A young business faces many different decisions, some of which can have long-lasting effects. Making the wrong choice can have consequences ranging from reduced flexibility and missed opportunities to time and money spent restructuring basic processes instead of building the business. One of the most important decisions is the accounting platform. Regardless of the nature of the business, accounting will be a necessity, and choosing the right system early will avoid the later need to retrain staff, convert records, and rewrite procedures. We recommend QuickBooks Enterprise for growing businesses for three reasons: power, scalability, and affordability.
QuickBooks Enterprise is Powerful
While Intuit offers other versions of QuickBooks, none have the power of Enterprise. QuickBooks Enterprise is capable of tracking up to one million customers, vendors, and employees and up to one million invoiceable items. A specialized database management system means that the lag other users experience when one user is generating reports is eliminated. In its 2017 version, QuickBooks Enterprise has also reduced the number of tasks that must be performed in single-user mode, further enhancing efficiency.
A key feature that adds to the power of QuickBooks Enterprise is the availability of specialized add-ons. These include Basic and Enhanced Payroll, Payments, Advanced Reporting, Advanced Inventory, and Advanced Pricing. These add-ons improve payroll processing without the need to add staff, let customers make payments by credit card, make available powerful and highly customizable reporting, enable detailed management of complex inventories, and allow customized pricing down to the individual customer level with multiple conditions to determine discounts. Having the right accounting system for your business becomes easy with the industry-specific templates in QuickBooks Enterprise, which cover retail, manufacturing, contracting, and even non-profit organizations.
Online accounting packages have proliferated in the past few years, but in most cases these systems are geared toward very small businesses and even individual freelancers and therefore lack the power of a system like QuickBooks Enterprise. Of course, online accounting software has tremendous advantages in terms of remote accessibility and data protection. The good news is that QuickBooks Enterprise is available with hosting, which provides these same advantages while retaining the power of the Enterprise suite.
QuickBooks Enterprise is Scalable
Having a powerful accounting suite is great. Paying for features and power you don’t need…not so much. Because QuickBooks started out specifically focused on small businesses, Enterprise retains significant scalability. For example, while it is powerful enough for 30 simultaneous users, it can just as easily be licensed for one, or two, or five—whatever number up to 30 is right for your business.
The various add-ons mentioned above can be added to Enterprise when your business reaches the size at which they’re needed. Moreover, if you own a restaurant and will never need Advanced Inventory or Advanced Pricing, you’ll never have to pay for them; Enterprise doesn’t automatically bundle functionality you don’t need and force you to pay for it. You can choose from the Silver Subscription which includes basic QuickBooks Enterprise, The Gold Edition which adds Free Enhanced Payroll, or Platinum Subscription which adds Advanced Inventory and Advanced Pricing to all the features in Gold and Silver.
QuickBooks Enterprise is Affordable
QuickBooks Enterprise is surprisingly affordable. As we have already discussed, you can purchase the number of user licenses that is appropriate for your business now and add more only when needed. Intuit offers a subscription model with three major benefits. First, you have access to U.S.-based technical support at no additional charge. Second, you automatically receive product upgrades, including upgrades to new versions. Third, you receive up to 100GB of online data backup storage.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find an accounting software suite that is affordable for your young business yet powerful enough to support it three, five, or ten years from now. QuickBooks Enterprise is designed to be powerful yet scalable and affordable enough to grow with you over the long term.