should work just like QuickBooks running on your local PC.

QuickBooks Online edition:

To switch from QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise to QuickBooks Online edition, you have to learn an entirely new interface and you give up several important QuickBooks features.

Built-In Remote Access:

The remote access feature built into QuickBooks is available only in the Premier edition and uses WebEx to allow only one user at-a-time to take control over one remote computer. A user must be present at each computer to set up each session, taking turns following the instructions Intuit provides in a 17 page manual.

Because a user must be present at the remote computer, this feature is fine for demos or interactive reviews of financials, but is unsuitable for a wide-range of remote access needs including outsourced bookkeeping.

Web Plug-Ins:

There are several web plug-ins that provide various levels of remote QuickBooks access, but none makes the full features of QuickBooks available remotely. Web plug-ins are intended to provide remote access to only a limited set of features whose access is required remotely by a specific set of users.

OUR SOLUTION - Hosted QuickBooks:

Hosted QuickBooks provides the closest to the ideal for ease-of-use because, unlike the other approaches, you actually run the same QuickBooks as you do on your local PC, but it is running on a remote server, inside a "virtual PC" - a computer we set up just for you.

Important QuickBooks Features

A remote access solution should not take away features, especially from my customers.

QuickBooks Online edition:

In addition to having to learn an entirely new interface in order to run QuickBooks Online edition, you lose several key features of QuickBooks Pro, Premium, and Enterprise (and even Basic) editions.

• No purchase orders or inventory tracking,
• No job costing or estimating,
• No customized price levels,
• No integration with ACT!, Word, or Outlook,
• No online bill payment,
• No true payroll integration (no integrated payroll input),
• No support for multiple companies in one subscription, and
• No forecasts, business plans, sales order tracking, or inventory tracking.

Built-In Remote Access:

The remote access feature built into QuickBooks makes many of the standard features of QuickBooks accessible remotely as long as you can get a user at the remote location to help you set up the session and relinquish control of the computer until you are through with it. Having to give up a computer during remote access sessions can be a significant inconvenience to your customers.

Web Plug-Ins:

Web plug-ins are intended to provide remote access to only a limited set of features whose access is required remotely by a specific set of users. Therefore, web plug-ins, by design, leave a lot of features behind.

OUR SOLUTION - Hosted QuickBooks:

With Hosted QuickBooks, you actually run the same QuickBooks as you do on your local PC, so all of the features you need are available remotely, exactly where you expect them.

Simplified PC Management

Is PC maintenance what you really want to be doing?

QuickBooks Online edition:

QuickBooks Online simplifies PC maintenance because you run it via a web browser. There is no need to install or maintain any version of QuickBooks on any of your PCs. In fact, with Online edition, there is no benefit to installing QuickBooks on any of your PCs because Online edition cannot provide a QuickBooks data file that you could otherwise use on your local PC if your Internet connection goes down.

Built-In Remote Access:

Of the alternatives explored here, the remote access feature built into QuickBooks is the most difficult to maintain. You not only have to install and maintain all the necessary, matching QuickBooks versions on every PC involved in the remote interaction, but you also have to set them up for WebEx use.

Web Plug-Ins:

Web plug-ins do not add any complexity to PC maintenance since, like QuickBooks Online edition, they are used via a web browser. For users that need full-featured access to QuickBooks, however, web plug-ins do not remove any complexity, as these users will still need to install and maintain the appropriate QuickBooks version(s) on their PC(s).

OUR SOLUTION - Hosted QuickBooks:

Hosted QuickBooks simplifies PC maintenance because, like QuickBooks Online, you run it via a web browser. There is no need to install or maintain any version of QuickBooks on any of your PCs. However, if you want to use your QuickBooks data when you are off-line (to view reports, etc), you can. Hosted QuickBooks solutions allow you to download your QuickBooks data file from the server and use it from a locally installed version of QuickBooks.

Reliability

I know that a data-center offers the best reliability, but I still want a local copy of my data.

QuickBooks Online edition:

QuickBooks Online gives you data center reliability, but doesn't give you a local copy of all of your data.

Built-In Remote Access:

Of the alternatives explored here, the remote access feature built into QuickBooks is the most likely to have reliability problems because more systems must be working properly for it all to function: the local PC, the remote PC, and the WebEx system that connects them. While there are local copies of the data, none reside in a data center, so the responsibility for backing up the data is left to the user (another place where things can go wrong).

Web Plug-Ins:

Web plug-ins are as reliable as the web server on which they run. Whether the QuickBooks data that they use is backed-up or whether you have access to a local copy depends on the offering.

OUR SOLUTION - Hosted QuickBooks:

With Hosted QuickBooks, you get data center reliability AND the ability to keep a local copy of your data.