business information technology – Page 15

February 4, 2014

A Higher Level of Customer Relationship Management: Building Closer Customer Relationships

Most businesses recognize the importance of creating a quality experience for customers doing business with them. The thing that many business owners overlook is how their internal workflows and information management systems serve to either support or impede the delivery of a well-rounded positive customer experience. Growing businesses must adjust their processes and improve their tools in order to have the necessary information available to workers at various levels of the organization, providing a centralized means for collaboration, data sharing and analysis. With the right information systems and process support, even small businesses are able to function at exceptionally high levels and provide the consistently high-quality service and customer experience that establishes long-term value in each and every customer relationship.

Businesses which excel at providing very high levels of customer service tend to have a few common characteristics – features of the business that identify it as an organization geared towards growth and success in driving the customer engagement and business value. Among these characteristics is the recognition of the need to use technology better – leveraging automation to a greater degree to create consistency in work performance, and improving information collection and integration to provide more context and depth to the data. Added efficiency which affords employees time to focus on customer oriented tasks and elevating the customer experience even more is the payback.

Many CRM solutions describe the benefits of a “360 degree” view of the customer, yet these solutions often orient themselves to supporting only sales and Contact Management and do not address product and/ or service delivery (fulfillment of what was sold/ordered) or project management, contracts and agreements tracking or other aspects of doing business with the customer.

Granted, customer interaction occurs most frequently with sales and service teams, but there are potentially vast number of processes and tasks performed within the business which operate with the same information as sales and services, and which would benefit by integration within the same information and workflow framework.

By selecting a solution that addresses the wider variety of business and information management requirements rather than focusing solely on sales and support, business owners and managers find that they are better able to address internal workflows with streamlined process automation.

The result is significant improvement in the quality and completeness of the information available to users throughout the organization, ultimately improving the quality and nature of customer engagement and interaction. Perhaps even more impactful is the ability for the business to better understand the context of and motivations for customer interactions, and (most importantly!) having the capability to take immediate action based on that knowledge.

With the right customer relationship and business management solution in place, and with a focus on systematic approaches to enabling process and workflow automation, businesses can become more flexible and responsive to changing customer needs and expectations. Creating the complete view of the customer relationship and capturing the data which helps users understand the dynamics of the entire relationship serves to build closer customer relationships that will strengthen and grow over time.

When a business needs to implement a Customer Relationship Management solution to address sales and support needs, it makes sense to also review information management requirements for:

Delivery of products and/or services – i.e. fulfillment of what was promised by sales
Scheduling of Work/Service Orders and integrated billing based on completed work
Time and personnel activity management as well as time reporting and billing
Project or job resource and time management and reporting
Documents, contracts, before & after pictures, and agreements of all types
Products and services, proposals and quotes, price books and channels

Additionally, since the processes are so closely related in terms of the information collected or used, it makes sense that the CRM solution would also work with:

Marketing campaigns and activities, lead generation systems and e-newsletter solutions
Accounting solutions which also utilize customer, product, job, time, cost and other data
Expense spending management, approvals and reporting

To be truly useful, the solution must also support remote and mobile workers since field service personnel and other workers are often not in the office when they need to get something done. Whether the access is via hosted solutions providing full remote desktop functionality, or via web-based application extensions allowing device independent access (or both!), the solution should be designed to allow users to access the system and perform their work from wherever it is required.

Even more, a comprehensive approach to managing business activities and information, particularly with a focus on providing all departments with all the information and capability they need to get their jobs done properly, requires that everyone in the company be on board. There really isn’t a great way to centralize and manage critical business data when the approach is to give a few people some information and functionality, leaving it up to human beings and individual initiative to connect the dots (and the data). The result is almost always a series of gaping holes in various processes where information and requests get lost.

Among the best solutions I have found which delivers the foundation for all of this functionality is Results CRM. Thousands of users have successfully migrated from ACT!, Goldmine, Telemagic, Salesforce.com and other SFA and CRM solutions to the Results CRM platform, and have benefitted from better workflow automation, more logical company and contacts associations, and a broader range of functionality supporting everything from sophisticated quote and proposal development to comprehensive project, time and expense management.

At the end of the day, it’s the reporting that wins. If the data isn’t in the database, you can’t report on it. If you can’t report on it, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t make good business decisions and grow the business.

Make sense?

December 20, 2013

Accounting, Technology and Small Business – The Best of 2013 from CooperMann

It has been an eventful year, hasn’t it? With the NSA lurking about collecting data, innovative new approaches to information and identity theft emerging almost daily, and complete turmoil in the IT services industry challenging trusted sales and distribution models, most of us have simply become numb to the noise. Information technology is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace and the way people and businesses interact with and use technology is being forced to change along with it. It’s starting to become almost, weirdly, natural.

Much of this change can be attributed to “The Cloud”, which is not a thing or a place. Cloud has become the term which applies to just about anything having anything to do with the Internet. For technology “purists”, cloud means something fairly specific, but for normal people (no offense to the nerds and geeks, but you know what I mean), cloud applies to pretty much anything accessible via the Internet. Photos back up to “the cloud”; music gets stored in “the cloud”, websites are hosted in “the cloud”; businesses run their applications in “the cloud”, and you can do darned near anything you need (or want) to with a phone. The cloud could be some guy’s server in his basement, or it could be a sophisticated network of systems housed in secure facilities around the globe. They both qualify, sort of. The point is that mobility, Internet services, subscription access to technology, and social computing are changing how people view technology – resulting with changes not simply in how IT is purchased, but in how IT is used and applied to daily life.

There are, however, some things that do not change even if the working environment does. The accounting profession, for example, is undergoing a great deal of change, and much of it fueled by the advancements in technology and social computing. But accounting fundamentals – the “truth of debits and credits” and the good old accounting equation – remain. The basics of running a business are also unchanged, even as methods of doing business evolve and globalization of markets continues. Business fundamentals – fiscal responsibility, cash and growth management, and focus on value and sustainability – are as necessary now as every before.

With all this change and IT “advancement”, there have certainly been impacts to how and where we work. But the more things change, the more they remain the same. Good business generates goodwill and more business – that doesn’t change – and bad news still tends to spread faster than good news (much faster, given social platforms that are designed to spread the word far and wide). And when it comes down to the fundamentals – the basic and essential foundations supporting building, operating, and accounting for business – we generally find that they remain constant even as the environment in which they exist experiences change.

Make Sense?

Here are the top 20 ranked posts for 2013 from CooperMann.com

Posts by category – with Accounting Professionals, QuickBooks Hosting, QuickBooks Software, and Small Business being the top categories with ranking articles.

ACCOUNTING PROFESSIONALS

Small Business Owner to Accountant: Make Accounting Valuable to ME

Accounting Professionals, You’re right – your clients don’t care about the numbers.

The Language of Accounting: Disconnect between Accountants and Bookkeepers

Why Accountants and Bookkeepers Use the Cloud

Bookkeeping and Benchmarks – Getting the Numbers Right

In Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Information Technology: The Value of Outsourcing

Re-defining the role of the accountant, or going back to the good old days?

The Collaborative Online Model for Small Business Accounting Professionals

Remote access to client bookkeeping comes in many forms because clients come in many forms

QUICKBOOKS AND BUSINESS APPLICATION HOSTING

What Small Businesses Need To Know about QuickBooks and the Cloud

Intuit Introduces Changes to Authorized Commercial Host for QuickBooks Program, Introduces QuickBooks Enterprise Rental Licensing

Hosting All My Applications in the Cloud

Intuit Hosting Program for QuickBooks Website Goes Live

Cloud Computing for Small Business: It’s All About 3 Apps

QuickBooks Hosting: New Program Tier Announced for QuickBooks Hosting Providers

Managed Applications, Cloudpaging, and a New Flavor of Hosted QuickBooks

QUICKBOOKS SOFTWARE

Changing How We See Software: QuickBooks 2013 interface frustrates power users

SMALL BUSINESS

4 Rules of Thumb for Business Success

4 Rules for Building Service Customer Loyalty

November 18, 2013November 18, 2013

4 Rules for Building Service Customer Loyalty

Every business owner knows that it’s important to retain the business of good customers, because those good customers will turn into referrals and more customers. What many business owner’s don’t know is that building customer loyalty – the repeat and referral business that keeps the doors open – takes more than producing a good product or having nice personnel. Building customer loyalty is a continuous process which involves just about every area of the business. Particularly with service-based businesses where there may be a number of variables involved with the delivery, proper information collection, management, and communication becomes the essential foundation for delivering on the promise of great service, which helps to develop loyal customers.

In a previous article titled “4 Rules of Thumb for Business Success”, I stressed the importance of creating the best business impression possible. Here are a few additional tidbits for service businesses – things the company can do to make sure that the work is done completely and correctly the first time, which is what leads to happy and loyal customers.

Rule 1. Remember that everyone in the company is essentially in a sales and service position. The customer should be able to get useful help or direction from any employee. Not that everyone in the company can do all the jobs in the business, but everyone should be willing and able to find the resources necessary to get the customer’s question answered. And it’s a good habit to try to set any necessary service appointments on the first call – it lets the customer know you’re ready to get the job done and saves them time. Too many sales teams simply answer inquiries from callers and don’t ask for the business. If you don’t ask, they can’t say yes.

Rule 2. Structure the order process to make sure that all information is captured, stored, and made available to service techs. Customer requests should be specifically noted, along with any special details or requests. There’s nothing more annoying than telling the company to watch out for something when they’re at your place, and then finding out that the tech didn’t get the memo. Also make sure that any specific work items or parts are listed on the order, making it easier for the tech to record what they do and use. All of this information should be available not just to techs, but to customer service and sales people, too. After all, mismanagement of order information is usually not the customer’s fault, yet the customer is the one who ends up not getting what they asked for. Avoiding this situation is critical to developing loyal, repeat customers. It also makes getting the customer sign-off more likely, and this signature should be captured at the work site when the job is completed (allows the billing department to get the invoice out much faster, which allows the company to get paid faster).

Rule 3. During the job, make sure customers and co-workers are informed as to the status of the work. The worst thing is to partially complete a job and leave the customer hanging – a situation that status tracking of service orders helps prevent. When the work is completed, make sure to let the customer know, and also provide observations and recommendations. Whether it’s a single job or a regular maintenance contract, always document what was done so that the customer knows exactly what work was performed. Use a checklist or cheat sheet to make sure things are done completely and consistently every time, including cleaning up and making notes about the job. Documenting things that technicians notice while at the customer location may provide the opportunity to offer more or other services to the customer, or might at least inform the customer about an issue they should be aware of. By paying attention while on-site and looking for upgrades or value-adds that might benefit the customer, service technicians can often position themselves as top sales people, too.

Finally, Rule 4, always thank the customer for their business and let them know you genuinely appreciate it. Smile, hand them a business card, and maybe even ask for a referral. If you’ve done your job well and kept the customer informed along the way, it’s likely that this customer will bring you more business both directly and through referrals and recommendations. That’s customer loyalty, and you can’t buy it anywhere – you have to build it.

Make sense?

October 17, 2013

Accounting Professional Value is Insight and Advice, Not Just a Hosted Server

Back in the late 90’s, when the application service provider model was first established, a number of providers recognized how beneficial it would be for public accountants to use hosted applications to work more closely with their accounting and bookkeeping clients. Seeking markets which would rapidly adopt a hosted application model, these providers focused on hosting small business accounting solutions such as Intuit QuickBooks desktop products, and then sought participation by the largest addressable communities of users working with those products – QuickBooks ProAdvisors, bookkeepers and accountants. The idea was that the community of QuickBooks professionals would benefit by bringing their clients onto the hosting platform, and service providers could sell to one professional and gain a bunch of small business users. It made sense, too, as it allowed the professional to have a single service and login that allowed them to access all their client QuickBooks company files. The client could log in to the system, too, delivering remote access and managed service benefits to the client, as well. But there was a catch, and it didn’t fully reveal itself until recently as cloud-based applications and true SaaS applications began to gain market adoption.

The problem actually started to reveal itself as more businesses elected to adopt hosting services. There’s a saying amongst the QuickBooks hosting providers that “nobody uses just QuickBooks”. Saying “nobody” uses just QuickBooks is a bit of a stretch, but the reality is that numerous businesses use other applications and software solutions in addition to their QuickBooks product. Sometimes these products integrate with QuickBooks and sometimes they don’t, but it is not often that a business utilizes just the one software solution. At minimum, there are likely email or productivity tools in use, too. The point is that the QuickBooks hosting providers – those hosts focusing on providing service to QuickBooks accountants and small business clients – realized that the number and variety of applications desired by their customers would grow very quickly, as would the variety of needed implementation models. The unfortunate solution of the time was to just put it all on the same environment.

The original selling message to the QuickBooks consultant and accountant markets was that they should get all their clients on to the hosting service, and then the accountant could benefit from an “economy of scale”, making the cost of the overall delivery lower. Further, by grouping the firm and the clients into a single hosting environment, it would make application and data sharing easier. Both of these messages are true, but putting the firm and its clients into a single environment – with the firm as the “sponsor” and front line promoter of the service – began to have impacts which were not clearly foreseen.

Accounting professionals and consultants changed the nature of their relationship with the client, going from trusted advisors to technology and solution vendors.
Client business technology needs were placed as secondary to “enabling” the working relationship between the accountant and the small business client.
Attempts to fully satisfy client technology requirements overburdened and impacted the environment, reducing overall service quality and satisfaction and diminishing the value of the scale economy (as well as the clients’ perception of their accounting professional).
Firms structured their processes to support a single technology and operating model, and found difficulties in adopting new strategies or solutions.

In concept, having accounting professionals and their clients all working seamlessly together in the same systems sounds great. For some firms, a cloud server packed with all the firm and client applications and data enables an entirely new business and service model, which is very cool and it actually works (for some firms and their clients). But the problem – a problem which may not be fully revealed in the short term – is that the various businesses involved, from the accounting practice to each and every client, has different business needs and operates as a unique organization. While there may be fundamental similarities, “the devil is in the details” as they say, and a single platform or hosting solution is unlikely to really work well for all. Even more potentially damaging, the perception of the trusted advisor who is now viewed as a vendor of IT services or software erodes the value of the client engagement and the potential for the firm to deliver greater benefit through their core offerings. A business owner is more likely to change vendors of IT service than they are their trusted accounting or finance professional. And they’re also more likely to change IT service providers if the provider cannot deliver exactly the application or service desired. When the accounting professional is perceived to be the IT service provider, the lines are blurred and the client ends up attaching their loyalty to a software product or business solution instead of the accountant advisor OR the IT provider.

With SaaS and native web-based applications being broadly adopted by small businesses, the opportunity for firms to engage with clients in different ways and with different solutions started to break the one-size-fits-all hosting approach. Professionals found that empowering their clients by supporting properly fitted solutions which work for the client business delivered the opportunity to become more operationally and strategically involved with the client business. Deeper operational and strategic involvement with the client became the means to drive increased value in the engagement and services offered and delivered. The client business was able to benefit from the involvement of their trusted advisor, regardless of what platforms or systems might be in place.

Accountants and bookkeepers are recognizing that the previous model of aligning the practice with a particular software product or delivery system may not be the best approach to building and retaining the customer base. With new business accounting and bookkeeping solutions emerging regularly – and gaining broad market adoption – and as more and more varied cloud based services and solutions are applied to various business problems – professionals will further recognize that their value is not tied to a cloud server, a single small business accounting solution, or to any particular technology. The value of the accounting professional is not in the software they support or the server it runs on. The value of the accounting professional is in the insight gathered and advice provided – services offered which help support better business management, growth and profitability.

Make Sense?

September 23, 2013

Licensing the Cloud: Software Distribution and Use in a Remote Access World

Whether we like it or not, and whether we agree or not – software developers have a right to decide how and where their licensed products are run. There have always been arguments in this area, where software license purchasers take the position that they should be able to do what they want with their licenses, and where commercial software developers believe they have the rights to dictate authorized usage. Truly, when it comes down to the legalities of it all, the software companies will win because they have the legal footing to fall back on – the EULA containing use rights and terms which licensed users have agreed to.

The problem has been ongoing, with software developers constantly and consistently seeking methods to reduce unauthorized software distribution and unsupported use, and users spending amazing amounts of time and resources finding ways to break the rule. Copy protection, “phone home” license validation models and all sorts of approaches have been developed to prevent software theft and unauthorized distribution. But it happens anyway – a lot – and the cloud is turning into a great facilitator. Surprisingly, it’s an “in your face” approach, too, where the previous iteration of web-enabled software theft (unauthorized digital downloads and license cracking) was fairly quiet and tried to be secretive to stay out of the gun sights of the developer. Today’s “flavor” is right out there, being marketed to any and all who care to view the ads.

With businesses more frequently turning to “cloud” server providers to run business applications, it is no wonder that the IaaS and PaaS companies would want to make their services easier and more valuable to acquire than the next guy’s. Aside from a groovy control panel and great networking and VM pricing, the added value from these providers is in the applications they are able to service. More frequently, hosting service providers are marketing their solutions in the context of the applications customers run on the service (which makes sense, because the application’s what really matters). Leveraging the brand value and recognition of popular commercial software products makes sense, as it improves overall visibility and increases the potential of the “right” kind of prospect engaging and becoming a customer.

The problem arises when these service providers sell hosting services for, or which support, applications they are not authorized or licensed to deliver, and this is where the argument comes full circle. The hosting provider wants to host applications customers use, customers have licenses for those applications, but not a right to have them hosted. The host deploys the application anyway, because that’s what the customer wants. “What’s the risk?” they ask… “the customer has the software license”.

The risk is, unfortunately, greater for the service provider than for the customer. Even if the customer has a license for the software product, that license may not actually be eligible to run on a hosted server. “Businesses lease computer equipment all the time, and they can run the software on those systems” is the next argument generally offered by the service provider. But, in the eyes of the software developer, there may be a big difference between leased equipment run in-house versus subscribed platform services deployed via a commercial hosting provider. Even Microsoft recognizes the benefit and value of providing “mobility” of application licensing, and has specific licensing models to allow commercial hosts to deploy customer-owned licenses. While many service providers understand and recognize the requirements to ensure that customer applications are properly licensed for hosted delivery, there are a great many who think the rules simply do not apply to them. These folks are introducing a great deal of risk into their hosting businesses, even if they are not willing to recognize it.

When a customer runs their software in an unauthorized manner, they risk losing the rights and benefits associated with their software license. When a commercial hosting company runs software on their servers that they have no right to install and run… they are potentially guilty of unauthorized software distribution and copyright theft.

Actions against facilitators of unauthorized content distribution – you can equate “software” with “content” – have received much press in past months, yet much of the discussion centers on music and video content (as in the Megaupload story). Actions involving commercial software products tend to be somewhat less visible, probably due to reluctance by commercial developers to have what could be perceived as negative press flowing through social media venues. It’s popular to protect music and videos, but hosting providers aren’t seeing the wisdom of preserving the integrity of a commercial software product license. Instead, they’re relying on the customer to indemnify them (the customer has a license, remember?). But the customer can’t protect the host; the host must protect the host – it’s the prudent business approach.

Infrastructure providers, platform providers and businesses operating as application hosting companies should pay close attention to the content living on their servers. Taking a position that the customer has the right to do whatever they want with the system is not a viable position; the precedent has been set that the hosting provider is responsible for the content on their systems. In the case of hosts offering service for small business applications like Microsoft Office and Intuit QuickBooks, for example, it is essential that a service model which conforms to and supports proper license usage be in place, and that any required authorizations are, too.

Software is just another form of content, and the cloud makes distribution of and access to content a lot easier, even when it shouldn’t be.

Make sense?

September 16, 2013May 18, 2017

Better QuickBooks Access, Management and Security – QuickBooks Licensing and Hosting Models

Whether hosted in-house or offsite, licensing models for hosting QuickBooks can be very confusing.

driving1-ANIMATION The demand for solutions to address user mobility, better collaboration and improved information security is increasing as connectivity improves and cloud services and threats evolve. Server-based computing models and application hosting are increasingly popular as businesses seek to embrace teleworking and telecommuting models for their entrenched applications and systems, creating a foundation for improved productivity and work/life balancing (or integration). On the technical side, the benefits of centralizing applications and data include improved efficiency in managing, maintaining and securing systems. For many small businesses, this means centralizing the installation and maintenance of core business applications like Intuit QuickBooks Pro, Premier or Enterprise.

Whether it be offsite with a commercial hosting provider or on a co-located server somewhere, or an onsite installation on the in-house server, hosting Intuit QuickBooks licenses can be straightforward or complicated depending on what you are trying to do with them. Because QuickBooks was designed as a standalone single-user application, there are a number of challenges when it comes to preparing it for server-based use. The primary issue is often simply understanding the QuickBooks licensing model, which is not particularly INTUITive (sorry).

Licensing hosted QuickBooks applications comes with two different sets of implementation issues: the technical implementation (the installation and setup) and the logical allocation of licenses to users (the licensing rules).

When it comes to the technical implementation, many an experienced engineer has beaten their head against the wall trying to get QuickBooks to work properly in a workspace or session-based system (e.g., terminal server), all because they expect the product to implement like a “normal” client/server application. While QuickBooks may use the Sybase database manager guts to handle multi-user access to QuickBooks data files (I think it is still Sybase), the architecture required to properly service a networked QuickBooks installation does not necessarily mimic what would be used with, for example, a .NET desktop client application with an MS SQL back-end. First, the QuickBooks data files cannot be remote to the application, meaning that both the client and the database manager (which is actually working as an adjunct to the client) must exist on the local network; it will not work over a WAN connection, which is why so many folks get frustrated when they put their server “in the cloud” and attempt to connect from a local client using a VPN. It just won’t work that way with QuickBooks; it all has to be on the local network – client, server, data… all of it.

It is notable that many businesses use Dropbox and other file sync solutions because they want to be able to get to their data from multiple locations, but the data they’re getting must be “local” to the apps that use it. It doesn’t allow for simultaneous multi-user access, but it can be an effective way to share a file. The caveat is that the file (at least in the case of a QuickBooks file, or Outlook PST file, etc.) should not actually be used from the sync folder. Sync folder should contain copies of data files that users wish to sync or share with other devices. But I digress…

With a server-based implementation of QuickBooks, technicians will install the QuickBooks desktop software on the server, and will determine whether or not that same machine will also handle the company data files. The QuickBooks DB manager is part of the installation of QuickBooks, and the file system and drive where the QB files are to be managed must be recognized as a local drive on the server running the QBDB manager. The overhead used by the database manager isn’t huge, but it can impact the performance of users on the server. For this reason, some techs will decide to implement a separate file server to manage the QB data files, taking that load off the app server.

The QuickBooks software uses the database manager to “host” access to company files. This simply means that a single server with the data on it is providing managed access to QuickBooks application users.
When QuickBooks application software and data is installed and centrally managed on a server (instead of QuickBooks being installed on individual PCs), that means QuickBooks application is being “hosted” on that server.
When a 3rd party provider supplies the server, the QuickBooks installation, data storage, and your way of connecting to it all, that provider is a “host” providing hosting services for your QuickBooks.

In a dedicated hosting environment, the data is often stored on the same server as the applications, whereas in a shared hosting environment, the data is often stored on central file servers which serve multiple customers. This is why, in some shared hosting situations, one bad data file can take down the database manager services for all the customers using that same file server.

Users open the QuickBooks application on the server instead of having the application installed on individual PCs. The single server-based installation of the software is able to be used concurrently by all users logging in to that computer. With the database manager running, the file is essentially “hosted” on that machine, and the file may then be opened in multi-user mode. OK so far. The problem generally comes about when a second user on the same computer/server wants to open the same QB data file as the first user.

Because the QB database manager is looking at the license of the client application accessing the data file, it will recognize when two different users/sessions with the same license key attempt to open the company data file. If that license key is a single-user key, then the database manager knows it should allow only 1 concurrent user in the file. QuickBooks doesn’t get installed for each user on a computer or server; it is installed one time on the machine and each user on that machine runs from that single shared installation. Any particular version of the QuickBooks application may be installed only once on a single computer, but it is possible to install multiple editions, year versions, and “flavors” of QuickBooks on a single machine (cannot be more than one installation of each unique product). There will be more than a few annoyances when running a variety of QBs on the same computer, but it is technically possible.

In order to allow multiple users to simultaneously access the same data file from a central installation of QuickBooks, the license key installed on the computer must be a multi-user key. QuickBooks Pro, for example, can be keyed to 3 concurrent users, meaning that the license will allow up to 3 users with that same license key to simultaneously access the same company file. Technically (but not lawfully) this installation of QuickBooks on the machine could allow a virtually unlimited number of users to launch the QuickBooks application simultaneously, limited only by machine resources. This is where the logical allocation of licensing comes in.. the rule of licensing QuickBooks.

The logical allocation of unique licenses for each QuickBooks user is a little easier to understand than the technical implementation. The rule is simply that each user of QuickBooks is required to have a valid registered/activated license. That valid license is a license purchased and activated for that business.

total-business Making QuickBooks desktop editions more useful by adding secure remote access and centralized management makes a lot of sense. For companies who rely on the functionality and features of the desktop products (QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise), a hosted approach is the only way to really address mobility and multi-location requirements. Remember that hosting doesn’t necessarily mean offsite, although that could make sense for the business, too.

Centrally-managing QuickBooks applications and data creates greater efficiency and improves overall IT management capability for the business. At the same time, a centralized model introduces a better strategy for mobilizing the workforce and connecting remote users and offices. The struggles of understanding and implementing proper QuickBooks licensing begin to seem very small when compared to the benefits of deploying a centralized system that’s easier to access, manage and secure.

Make sense?

A Higher Level of Customer Relationship Management: Building Closer Customer Relationships

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Accounting, Technology and Small Business – The Best of 2013 from CooperMann

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4 Rules for Building Service Customer Loyalty

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Accounting Professional Value is Insight and Advice, Not Just a Hosted Server

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Licensing the Cloud: Software Distribution and Use in a Remote Access World

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Whether hosted in-house or offsite, licensing models for hosting QuickBooks can be very confusing.

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