Category: data integration

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Improve Processes and Profit More

Reducing paper, streamlining the work and producing better financial results

Article 2 in 4-part series

When it comes to providing solutions that help small businesses manage their finances and other information, Intuit QuickBooks is typically the first choice. This decision usually occurs just after the business determines what sort of productivity and messaging (email/voice) solutions will be used, and more often right after the first revenues are earned which need to be accounted for.

For most small businesses, having a copy of QuickBooks is how the company tracks the money.

What’s interesting is that most of these small businesses really operate outside of the financial application, doing the actual deliverable work using some other type of solution. Finding a way to support the work performed in the business and then having all that information flow through to the accounting system isn’t always easy.

On the one hand there are the people, resources and activities which make up the work, but there are payroll, billing, expenses and cash management activities that result from all that work. Tracking it all in a meaningful and affordable way was exactly the challenge that Jeff and Donovan Sachs faced with their business, Alembic Computer Services, Inc.

Alembic Computer Services is among those small businesses that use QuickBooks for financial management but not to actually support the wide variety of processes that make up the business.

ACSI, also known as the QB Resource Center, sells QuickBooks software and provides custom development and implementation services to customers throughout the US. The team at ACSI recognizes the benefits of applying the right technology and applications to any particular task, and embraces the same philosophy and working models internally that they recommend to their forward thinking clients.

The business of software development and implementation isn’t simple, and it is founded in the delivery of professional consulting and development services. Where some professional service offerings may be standardized to the point of enabling “templated” production and performance, custom software configuration and development requires that each project be viewed individually in order to fully understand the requirements and deliverables.

Where the actual production requirements of the project may be unique, the processes for guiding the flow of work through the business are highly consistent and well understood.

Providing consulting and implementation support in addition to custom development has introduced Alembic Computer Services to a wide variety of businesses and working models.  Because QuickBooks software is recognized as a fundamental tool for most small companies, delivering guidance and support to QuickBooks customers became a solid foundation for discovering where customization or other software implementations were required in order to fully address the business needs of their clients.

What became apparent to ACSI while working with these vastly different organizations was that there were similarities in the fundamental workflows and information management processes, and that these processes were not being adequately supported by any of the accounting or ERP systems. Even more than with software customization and development, ACSI recognizes the potential for helping a wide range of businesses with improvements that could be made by implementing standardized workflow and business process support systems.

The real basis for delivering work at Alembic Computer Services is the team that makes up the company. 

Fully leveraging the capabilities of each developer and supporting staff member is essential to creating and retaining profitability, which places employee time, resource and project management as the absolute top priorities. Managing the scope of information necessary to support each consulting or development project is no small task, nor is managing the time and activities of a team of developers and other employees, and flowing all of that data through to scheduling, payroll and billing systems.

To meet these internal requirements as well as establishing a basis for expanding high value service offerings to clients, Alembic Computer Services selected Exact Synergy Enterprise, a business management solution from the Dutch software company Exact (www.exact.com).

“For over 35 years, the tag line at Alembic has been ‘Productivity by Design’. It is our mission to improve the businesses of our clients by providing quality software solutions and the highest level of customer service. Exact Synergy Enterprise provides us with a unique tool that enables us to help almost any business achieve a greater level of productivity. With our many years of experience with Synergy, we are very excited to be the ones to introduce this special product to the QuickBooks community.”

Alembic Computer Services stands out among the numbers of consultants and resellers working with Synergy, largely due to the focus on bringing the value and power of Synergy Enterprise into the QuickBooks user space. 

While there are other partners selling ERP products that integrate with Synergy, Alembic Computer Services works primarily with QuickBooks Enterprise customers who need flexible workflow and business process management support that can’t be handled with QB alone or by other solutions in the QB marketplace.

“The Exact partner community has a rich history of enabling integration with other small and mid-size financial applications, giving companies the ability to modernize the business processes surrounding financial data that is so important to them. We strongly support what firms like Alembic Computer Services are doing to marry Synergy Enterprise with QuickBooks” says Philip Bini, Director for Exact Americas.

“Exact is excited to see advisors like Alembic Computer Services apply their passion for Synergy Enterprise by creating a business management blueprint for businesses that use QuickBooks for their accounting needs. Exact Synergy Enterprise allows business users to interact on their business transactions in a collaborative environment.  As a result, the integration between Synergy and QuickBooks makes the complete solution more relevant and widely accessible to QuickBooks ProAdvisors, reseller communities and the QuickBooks customer base at large. It really is an exciting time for the entire QuickBooks market to be introduced to Exact Synergy Enterprise.”

Within Synergy Enterprise, the people, actions and activities, and business resources are all tracked in order to inform other applications and processes which support the business and operation. 

By centering the Synergy workflow solution in the business applications infrastructure and utilizing its flexible and extensible framework to embrace the full realm of business activities, Alembic Computer Services is able to automate and fully streamline processes that were previously very time-consuming and which did nothing to directly support or improve business profitability.

In order to create the most efficient and high performance approach possible, Alembic Computer Services knew they wanted a solution which natively addressed standard business needs like electronic document management, customer relationship and personnel management, but which could also be custom configured to handle their development and project-related workflows at a very detailed level.

While Jeff and Donovan are developers by profession, there was little interest in embarking on a large customization project to support their own business needs, so any solution would have to provide not only strong essential functionality right out of the box, but should allow for a great deal of customization of the solution without coding. Synergy delivered on those capabilities richly.

Using a standards-based approach to framing the activities and guided by logic infused into the Synergy system, Alembic Computer Services created their own professional project management and time and billing system within Synergy that directly and efficiently addresses the specific tasks, activities, resources and services involved in any given customer project. Storing not just customer and baseline project information, the system tracks every document, activity, research item and production element which associates to the performance of the tasks or which is provided through guided workflow.

Further, by integrating the project, time and resource data with their QuickBooks financials, the company was able to create an end-to-end solution which addresses the wide array of activities involved in running the business, increasing efficiency and effectiveness in back-office operations as well as those in front. This benefit was among those most apparent to Alembic Computer Services, and was the fuel behind the development of the integration between QuickBooks and Synergy.

Unaccounted for time or resources, incomplete task performance, and undocumented project activities leads to inconsistent performance and lower profits.

Integrated workflows and the elimination of double-entry ensures greater accuracy in payroll, billing and other related processes, allowing ACSI personnel and business managers to more efficiently perform their required tasks, reducing friction and smoothing performance to a consistent and predictable flow.

For the project managers at Alembic Computer Services and the QB Resource Center, the big benefit of Synergy is that the developers know what projects are assigned to them at all times and can view exactly what tasks must be performed and when. For owners Jeff and Donovan Sachs, the confidence comes from knowing that every business process structured and defined, that the processes will be handled in a complete and timely manner, that all documentation and data is sufficiently collected and filed, and that their systems have the agility and power to carry the business well into the future.

Make Sense?

J

 

Read the Introduction: Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

Article 1: Every Business Deserves a Chance to be Better

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Every Business Deserves a Chance to Be Better

Amazon's Domes

Article 1 in 4-part series

Every business owner or manager wants to see growth in revenue and profits, and sustaining a high level of performance requires that the business operate smoothly and without breakage or imbalance. When workers know their jobs and do them well, and when workload performance is regular and timely, the business operation glides.

Yet few organizations fully understand how all of their processes weave together to form the operation, or how changes in workloads and task performance will impact the bottom line. Growing or shrinking workloads, supply chain interruptions and other conditions influence the flow of work in the business, which is why a clear understanding of the workflows and the dynamics of the processes they connect is so essential.

It really comes down to a “degrees of success” question: how much better could the business be?

It is said that the only constant is change, and businesses must find a way to effectively and cost-efficiently meet changing demands and conditions in order to survive.  What frustrates many business owners is that change is generally disruptive to the business, representing a significant challenge when it comes to the development of internal processes, procedures and the workflows which bind them.   At issue is the understanding that proven, structured and repeatable processes help to improve efficiency, yet changing conditions often require changes to these processes.

Creating agility and sustainable value in the organization suggests that guidance for workers, processes and controls, business and system policies, activities and agents and resources all be brought together to form a complete picture of the business and operation.  With this in hand, the business is better able to communicate to each member what is expected of them and when, and to make adjustment or enhancements to how the work flows in order keep moving toward the stated goal.

Informed workflows guide smarter processes, and smarter businesses are more resilient.

Smarter business is built from knowledge and understanding not just of the systems and actors in the enterprise, but of the higher level goals motivating the activity.  In a global economy, where competitive pressures are increasing every day for even the smallest of businesses, making process improvements and creating sustainability become as much a focus for the business as growth once was.

Developing strategies for retaining profit margins, improving cash flows, solidifying supply chains and streamlining operational processes is essential when designing the business to handle the stresses of a changing economy. The foundations of such strategies are the people, processes and knowledge in the business, and the workflows which tie them together into a cohesive, high performance enterprise.

What comes as a surprise to many businesses is that their efforts to structure the work – defining the activities which string together to form the process, or connecting the processes in a workflow – often reveals why certain things are done the way they are. Where process and workflow modeling most frequently addresses the “what” and “how” of the business, less often is the “why” question directly approached. The discovery of “why” is sometimes a revelation which comes unexpectedly, providing insight into areas of the business where change could be made, leading to improved process performance and moving the operation closer reaching its goals.

With the popularity and proliferation of online applications and cloud computing, many businesses have transformed how they manage activities, people and resources.

The adoption of individual apps to support specific business activities and processes is increasing, where solutions are often loosely connected, integrating or syncing only selected data used for a particular purpose.  The Internet-connected marketplace has introduced both opportunity and challenge for businesses of all sizes, and much of the focus has been placed on the management and control of digital documents and data.

Centralized electronic document management has been commonly used in business for many years, yet has not always been viewed as an essential technology to apply in the context of organizing and structuring the workflows in the business.

Particularly in situations where apps and activities are not always directly connected to their dependent or resultant processes, electronic document management and integration of external data elements become critical to structuring the flow of work.

In structuring workflows and documents systems which support the various business processes, the organization will find that it has developed the means to collect and memorialize the business and operational knowledge owned only by individuals in the business.

Gathering together the “tribal knowledge” from users in the business – investing the learning and experience of individuals into the DNA of the business processes and organization of work– is an essential element in crafting meaningful workflows which capture the human-based considerations that are often overlooked.

When individual knowledge becomes business knowledge and is turned into documents, systems and structured processes which guide the operation, results are able to be reproduced more consistently and reliance upon individuals is reduced significantly.

Business processes are now considered to be corporate assets which require consistent and ongoing management and review.

Because business is not stagnant, processes and workflows will necessarily evolve as conditions change. Managing these processes and the workflows which attach them is an iterative process that must be actively pursued in order to ensure that evolving approaches don’t fail to support higher level business objectives.

While an electronic document management solution may address many of the challenges involved in working with large volumes and varieties of documents and data, there are few DM products on the market which can approach the full realm of business workflows and how they are impacted by business or data-driven events or by the availability of people or resources to facilitate the process.

Businesses must not only structure their documents and data, but also their workflows necessary to support the various processes and should seek to normalize those workflows as much as possible. Through a standards-based approach to workflow development, businesses are able to develop a consistent and methodical approach to the work which results in more predictable and consistent outcomes.

The workflow “engine” is truly the workhorse in the business, connecting the people, activities and information required to fulfill each required task.

Fueled by stored documents, data and business policy, workflows inform the organization on the effectiveness of applied resources, events and agents. Not only providing a basis for measuring process effectiveness, structuring all workflows in the business often reveals why certain previously unrecognized processes occur.

Sometimes referred to as “process mining”, activity monitoring and regular workflow and process evaluation allows the business to develop greater understanding of the rationale it must apply to detect or diagnose processes which deviate from the desired path and cause the business to track away from its strategic goals.

Exact Synergy is the workflow engine which powers global businesses and drives performance.

The business fundamental framework of Synergy allows organizations to structure the entire realm of business activities and provide digital workflows and automation to enhance productivity and ensure accuracy at every step. The core of Synergy connects and tracks the entities, transactions and documents associated with every aspect of the business.

Recognizing that business happens with people, systems and processes, Synergy is the tool organizations use to describe the various entities, actions and requests involved in performing the business, guiding process performance with meaningful workflows which clearly communicate to each participant what is expected from them, when it is expected, and even how to perform.

While essential business needs are met with the initial installation, Synergy is extensively configurable and customizable, considering all areas of the enterprise and offering functionality to support a vast array of requirements.  A business may use the solution in a limited capacity, guiding certain HR and other back-office functions, or it can be applied to the entire business and operation, spanning departments and locations, joining processes and acquiring data which might otherwise remain unmanaged and disconnected.

Synergy helps businesses keep actions and decisions aligned, sharpening the competitive edge.

Synergy’s framework combines entity management, process governance and strict security and data controls with a presentation which allows for everyone in the business to view and manage their workloads quickly and directly. Synergy provides each user with the information they need to get their job done without complication or interference, providing the views and access to increase process effectiveness and supporting the most efficient flow of work through the business.

If actions and decisions inside a company aren’t aligned, processes are disrupted and the competitive edge gets lost. With a more intelligent approach to enabling and managing the work flowing through the enterprise, businesses can be smarter and introduce new value for those involved with them.

Make Sense?

J

Read the Introduction: Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

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Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

You Deserve To Know About Things That Will Make Your Business Better

Every business in the marketplace, from freelancer and entrepreneur to the largest of enterprises, is facing tremendous pressure to change how they do business. Workers demand more options for balancing business with personal life; consumers demand more and different modes of interaction; and business stakeholders continue to demand positive performance even as the pace of change increases.

Digital, social and mobile aren’t fringe considerations in business any more.

People use their phones all the time to do all sorts of things, and a lot of the time those “things” impact the business. From apps and processes that support how work gets done to the policies that guide various aspects of operation and interaction, businesses are discovering that embracing digital workflows and emerging operating models is the new imperative. Every interaction is a transaction, and there are many possible actors collaborating on each one. How well understood is this activity within the business?

From within and without businesses are forced to react to various influences shaping user and consumer behavior, adjusting their processes and creating new core workflows to address digital data, online, social and mobile models that were once considered to be more fringe than foundation. Few businesses, particularly those smaller companies where only one or a few participants do all the work, have a central framework in place to support the vast array of processes and tasks they perform, and even less to help adjust to changing business requirements.

Relying more on individual knowledge than documented processes and structure, small businesses are generally able to retain their agility only as long as they also retain their small size.

What is usually missing in the small business is a foundational workflow system and framework which sets the table for future improvements within the business, and establishes the flexibility to support faster execution while saving costs and reducing investment.

Most business owners don’t consider a workflow-driven system to be an imperative, focusing more on the solutions which address specific operational tasks and activities. This approach may meet business needs for a short time, but the sprawl and distribution of business data and activities enabled with the bolt-on “app” approach often fragments things rather than tying them closely together.

Doing things right in the beginning saves time, effort and money compared to fixing things later.

Businesses should create an organizational structure and employee culture that is “process aware”, developed and built on the solid foundation of structured workflows.  This gives the entire organization a visible basis for improvement at any level, allowing a focus on work attitude and operations that are positive and healthier for the company.

It has been proven time and time again that implementing a flexible framework for structuring workflow within the business will help the enterprise improve performance, undertake efforts to support better decision-making, and achieve a competitive advantage. The structure, crossing all functional boundaries and taking a holistic view of the processes, helps ensure that stakeholder perspectives are aligned, makes sure that everyone has a clear understanding of how processes are undertaken and why, and ultimately focuses all organizational efforts towards the right goal.

This is the introductory article in a series which will discuss the values of a structured workflow solution applied to small and growing businesses and why every business large or small should immediately implement such a system.

The discussion focuses on a solution which I believe presents the framework and extensibility required to address the essential needs of business process management along with the flexibility in design to address more unique and sophisticated flows and integrations.

Meet Exact Synergy Enterprise.

The series will discuss WHY businesses must consider implementing workflow and process management and how Synergy meets those needs.  Further, we’ll take a look at a successful QuickBooks consultant and developer who implements Synergy internally and for their clients. That article explores how their Synergy-founded professional time and billing solution works with QuickBooks, addressing time and resource management requirements that other solutions couldn’t provide.

The discussion then addresses how bookkeepers, consultants and other QuickBooks advisors can quickly and easily implement a structured workflow solution that delivers immediate value to the business. With out-of-the-box functionality to address essential business processes and activity management including CRM, document management, human resources management and more, there is little or no configuration required making the solution useful on the first launch.

The final article takes a look at Synergy implemented in a business, demonstrating the extensive ability for the system to be custom configured directly by the customer. It is the ability to be customized easily, meeting specific process requirements and connecting to the applications and data that round out the operations that makes Synergy particularly powerful and a key component to enabling a successful transformation into an agile, high performance business in the digital age.

syn·er·gy

the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

 cooperation interaction, cooperation, combined effort, give and take

 

Make Sense?

J

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Mobile IT for Contractors and Builders (for every business, actually)

The Trend Is Up For Single-Family Housing Market

Even as lot and labor shortages and other supply side constraints continue to impact builders, and while the cost of building materials continues to rise, the demand for housing continues to increase at a fairly consistent rate. “November’s builder confidence reading is close to a post-recession high-..” NAHB Chairman Granger MacDonald said in a recent release.

Supported by rising homeownership rates and a reduced number of available homes for sale, the trend up is expected to continue.

Increased competition for new business opportunities in the building market require that home builders and developers leverage available technologies and IT resources to improve operational performance and increase the profitability of every project. Applications for better estimating, project and cost management and accounting represent the foundations for information management and supporting the flow of work.Extending workflows to embrace mobile workers and remote offices is the next step to developing an efficient anytime/anywhere business. 92 percent of U.S. construction executives believe that technology will fundamentally change their businesses, and help them bridge the performance gap, according to KPMG’s Make it, or break it – Global Construction Survey 2017 report.

Collaborating while on the go and exchanging ideas and concepts quickly helps businesses be more agile and better-able to meet changing customer needs. Remote and mobile access provides businesses with mobile office options that allow users to get their jobs done no matter where they happen to be.

Business moves at a fast pace and working smarter means implementing the right IT to keep moving up with the demand and creating sustainability for leaner times.

Make Sense?

J

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‘Tis the (Filing) Season – Time for W2s and 1099 Reporting

1099-santa-hatEvery year-end brings with it not just the holiday spirit, but also the underlying dread felt by small business owners – a creepy and back-of-your-neck hair-raising feeling associated with annual business tax reporting and filing. That old saying about “death and taxes” has a lot of validity to it; sometimes they feel like the same thing to a small business owner. And this is the filing season. Ho ho ho.

The reporting requirements for small businesses seem to be growing at a rapid pace, and business owners are struggling to find the information and tools that ease the adjustment to increasingly burdensome reporting and compliance. The IRS has implemented a number of measures to increase tax revenues and enforce compliance, including stricter 1099 reporting requirements. With information provided at both ends of the “transaction” it is easier to identify those discrepancies which trigger audits.   With this type of business intelligence, the IRS has developed a fairly strong weapon to combat non-compliance, so small business owners need to really pay attention (the IRS is).  If the feds are tooling up, then business owners should, too.

Just to add to the seasonal festivities, make sure you upgrade your accounting software in time to benefit from the right rules and forms. If you run a small business and keep most of your information on spreadsheets (still? really?), that’s OK because there are solutions available which draw the information from spreadsheets, eliminating the need to re-enter data. Seriously, though, you should consider using actual bookkeeping or accounting software.

It is also important to remember that payroll tax filing dates for W-2s and 1099 forms were changed for 2016 taxes, and these changes continue for 2017. The filing deadline for 2017 W-2s and 1099 forms (including Form 1099-MISC) is January 31, 2018, which is a month earlier than the pre-2017 filing date. Thankfully, the deadline for providing W-2 forms to employees and 1099-MISC forms to other workers for 2017 has not changed. This deadline is still January 31, 2018. 

Using a cloud-based service to file 1099s online should be something your business considers doing if it isn’t already. Because most services include form and feature updates, users don’t have to go looking for the right documents or worry that they are using an outdated form.  In an online or hosted solution, users benefit from updates without downloads and get stricter security around their data than would likely be present on their own PC.  As it relates to your accounting software, make sure it has the capabilities you need in this area and don’t settle for limited functionality.

Here are some features you’ll want to look for in your e-filing solution this year:

  • The ability to print and/or mail forms to recipients as well as e-filing forms directly with the IRS or SSA
  • Have Form 1096 or W-3 automatically calculated and transmitted electronically with the detail forms
  • Upload volumes of data with Excel templates or import from your accounting software (saves time and reduces input errors)
  • Store data securely and provide full access to filed forms for multiple years
  • Maintain payer and recipient records securely for use year after year.
  • Encrypt data upon submission and keep it encrypted throughout the entire process
  • Supports 1099 Corrections (should allow filing of corrected forms regardless of how the original form was filed)
  • Accountants, Bookkeepers and Tax Preparers should be able to set up multiple payers and file on behalf of many clients from a single account, even filing for all clients at once or via batch submission

Year-end tax filing, especially dealing with 1099s and W2s, is an arduous task for most small businesses and their professional service providers, yet it is one of those things that simply can’t be put off.  Where there is a single income tax return there could be literally hundreds of associated 1099s or W2s to file.  1099 filing in particular has become more of a focus as authorities crack down on contractor versus employer classifications and seek to develop easier identification of audit candidates (something every business owner wants to avoid).

The point of the discussion is that there are cloud-based tools which are highly useful, feature rich, and very affordable… and business owners and their accountants or bookkeepers would be wise to take a look rather than assuming that the general accounting software will do the trick this year and the next.  Remember that tax filing season is an annual event, and being able to rely on a consistently useful solution can make the season a bit merrier (or at least a little less stressful) for all.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

Hi! I was looking for the Frangos.

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QuickBooks 2018 Updates and Enhancements

QuickBooks 2018: Changes You See and Updates You Can’t See

QuickBooks 2018 has been released, and there are a number of beneficial enhancements and changes to the application that many will find very useful.  Sometimes it is the little things – like a past-due stamp that can be printed on invoices when they are re-sent to a customer – that can make getting the work done just a bit easier. Being able to search the chart of accounts is another thing that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but becomes one when you just can’t remember the account number you’re looking for. Frequently having to scroll through the list of accounts is taking more of your time than you’d think it would.

For the most part, it looks like there are some nice and needed changes that come with QuickBooks 2018. These changes address some functionality and usability issues (like supporting multiple monitors) and are visible to the user.  There are also other important changes that come with QB 2018 editions that aren’t quite as visible.

All editions (Pro, Premier and Enterprise) in the US, Canada and UK got some common updates, including:

  • Multiple monitor support
  • Search in the Chart of Accounts
  • Cash/Accrual toggle on reports
  • Past Due Stamp
  • Keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste lines in transactions
  • Secure Webmail option

For folks using payroll, there are now useful reminders for payroll tax liabilities, and for accountant edition users there is now the ability to merge multiple vendor records.  An exciting feature for many users of QB Enterprise is improvement to the sales order fulfillment process, including support for mobile (un-tethered) barcode scanners.

The changes that remain less visible to the user are primarily component updates and security improvements.  Additional encryption for certain PII (personally identifiable information) fields, version updates of framework and database components, and reliance on Internet Explorer v11 are among the items addressed. While these are not visible changes that impact the program functionality directly, they are necessary to keep the product up to date with Windows platform and to modernize the security in the product. In particular, users should pay attention to the requirement for Internet Explorer v11.  While Microsoft continues to promote Edge as the power browser for Windows 10, it is Internet Explorer v11 that QuickBooks requires.

It is important to note that Intuit‘s support for 3rd party applications is sometimes impacted with QuickBooks updates, particularly when it comes to security, encryption and unattended access to QuickBooks data.  Changes made to how QuickBooks encrypts stored credentials (among other things) caused many 3rd party solutions to lose their ability to connect to and sync data with QuickBooks while unattended (like a middle of the night sync, when nobody else is working).  Many applications had to return to a user-attended sync process, where a user in QuickBooks had to manually initiate the sync which allows the application to connect to QuickBooks and run.  With the release of QuickBooks 2018 this issue remains, which means that you should check with your 3rd party software provider regarding any possible automation changes or additional configuration that might be required due to the update.

For those running QuickBooks in a server-based or hosted environment, there are a few additional considerations regarding some of the changes in QuickBooks 2018. Some of these items represent known technical limitations of working in a terminal server/RDS/hosted environment, and sometimes they’re limitations or restrictions based on the technology being used and how it is applied. It is in this area where the suggestion that hosted QuickBooks will work EXACTLY as the program does when locally installed is not entirely true.

Multiple monitor support, for example, may or may not be easily handled by your hosting provider or remote access solution.  In particular, if you access your hosted service as a Remote Desktop or Virtual Desktop, you may have only one actual Window (the remote desktop window) to work with.  Even if your hosted QuickBooks were to attempt to open multiple popup windows so you could move them to different monitors, you’ll still be limited to the dimensions of your remote desktop. If the remote desktop doesn’t span over multiple monitors, then the QuickBooks windows that open in the remote desktop window won’t either.

The option to keep a user logged in to QuickBooks is another item that may not be useful or workable in a hosted environment, and isn’t necessarily a great idea even if running QB on a local computer.  This option keeps the user logged in to the QB “instance” which can make working with lots of company files a bit faster and makes loading/unloading QB seem faster because it doesn’t really unload or shut down.  While it may be convenient to eliminate the wait times during these login processes, the offset in security risk and problematic application functionality may be higher.  Leaving a user connected to QB for a fast login means that an unattended PC becomes a vulnerability as someone could access the app and files without having to enter credentials every time.  In a hosted environment, the functionality tends to leave QuickBooks running in a user session, often causing the user to be unable to launch QuickBooks if they log off and back on to the host system (getting the message that QuickBooks is already running or the company file is already open).

Support for 3rd party integrations varies in hosting environments, too, but the granting of administrative permissions to users is largely consistent: users do not get administrative permissions. This means that some applications which require Windows administrator permissions to run cannot be easily handled in a hosted delivery.  Additionally, applications that run as services on the computer, and particularly those with controls accessible via the task manager, are difficult to manage in a hosted environment because users are generally not able to access the task manager on the machine to start or stop running services.

Among the most challenging items to support in a hosted environment are mobile and handheld scanning devices.  Mobile scanning devices have become essential tools for inventory and product management, providing users with the ability to rapidly access item information by simply scanning a barcode.  Manually keying in data increases the potential for errors, but also requires a machine with a keyboard be nearby. With mobile scanners, workers are able to input item information regardless of whether they have a computer nearby or not (which is often the case in a warehouse or out on the shop or store floor). The software sees the barcode scanner input as though the data were typed in, which eliminates input errors and failed lookups by ensuring the item number is correctly entered every time.

Where the challenge with a hosted solution comes to play is in communicating between the hosted software (QuickBooks in this case) and the scanner device.  Usually, a scanner must be able to “see” the computer running QuickBooks on the local network.  The scanning device, like a networked printer, is able to communicate directly with the PC on the network so it is able to work with the software running on the PC.  When the QuickBooks software is running on the hosting provider’s computers, the mobile scanners in your business location aren’t able to “see” the host computers on the local network so they may not be able to communicate.

The time for software upgrades is also the time to take a look at how you’re implementing the software to ensure that your business has the most effective and easy to manage system possible. Rather than simply installing the new version on top of the old, consider whether your systems and software might be handled in a more cost efficient and useful manner.

If you’re installing the new QuickBooks editions in-house, maybe it makes sense to take a look at doing a server-based approach, which reduces the number of software installs required, centralizes the access and applications which makes managing the system easier, and creates a single system to back up and administer.

If you’re looking to eliminate the burdens of installing and maintaining your software, backing up your systems and dealing with hardware issues, moving to a managed hosting solution may be the right answer.

Software upgrade time is the right time to explore these options, giving your business the opportunity to test out new delivery models and services without impacting the production system.  There is always some element of risk in updating applications, so it is important to make sure things are ready before starting the process. Make sure all systems are fully backed up, and make sure you have the tools necessary to re-install the old versions of your applications just in case there are changes you can’t work with or problems you didn’t expect. If you’re not sure the best way to approach upgrading your QuickBooks system, contact me and we’ll find the right answer together.

Make Sense?

J