QuickBooks comes in a variety of flavors and allows you to choose the apt one for your business. QuickBooks (QB) products are designed to help you in business management, especially accounting, inventory, payments, sales, and expenses.
With various available products, business groups find it challenging to choose the appropriate one that is the best fit for them. Let us look at some important pointers that can help you choose between two of QB’s products, QB Online and QB Enterprise.
What is QuickBooks Online?
QuickBooks Online (QB Online) is a web-based application that caters to the needs of accounting professionals. It targets small and medium-sized businesses and provides the flexibility of accessing from any computer with internet. It’s an application that provides anytime, anywhere work model. It provides accounting applications on-premises and cloud-based versions.
What is QuickBooks Enterprise?
Quickbooks Enterprise cloud hosting is a complete desktop-based application, which is designed to help you manage your accounting and other business needs effectively. It is bundled with customizable, advanced features like inventory management, pricing management, and advanced reporting that aid in running your business easily. QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise with Hosting provides a fully supported cloud-based solution in a virtual environment.
Now, that we are aware of the key difference between the two products, let us look at a couple of questions that might help you analyze and identify what’s best for your requirements.
• What is your core business?
• What are the main revenue-generating activities?
• How long have you been in business?
• Do you use another accounting system?
• How many users would be using the application?
• Do you have employees who work remotely?
• What are the devices or operating systems the employees work with? Do they use mobile devices for accounting purposes?
For example, it could be Windows PC, MAC, or Android-based smartphones and tablets.
• What are the critical or vital reports that help you analyze business activities and drive business goals?
• Do you need an application to help you with inventory management? If yes, do you need to track multiple inventories and bin locations, serial numbers, lot numbers, barcode scanning, and cost accounting estimation?
• Do you connect to external applications and wish to integrate it with QuickBooks?
• Do you want to use QuickBooks to manage payroll?
After having answers to these questions, you can look at the following table that provides a brief comparison between both the products to help you analyze better.
| Features | QB Online | QB Desktop Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum number of concurrent users | QB Online Plus supports a maximum of 5 users+2 accountants | Maximum of 30 user licenses |
| Pricing | $50 per month | From $1100 per year |
| Free updates | Yes | Certain updates |
| Automatic reports emailing | ||
| Advanced Inventory | ||
| Advanced Pricing | ||
| Advanced Reporting | ||
| Importing bank credit transactions to QuickBooks | ||
| Multiple access across locations with any device | Available with QB Desktop Enterprise with hosting provides | |
| Job costing | ||
| Online Backup and protection of data | ||
| Batch invoicing | ||
| Tracking fixed assets, sales, sales taxes, and customer payments | ||
| Consolidating reports from multiple company files | ||
| Setting and managing inventory reorder points | ||
| Customizing and automating pricing |
For a comparison of all the features and detailed description of each of the products, see:
• Comparison Chart
• QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise
• QuickBooks Online
It’s not an easy task to choose the best QuickBooks flavor, but with a multitude of common features, you can choose the apt one for your organization.
