As your clients’ trusted advisor, you should always be looking for ways to deliver your clients systems that enable greater efficiencies and results, while letting them focus on doing what they do best – running their business.
Upgrading to QuickBooks® Enterprise from Pro or Premier does just that. And, here’s why.
I can summarize the "Why Upgrade" question in two parts:
- Core Features
- Advanced Inventory and Advanced Pricing Features (*Part 2 of the article will be published first week of July)
There are over 20+ CORE features of QuickBooks Enterprise that QuickBooks Pro/Premier do not have:
- QuickBooks Pro and Premier are limited to a total 14,500 list names (Customers, Vendors, Employees, Items and Accounts). QuickBooks Enterprise does not have a limit. Also, if your QuickBooks Pro/Premier file is getting close to 250mb in file size, it will start working a bit sluggish. The QuickBooks Enterprise file system can handle much larger company file sizes.
- QuickBooks Enterprise was built with Windows Terminal Services in mind (which means that it works optimally with multiple users connected to the same Windows Server, whether locally or remotely, using the Remote Desktop function of Microsoft Windows).
- QuickBooks Enterprise can have up to 30 users, while Premier/Accountant is limited to 5 and Pro is limited to 3. Plus, Enterprise gives you the ability to set up roles and specific task-based user security access. QuickBooks Pro/Premier has a very limited user-permission scheme.
- QuickBooks Enterprise can have up to 15 custom item fields and 12 custom name fields, whereas Pro and Premier are limited to 5 and 7, respectively. Also, QuickBooks Enterprise can be configured so that the custom fields have data field format input specifications, and with even drop down menus! The additional custom fields are designed to capture even more data that can be used to search or filter on custom reports.
- Enterprise can search items within transactions, such as Purchase Orders and Invoices. So, the user can use part number, description or a custom field to search for a specific item, which is very important for large item lists.
- QuickBooks Enterprise feature is U.S.-based technical support, and you can automatically upgrade to the latest versions available with an active subscription.
- With QuickBooks Enterprise, you can consolidate reports from multiple QuickBooks files into one combined financial statement in Excel.
- Enhanced Inventory Receiving separates the receiving process from the accounts payable process, which is great to maintain separation of the receipt date of inventory from the bill date.
- Automatic Price Markup lets you configure the MARGIN, or the MARKUP, of an item to be fixed, and QuickBooks will automatically update the sales price if the cost changes.
- With "Automatic PO," you have the ability to create a Purchase Order automatically to stock up to recommended levels. Also, you have the ability to track both Min and Max reorder points.
- QB Enterprise has Default Classes, which allows you to automatically assign a class in transactions to a Name (Customer/Vendor/Employee), item or Account.
- Use a Sales Rep and Custom Fields in Vendor Transactions, such as Checks, Bills and Credit Card Transactions.
- WIP Summary Report (Contractor Edition) with percentage of completion calculation. Committed Costs by Job Report (Contractor Edition) shows the estimated costs of open purchase orders and time sheets assigned to jobs.
- Ability to automatically build assemblies with subassemblies, quickly remove or replace discontinued components in an assembly, and the option to auto calculate cost of assembly items, based on Bill of Materials.
- You could even disallow negative quantity on items to restrict a user from selling (via invoice or sales receipt) items that have less quantity than the amount being sold. Accompanying Negative Item Listing Report: With all the items that are currently on negative quantity on hand, it’s great to catch inventory errors.
- Shortage Report for inventory assemblies shows a list of all items needed, in order to build an assembly that falls short and is marked as pending. Also, there’s an Inventory Shortage Detail Report with all pending builds and items required to be able to completed the assembly.
- Subtotal on item quantities and custom fields, ability to sort by any column, print footer on last page only, and alternate gray lines available when printing/PDF transactions.
- With QuickBooks Enterprise, you can see the cost of an item in the Sales Forms; this includes Sales orders, Invoices and Sales Receipts, previously only available on Estimates.
- Hide opening balances on items and names: Option to disallow users from putting in this information, when creating new item, customers or vendors.
- Disallow selling to overdue customers: Optional feature to prohibit users from creating invoices for customers that have at least one unpaid invoice that is aging beyond due date.
- Advanced Reporting is a fully customizable pivot-style advanced reporting within QuickBooks Enterprise.
- Batch Delete/Void Transactions: Now, it is possible to delete checks, invoices or bills in batch! Great for error correction.
I am doing a free one-hour webinar on Wednesday, July 19, at noon ET, where I will walk through all these features and more, plus answer any questions about QuickBooks Desktop you may have. Register here.
Part 2 of this article will be focused on Advanced Inventory Features that benefit product-based businesses requiring Multiple Inventory Location Tracking, Bin Number Tracking, Serial/Lot Number Tracking, FIFO valuation and Bar Code scanning.
