Accounting professionals and small businesses worldwide use QuickBooks software to manage business finances. Launching Basic and Pro versions in 2000 and increasing market share from 74% in 2004 to boasting more than 94% in 2008, Intuit continues to successfully serve the needs of small and growing businesses.
Over the past few years, Intuit has focused quite a bit on SaaS and online services, promoting QuickBooks Online Edition, mobile payments and full service payroll as solutions that can meet specific business needs and which drive new customer adoption of the products. While customers may initially attach to QuickBooks because of one of these capabilities, it is the richer functionality found in Pro, Premier and Enterprise which often causes the business to run the desktop editions.
Intuit knows that the desktop editions remain hugely popular, which is why they continue to be updated and supported. And this is also why payments, payroll and other functions supported by the product are handled as integrated service rather than software; It’s a great way to make sure customers upgrade their QuickBooks software regularly, even when it sits on the desktop.
The changes in QuickBooks for 2020 aren’t amazing… it seems like they are more tweaks and adjustments than real feature releases. I’ll list a few of the changes below, but first I’d like to point out the 2 changes that I think might make a big difference.
These are my 2 favorite changes with QB 2020
1. QuickBooks Enterprise 2020: Landed cost
How did you get along without this before? Manual calculation, that’s how. Landed cost capability gives visibility to actual, complete product costs because it adds freight, duties, insurance and whatever other expenses relate to the purchase. Allocate the costs to item bills and you now have a complete view and tracking of the real cost of bringing in the product.
2. It is Now Easier to Reset the Admin Password
Yay! No more 20 questions! The Admin password for a company file may now be reset without having to enter a bunch of information and answer a lot of questions to verify identity. The process now asks that the user pick their email address from a drop down list of emails registered with the QuickBooks license. A token is emailed to the address to use in resetting the Admin password. The key here is to make sure your QuickBooks registration information remains up to date so that an email you can get to is used for this process.
Here’s the list of changes in QB 2020.
You can see more on Intuit’s website.
QuickBooks Desktop Pro, Premier, and Accountant
- Automated Payment Reminders
- Automatically add customer PO# to Invoice emails
- Combine all invoices meant for a single customer into one email
- Find and open your company files with the addition of a file search option
- Enhanced Accessibility to improve usability for vision-challenged users
- Collapse columns in reports
- View detailed status of direct deposit payroll
- Smart Help: Press F1 for improved content and search experience
QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 20.0
Here are the changes specific to QB Enterprise
- Complete picking and packing operations as part of single workflow
- Track product landed cost
- Manage product vendors with primary and alternate vendor selections
Intuit continues to do a fine job of making QuickBooks desktop the most useful and easy-to-use solution for small business finance, and we make it run best in the cloud.
Where QBO (the online edition) might work for very small businesses and those with very limited requirements, the real work gets done in the desktop editions. My team helps make running the QuickBooks desktop editions easier and even more useful in the cloud.
A quality cloud hosting approach can deliver anytime/anywhere access, greater IT resiliency and faster disaster recovery, but only if done properly (note my favor for private tenant hosting rather than multi-tenant or shared hosting). The wrong platform introduces poor performance, limitations on applications and breaks in processes and workflows, and may even compromise security and complicate recovery when something does go wrong.
QuickBooks desktop solutions are the right fit for many small businesses, and these businesses demand mobility, security and flexibility in their IT systems. Providing this is our way of helping make QuickBooks desktop a little bit better.
Make Sense?
J
Cooper Mann Company 