In addition, QuickBooks protected cloud access lets clients collaborate and boost productivity because they can use Enterprise anywhere, using any device. Plus, they use state-of-the-art protocols to store data, so it really is the most secure and streamlined solution, giving all of us peace of mind.
The flexibility and customization available in QuickBooks Enterprise really make it the go-to solution for any business. That’s why I set up my business clients on it, and then we completely tailor it to their goals. Enterprise truly is designed for all, but unique for one. Here are some key examples:
Centralized data provides seamless business insights. One of the most powerful things about Enterprise is that it eliminates the need to have separate apps or documents to reconcile manually. You can integrate and monitor all of your business data in one place from payments, payroll, timekeeping, and sales, alongside your file of vendors, customers, and inventory.
This is especially important when it comes to tracking income – yep, every business owner’s favorite subject!
For money coming in, my clients can use QuickBooks Payments to sync those transactions in the background. They can also offer their customers and vendors several flexible ways to pay. When those payments come in, Enterprise automatically records and reconciles all those payments in your books.
When it comes to outflows of cash such as payroll, that can be handled right within Enterprise. This is not only efficient, but also helps to relieve the inherent stress of payroll.
I know, for many business owners, just hearing the word “payroll” can be stressful. That’s why I always recommend that my clients use an outside payroll provider. Unless they’re using Enterprise, though, they still have to take the extra step to bring the data back into their books.
It’s a simple remedy: Do payroll expertly, efficiently, and more easily in Enterprise. With QuickBooks Assisted Payroll, the data comes straight into your books, so that you can do real job-costing. You can also set your payroll taxes to be filed and paid automatically, with an error-free guarantee – pretty amazing!
Enterprise also offers a lot more when it comes to the ability to flex with your team. This is key because just like every business is unique, so is its team, so Enterprise offers a lot of tools that support their needs, too.
For example, employees don’t need to track their time with manual timecards or get paid with paper checks. Plus, your clients certainly don’t need the work of manually adding all of that to their books. When you use QuickBooks Time (and the QB Workforce mobile app), your timekeeping data is native in Enterprise, and it goes straight into your projects and payroll.
Not only that, but the integration also means that you can track labor costs, material costs, and project income to help you deliver jobs that are profitable. Just as a business has unique needs and services, so does its team. A business typically has many different roles for employees, relative to the company’s data to be productive, but giving access to sensitive information is both unnecessary and potentially dangerous.
The custom user permissions in Enterprise gives you the control to separate those duties. Each assigned role can be tailored, and it gives access to only the information the team member needs, nothing more. When my clients need this feature, I introduce it to them immediately. They’re so relieved to have that separation of duties because their business is their baby. And when they can delegate more of the work that they’d been doing themselves, they end up with more time for their business.
Once payment, payroll, and time-tracking needs are covered, business owners can devote more energy to their strategic goals and growing their business profitably, using insights from Enterprise.
Enterprise empowers e-commerce capabilities. When it comes to expansion, Enterprise can easily meet the needs of growing businesses. Enterprise truly is the hands-down winner for e-commerce accounting, enabling clients to open up new sales channels and expand their customer bases through integrations with almost any e-commerce destination and shipping options.
With a choice of flexible packages, Enterprise clients can manage all offline and online inventory and sales in one place, avoid stockouts, and get a better sense of how profitable they are. An added feature is the flexible pricing and discount rules that can be set to specific client criteria, including a profit margin. Simply set the pricing rule, and if a cost within the product build goes up, the price adjusts itself to meet the desired profit margin, which are the conditions of the rule. Enterprise automates this function, so that the potential for errors is exponentially reduced, which saves a ton of time.
Extend the power of enterprise with best in-class apps. In addition to expanding functionality with built-in features, Enterprise can be the home to all of your clients’ data from best-in-class apps. I often help my clients choose from the apps that were created by industry experts to help them extend Enterprise and solve their specific business needs.
Take the need for a CRM, for example. Rather than trying to use Enterprise as a CRM, clients can sync Enterprise to Salesforce to make a single source of sales and accounting data. When a lead becomes a customer, invoices will be automatically generated, and the details can be seen in QuickBooks.
Here’s another case in point: A restaurant client of mine captures their sales with an app called Toast. They use another one called Cohesion for Restaurants to regularly post that data to Enterprise, so that it’s all in one place. This saves a lot of bookkeeping time and ensures accurate, up-to-date reporting.
Nonprofit organizations can integrate an app to send a thank-you letter and donation receipt right out of Enterprise, and even connect their website’s donate button to record those donations directly to their books as sales receipts.
Leverage Enterprise data to optimize your clients’ business potential. There are literally hundreds of choices for specialty apps to integrate with Enterprise and make it unique to your clients’ business. And what to do with all of this beautiful data coming in? As an accounting professional, the answer is simple: reporting.
Reporting is your eyes and ears for making pivotal business decisions. Everything from a vendor choice to key crossroads decisions, such as which major revenue streams to add and subtract. This is the kind of reporting that Enterprise can do in a snap. You’ll have over 200 reports to tailor to your clients’ business, or you can start your own from scratch.
These are the kinds of growth decisions that you can’t make effectively without the deeper insights that Enterprise offers. A favorite tool of mine within reporting is custom fields. These are fields that a business can set up with whatever unique detail they want to track, sort, or filter by. I have seen firsthand how this functionality has really turned the tide for a client of mind … pun intended!
You see, this client of mine ships items on a ferry. To track the items, they were using a manual system with a bookkeeper on either end of the route. To fix this, we combined several features in Enterprise to create a freight system. A key part of this was setting custom fields that were specific to the items being shipped, so they wouldn’t have to enter them manually every time. Talk about a timesaver. It completely changed the way they would account for those items.
Using custom fields also made it possible to pull more specific and actionable information into their reporting that they couldn’t do before. In a short period of time, they were able to see the power of Enterprise, and you could see that they felt like their ship had finally come in in this regard!
Enterprise was made to manage any business – and every one of them can make it their own. A lot has changed since I started my accounting practice 23 years ago, and so has the business landscape. My clients’ needs are always evolving, just like their businesses.
But even as they grow and change, I know without a doubt that Enterprise is the one solution that can grow with them and provide everything they need to identify, reach, and achieve their goals. With its comprehensive features and integrations, Enterprise was made to manage any business – and every one of them can make it their own.
To learn more about QuickBooks Enterprise visit https://quickbooks.intuit.com/desktop/enterprise/.
