Mendelson Consulting Offers Cloud and Migration Options
Need to convert data in QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online? You can get help from Intuit with this. Need to go the other way and convert from QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop? Not so much… So please read on.
In a surprise (and very quiet) announcement to QuickBooks Solution Providers, Intuit recently announced that it no longer freely provides data export functionality that allows businesses to convert their data from QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop. As of 12/18/2020, if you want to move your data from QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop, you have different options for how to do it and will get less support from Intuit in the process.
It is no great surprise that Intuit made this move. Even prior to ending the service, exports from QuickBooks Online to 2021 versions of QuickBooks Desktop had become quite difficult anyway. Requiring users to login to their Intuit account to create a new company file interrupts the QuickBooks Online attempt to create a new file in QuickBooks Desktop during the conversion, so the entire process became broken. (Note: Our solution is to create the new QuickBooks Desktop file in an earlier version of QuickBooks that does not force the Intuit account login, for example 2019, and subsequently upgrade to the latest version 2021).
The QuickBooks Online web-based service locks you into a subscription, delivering recurring revenue to Intuit. Logic follows that now it has become more difficult to get the data back out of QuickBooks Online in a useful way.
Intuit is still allowing businesses to migrate list data out of QuickBooks Online (think Customers, Vendors, Items lists only), but this is not a very clean process for migrating an entire company data set. Particularly since it involves exporting lists to Excel, manipulating or massaging the data and then importing into QuickBooks Desktop. You can see how this introduces a variety of ways to mess it up. And still this does not get the historical transaction data.
Another consideration is that QBO allows businesses to alter the screens and data stored in the product, and to use that data in ways that QuickBooks Desktop doesn’t necessarily understand. For example, simply adding a field called “job” to invoices in QBO does not mean that QuickBooks desktop would see that data and recognize it as a Customer:Job. That field in QBO doesn’t actually mean anything other than to the user so it isn’t something that could be automatically understood in a conversion. For any conversion of data to be done properly, there needs to be a clear understanding of what data is stored in QB Online, how it is used, and how that data needs to be translated to QB desktop.
Mendelson Consulting has a team of experts available to help with converting your QuickBooks Online information into useful QuickBooks desktop data, offering a thorough review of QBO is being used and mapping that information to how QuickBooks desktop should be set up and the data migrated. Better than a blindly automated process, this option for converting your QBO data to QBD provides a much greater assurance that the financial and other business data is migrated correctly and properly.
What about cloud? There is actually a better option than QBO for businesses that want to benefit from managed infrastructure and anytime/anywhere cloud models, and it does not require that the business lock itself and its future in a web-based application like QuickBooks Online. The better option is to have QuickBooks Desktop and other applications in a private cloud, as with NOOBEH’s QuickBooks on Azure service.
Our options for QuickBooks Desktop in the cloud offer far more than just QuickBooks. NOOBEH does not lock you in to any specific software application, version or working model. Rather, we provide businesses with the ability to run all their applications and manage their data in a familiar Windows environment, but not be tied to any hardware or physical location.
Running applications and data on private Microsoft Azure cloud servers lets even the smallest of businesses benefit from enterprise-class technology and IT platforms and get them affordably. The best part is that there is no vendor lock-in and no limitations on moving to other applications or services. If business needs change, NOOBEH can help the environment adjust to what the business needs, and not the other way around.
When the business needs more functionality, more application support, more process support and more flexibility to meet changing needs and conditions, then the business needs Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh.
Make Sense?
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