Tag: hosted quickbooks

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Two Ways to Get QuickBooks in the Cloud

Get QuickBooks in the Cloud: Hosted QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online

cloud-computingRunning applications online, or “in the cloud” using today’s parlance, is top priority for a lot of businesses.  It’s not that these organizations have a burning desire to post their financials to the web, which is what a lot of folks thought was going to happen when we first suggested they use their financial applications online.  Rather, business owners and managers have begun to recognize and experience the benefits of connecting their various locations, remote and mobile workers with real time access to business applications and data.  Further, centralization of IT coupled with outsourced IT management and subscription service pricing has introduced financial and operational benefits which make businesses more cost-efficient as well as more agile.  From being the basis for foundational process and workflow improvements to allowing the repositioning of IT costs from capex to opex, online application services are proving their value in various ways every day.

The evident popularity of cloud solutions is clearly visible in one small corner of the global software marketplace: the small business accounting solution market. Intuit’s QuickBooks product, almost a default go-to with entrepreneurs and small business owners, is still the most prevalent accounting solution in use by US small businesses.  While there may be growing usage of other applications on the web, such as Xero or FreshBooks (both are awesome SaaS apps that do what they do quite well), there is equally strong growth in Intuit’s own SaaS version of QuickBooks.  The SaaS applications are easier to localize for different places in the world – different languages and currencies – so international use of these products is likely to continue to grow.  Even more to the point, these solutions address functionality and pricing levels which are acceptable to entirely different classes of users that previously wouldn’t even consider buying accounting software to do the books (like freelancers and solo/soho operators), so the overall size of the market of “businesses who use accounting or bookkeeping software” is actually growing.

Intuit’s QuickBooks Online edition is a true SaaS solution that is quite different from the desktop-based QuickBooks.  While QBO has gained tremendous popularity, it has yet to reach the user numbers the desktop products have.  The desktop solutions boast not just a particular range of functionality, but integrated applications and add-ons, and – perhaps most importantly – being a foundation for a wide variety of financial and business record keeping, bookkeeping, accounting, operationally oriented and reporting processes.  To sum it up: it’s embedded.  People know the software, the data is in a known format, and the product is simply part of how the business operates.

Once a solution is as entrenched as QuickBooks is – kind of like the entrenchment Microsoft Word and Excel have in the productivity area – it doesn’t go away very quickly and only when the value proposition is much greater… and maybe not even then.  Rather, folks find ways to make the solution they want work for them.  This is where hosting comes in and meets with the market’s demand for running applications (yes! even desktop applications!) online, as managed subscription service.

Running your QuickBooks desktop online via a hosting provider is how businesses take advantage of the best benefits of SaaS without actually converting to a SaaS application. They retain investments in training, process and integration yet introduce mobility, remote access and office connectivity, centralized information and predictable costs. QuickBooks-using businesses need to know about hosting their QuickBooks and the providers who can offer anything from standardized to extremely customized service.

As technology continues to evolve at ever-increasing rates, businesses will continue to be faced with new paradigms for doing business.  Some will adopt early and some will adopt later, and some simply won’t adopt.  Certainly the market as a whole doesn’t adopt as quickly as software companies would like, but then that’s always the way it is.  Customers will do what works for customers, and right now hosting is working for QuickBooks customers.

Joanie Mann Bunny FeetMake Sense

J

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QuickBooks Online vs QuickBooks Desktop: The Great Debate

QuickBooks users around the country are facing a dilemma like never before – they’re being forced to consider exchanging their beloved QuickBooks desktop editions with a subscription-based online application that seems like an entirely different product.  It not only seems like a different product, it is.  And this is where the debate begins.

For years businesses both large and small found Intuit’s QuickBooks software to be their solution for business bookkeeping and accounting.  Over the years the product line grew to support larger businesses, with the Enterprise edition scaling to 30 users and boasting a load of operational process support features.  Accounting professionals, too, grew to favor the QuickBooks products because there were features just for these “mechanics” who learned to make the software do what was necessary to support the business, even if the software wasn’t intentionally designed to be used in that manner.  After all, it is this “unintentional” activity which often results in really cool new features being introduced in the product – features that the designers didn’t think up but that users did and the news eventually got back to the developers.

dt-v-online-great-debateWhen Intuit introduced QuickBooks Online, however, the tried-and-true solution known as “QuickBooks” became something very different at first glance, creating the need to educate the market about the continuing existence of desktop QuickBooks products as well as the newer online QuickBooks product.  Differentiation of the two is not really the “desktop” versus “online” moniker – Commercial Hosts for QuickBooks, who essentially turn the desktop products into online application service, pretty much eliminate the whole “any time, anywhere” debate, as hosted QuickBooks desktop editions are just as anytime/anywhere as the online edition is.  The benefit of Internet access and running on any device is now removed from the equation, so what’s left to compare other than functionality, benefits and features… and a proven track record?

We could, in the past, have a conversation about the features, benefits and functionality in QuickBooks and know that the flow-through of product use knowledge, stored data and integration with other business solutions would be fairly seamless and consistent.  QuickBooks Online has demonstrated none of this, fracturing the seamlessness and consistency users could previously expect as they move through the product line – as businesses will do as they grow larger and have more demands from their software solutions.

So now there’s a debate – which solution is best?  The answer really isn’t necessarily about which is best, but which addresses the business need now and, if the business intends to be around for a while, in the future.  Sometimes the argument is more about getting you where you need to be rather than simply supporting where you are now.  I know I’m not yet ready to place any hard bets on whether or not the QBO  model will truly deliver the goods for growing businesses long-term.

Joanie Mann Bunny FeetMake Sense?

J

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Accounting for Custom Manufacturing

Accounting for Custom Manufacturing

Accounting and bookkeeping is a part of every business large and small, yet there are myriad details to work with and a multitude of possible approaches to addressing the requirement.  From a summary perspective, there are standards which are fairly easily met, providing the basics of sales and expense tracking and income reporting sufficient for basic tax and compliance work to be performed.  Yet accounting may go much deeper into the operational processes of the business, delving into the details of productivity and profitability in order to find and expose areas where the business might improve both.

mfgManufacturing, particularly custom manufacturing or ETO (engineering to order) is among those industry types that could benefit tremendously from a more intimate and detailed approach to accounting.  Unfortunately, it is often difficult to find experienced professionals with not simply a competence in working with manufacturing industry sector clients, but specifically with ETO process.  Building to order is one thing, but finding the way to improve efficiency and profitability when every job is a custom encounter takes additional skills and a lot of data.  Accounting professionals with these skills are needed to help these custom manufacturers grow, transform their businesses and make the overall operations more efficient and sustainable.

It seems logical that manufacturing and ETO space businesses are ripe for the same bridging of technology and analysis that the accounting industry started broadly approaching some years back.  With bookkeeping processes being more frequently outsourced to non-accountants, the accounting professionals saw increased pressure to find more efficient ways of doing things and had to find new value to deliver to clients.  Technology, data collection and analysis became the foundations for delivering on that new requirement.  With the established model and philosophy, bringing more operational aspects of client systems into the mix and extending the model end-to-end just makes sense.

It takes a combination of systems – from the core accounting solution to the manufacturing control or other operational systems, through to the analytical tools.  Leveraging hosting technologies and cloud service, businesses are finally able to bring the multiple work locations – shops, warehouses and business offices – together in a single software and technology platform, and collect the level of detail necessary to provide a comprehensive and true picture of the business.  The analytical tools then provide the means to explore the details and identify where improvements might be made or where previously unrecognized risk exists.

QuickBooks desktop editions remain among the most popular financial systems used by manufacturing and job shop applications, largely due to the effectiveness of connecting the operational applications to an accounting solution which proves highly workable and which has strong industry support.  Even with the emergence of QuickBooks Online (and the push by Intuit to get customers to adopt this web-based alternative to desktop-based software) the QuickBooks desktop edition products continue to provide more functionality and application support for these working models, as the ability to fully manage the information in the solution exists more in the disk based products than it does in a multitenant web-based application.  Accounting “mechanics” are able to see, access and work with all the data rather than simply view reports where only half of the transaction is visible – making detailed accounting and data analysis more readily available.

 

The key is to leverage the accounting professional, the right software tools, and the platform and delivery environment that allows it all to work in concert for the entire organization.  Add the QuickBooks hosting service so the participants can work more closely together.  Enabling the accounting professional and bringing them closer to their clients (and client systems) allows the deeper move into operational issues, creating the basis for both to receive new and more value from the relationship.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

 

 

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Everything Old is New Again: Big Fat Phones and Desktop QuickBooks in the Cloud

anywhere-anydeviceEvery year that passes leaves some reminder of the time – some person or occurrence which touches us and creates a lasting memory.  2014 delivered its share of memorable people and moments and proved again that social platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have become increasingly significant as people across the world organize, march or call for change.  Yet even as change is demanded from us and often forced upon us, it is wise to remember that the pendulum eventually swings both ways.  We want to have our cake and eat it, too, which is the ultimate no-win situation and causes us to constantly and consistently seek out the alternative.  Like the puppy chasing his tail, we end up going round in circles.  Harem pants and jeans torn from knee to thigh have come back in fashion, and even though they didn’t really work the first time, here they are again. It is inevitable.

Information technology trends follow similar patterns, and what was once in high fashion may now be considered as “legacy”.  Perhaps the better word is “classic”, as these legacy solutions often represent the standards by which new solutions will be measured.  Eventually, the properties of the classic or legacy solution wind up in the new breed, because this is what the market has come to expect and/or demand.  Even when entirely new standards are believed to be adopted, the truth is that years of learning and experience will often find the path previously traveled by others to be the right path.

It seems like so long ago when some said “the desktop is dead” and that all applications would be used by every device via the web, but not run on the device.  Well, there are quite a number of web-based applications and services delivered in just that manner, but there are also lots and lots of computers out there with software still installed on them, happily working away for their users (there’s an app for that, right?).  The desktop isn’t dead at all, it seems, and what’s more – there are trends to extend the capability and reach of the desktop to the web rather than replacing the desktop with the web.  Application integration, process integration, interoperability, functionality and modality – all these factors and more have become the underlying drivers for extension of and hosting for desktop applications, and are the areas where SaaS and web-based application service has not delivered as expected.

The idea of having no software on the computing device is kind of silly, when you think about it.  Computers continue to get more powerful and have more capability than ever.  Heck, even phones are getting fatter and bigger again.  The best phones these days are the ones that rival tablets and laptops in size and have lots of apps to run.

Microsoft Office, too, hasn’t gone anywhere, really.  It’s still firmly attached to most workstations whether they’re iPads or Macs or Windows systems.  Web-based productivity tools are certainly gaining in use, but not nearly as widely as some would believe.  Office productivity continues to live on the desktop, and ties many users to desktop computing for that very reason.  Use CRM in the cloud?  I’ll bet you still export data to Excel or Word on the PC.  Use accounting in the cloud?  A lot of reporting still goes through Excel, trial balance systems and the like.  The universe of web-based and SaaS apps is getting larger, but it hasn’t yet become the center of the universe for most established businesses.  Net-new customers and smaller businesses are adopting SaaS due largely to cost and to the success of the marketing message, but use and direct experience with the product applied in the business setting often demonstrates that adoption of a more flexible (malleable) or functionally rich solution is indicated. The business likes the mobility, remote access and managed service, but not the actual SaaS application.  So, hosting becomes the better alternative and the business is able to use the software that works for the business, and use it in a manner that allows the business to take advantage of remote and mobile capability, subscription service, and more.

I really have no gripes with web-based and SaaS solutions.  In fact, some of my best friends use SaaS  🙂  The message I’m trying to convey is simply that, regardless of what the media and marketing may tell you, things don’t always change as quickly as it seems.  Yes, there is a movement towards cloud solutions and online working models.  Yes, there is change in how information technology is obtained and used.  And equally true is the reality that only a portion of the market has adopted these changes and new philosophies.  By the time there is “complete” adoption, there will be a new standard or approach being marketed and we will be in this place once again.  Is there wide recognition of the benefit for mobility and remote capability? Sure there is, but it is also accompanied by the understanding that tried and true solutions will continue to deliver the functionality and capability businesses rely upon, even as new models for delivering them come about.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

Here are some of the most popular articles from CooperMann.com in 2014.  Surprisingly enough, the most popular were articles about QuickBooks and the Cloud, a subject I’ve been writing about for many years.  In fact, some of the most popular of my QuickBooks/cloud articles are from 2013 and they remain among the most frequently viewed even today. Search and view metrics indicate that the topic’s popularity is not likely to diminish soon, so plan to hear more about how businesses are using QuickBooks (and other desktop and network applications) in the cloud, but aren’t using Online editions to make it work really well.

 The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. CooperMann.com blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

  1. The 2 Most Popular Models for Working with QuickBooks Desktop Editions and the Cloud
  2. Hosted QuickBooks and Office 365 a Complicated Technical and Licensing Model (until now)
  3. Intuit Introduces Changes to Authorized Commercial Host for QuickBooks Program, Introduces QuickBooks Enterprise Rental Licensing
  4. Managed Applications, Cloudpaging, and a New Flavor of Hosted QuickBooks
  5. QuickBooks and Dropbox? Yeah… no.
  6. Intuit Ends QuickBooks Remote Access Service: The Time to Host is Now

 

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Intuit Ended QuickBooks Remote Access Service: The Time to Host is Now

Intuit Ended QuickBooks Remote Access Service: The Time to Host is Now

accountingCloudAccountants, bookkeepers and small business consultants have recognized the benefits of accessing client information remotely, where all parties can work on the same data in real-time, creating the opportunity to maintain more timely and accurate financial data for the business client.  The Internet has become the network, facilitating a variety of different working models which allow users, regardless of location, to access business information and data to get their work done.

For accountants and their business clients, it is essential that there is some type of virtualized working model, else the client is relegated to accepting after-the-fact reporting and outdated information.  Especially in smaller businesses where many of the accounting and finance processes are handled by an outsourced professional, time and distance is the enemy.

Just about anything that helps remove those barriers to real-time efficiency is worth looking at – which made it particularly unfortunate when Intuit, the  makers of QuickBooks, discontinued the QuickBooks Remote Access Service which was a tool that had addressed the remote access requirement for many businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping providers.

There are a wide variety of options for accountants to work closer with their small business clients, and jumping into a SaaS or web-based application is just one of them; other proven options include secure remote PC access or hosted application services.  Hosting in particular is beneficial as it allow businesses to continue the use of the software and processes they have already invested in while enabling a remote access and mobile capability.

If the problem is access, the solution isn’t necessarily a complete change in software – the solution is to create access. With Intuit’s end of QuickBooks Remote Access services in sight, the time to explore QuickBooks hosting is now.

Make sense?

J

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Following the Rules: Users and Licensing for Hosted QuickBooks

Following the Rules: Users and Licensing for Hosted QuickBooks

I have said many times before that the licensing for QuickBooks desktop editions appears to be a bit complicated, and a lot of that may have to do with the fact that so many people use QuickBooks in so many different ways.  With a solution like QuickBooks (or Microsoft Office or other really popular and widely used software products) there is a tendency for folks to want the flexibility of accessing their software regardless of what computer they are using.  Also, especially in businesses, there is the habit of installing software on a computer and then allowing anyone sitting at the computer to use the software.  In some cases these approaches are okay with the software vendors, but in most cases they’re not.  Yet too often, the small business owner doesn’t find out what the actual rules of using the product are until they try to deploy the software with a hosting service provider (because nobody ever actually reads the EULA, do they?).  If the provider has any credibility at all, they will enforce the licensing rules of the software, but that doesn’t always sit well with the customer.

picture-hostedQBThis situation rears its ugly head quite frequently in the QuickBooks hosting world.  Perhaps it is because there are a lot of possible working models involving QuickBooks users, or maybe it’s simply a matter of people not seeing the value of paying for what they want to accomplish.  Either way, service providers find themselves being challenged every day in trying to explain to a customer why they need to have more than one license for QuickBooks and more than one service account if they want more than one person to access the hosted solution.

Different people at different times: The Concurrent User approach

One of the arguments people make for not having licenses for all of their users is that they don’t actually need everyone in the system at the same time.  The belief is that there should be licenses enough only for the number of concurrent, or simultaneous, users that will access the system, yet each individual human being/user should have a login to the system with the software available (for convenience, of course).  A QuickBooks 3-user license, they believe, should be able to be used by any number of business users as long as no more than 3 of them are in QuickBooks at any given time.

While the customer may be making a reasonable argument, it all falls down when you consider the license agreement for QuickBooks.  Each user of the product is supposed to have a specific license.  A business with a 3-user license (or 3 single-user licenses) for QuickBooks has the rights to allow 3 people (unique human beings) to use the software, not any combination of people as long as they number no more than 3 at a time.   There is to be no sharing of licenses, and there is no “concurrent” licensing model: each person/user/human being is supposed to have their own license for the product no matter how often they access it.

Look but don’t touch: The Read-Only User approach

Another of the arguments people make for not licensing all of their users is that there is somehow a belief that if you don’t actually enter information, then you aren’t really using the software.  This often comes up in situations where an accounting professional works with their client, or when business owners want to occasionally see what’s going on in the company.  The approach centers on the concept of what a “user” is and suggests that users are the people entering or changing the data, and people only viewing that information aren’t really “users” at all.  When the bookkeeper opens QuickBooks and enters an invoice, the bookkeeper is recognized to be a user.  But when the business owner opens QuickBooks to view the financial statement or see the bank account balance, isn’t the business owner also a user?  Yup, they sure are. Any person that actually opens the program on the computer is a user, regardless of what they do when the program is open.  Just looking around at the data still requires that the program be open, and opening the program requires a license.

Two Fer: But the other hosting company lets me…

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.  So, just because a different hosting provider might let you get away with things that aren’t right (but perhaps are convenient or cost saving in the short-term) doesn’t mean you should expect a different host to allow the same thing.  If your current host says things like “as long as you don’t tell us…”, you should be concerned.  This often comes up in a hosting scenario where there is an outside accounting or outsourced back-office professional working with a hosted client business.  The outsourcer will want to access the client books, so they will want to have a login and access to QuickBooks software on the host system.

The trouble starts when the outsource professional doesn’t want to have to pay for their own service or licensing, yet they want to be able to login to the system and run QB just like the client does.  Falling sometimes under that attempt to leverage a concurrent user approach (see above), these outsourcers just aren’t realizing that the benefits of accessing their client information and working in real-time with that data is often valuable enough to support the cost of a hosted account and license.  Instead, they want their access to be free of charge and not be bound by silly rules of licensing, often because their client won’t want to pay for the accountant service in addition to their own.

This is when the “if you don’t tell us” stuff comes in – where the service provider may suggest to the accountant or outsourcer that they can simply login as the client and nobody would be the wiser.  I’ll fess up and say I have even entertained this idea with clients a few times but always shy away from discussing it in-depth.  While it is basically true that the service provider doesn’t generally know which exact human being is sitting at the other end of that remote desktop connection, that doesn’t mean that it is okay to leverage it into an abuse of services or licensing.

Two or more people sharing a single login just isn’t good ju ju, and it’s usually against a whole bunch of licensing rules and rights of use.  The funny thing is that many customers who initially leverage their service in this manner end up finding it was a really bad idea.  I saw a scenario a few years ago where a business allowed their outside auditors to share the logins of regular employees in the finance department.  When an employee tried to login to their remote desktop, they opened the session the auditor had open – exposing the employee to a lot of data that was not theirs to see but which the auditor user in QB had access to.  The company called it a security breach and it was on their part – and it was allowed to happen because they shared their remote desktops with the auditors rather than giving the auditors their own accounts with their own security profiles.  What seemed like a good, cheap approach on one day rapidly turned into a big issue the next, and the service provider had no power to prevent it from happening.

The moral of this story is simply that following the rules is the right thing to do and most reputable hosting service providers will try, even if they don’t end up doing it really well.  There are always going to be those who figure that the risks don’t measure up to the potential rewards, so they will do what they choose to do.  I’m always left wondering about those guys; if they have no problems breaking these rules, I wonder what other rules (or confidences) they are willing to break.  Hmmm.

Make sense?

J