Top 5 Reasons to Host your QuickBooks Enterprise

One of the top questions’ businesses are asking more and more is “What the heck is the cloud?” As IT structures continue to become more prevalent, businesses are being forced to adapt to the times. That’s why Intuit launched its Hosting Program where businesses can set up their QuickBooks files on Intuit’s remote servers. There are a ton of reasons why businesses should start hosting QuickBooks Enterprise (or even your QuickBooks Pro or Premier) and this article will lay out the top five.

1. Access QuickBooks from Anywhere at Anytime
One of the greatest benefits of hosting your QuickBooks Enterprise is the remote accessibility. This means that you can access your QuickBooks file at anytime from anywhere with an internet connection. For time-savings and more efficient processes, small businesses can collaborate from any location at the same time. You can also give your accountant access to work in the QuickBooks file at any time too – without interrupting each other’s work. This saves the hassle of coordinating work with your accountant or other employees as they can work on their own time.

It also can potentially allow other businesses access to your data in a very simplistic way. As a real-life example, one customer that we worked with, needed to have an outside company that managed and warehoused their products, have access to their inventory on a real time basis. The customer was using Enterprise and so was the warehouse company. They were struggling with the fact and expense of setting up a way to “sync” the items back and forth and couldn’t come up with a viable solution. The easy fix was to host the QuickBooks Enterprise of the parent company, add 2 users for the warehouse operation, and then limit their access to just the inventory section keeping them out of the information that they didn’t need to see. Much easier and the implementation was done in less than a day.

2. Eliminate IT Costs
Growing IT costs are another driver for so many businesses to make the switch to the cloud. Hosting your QuickBooks file with Intuit will help your business do this as well. Maintaining IT equipment and managing processes can add up very quickly in time and actual dollar costs.
By hosting your QuickBooks software, you eliminate the costs of server or network maintenance by essentially outsourcing these to Intuit. These functions are all managed by Intuit and the hosting provider once you make the switch to the cloud – and you don’t even have to maintain the local software on your computer- everything is handled for you.

3. Protect and Secure Your Data
Protecting and securing your business’s data are two crucial concerns on top of IT costs. Making sure that your data is available if disaster strikes and securing your customer’s personal information are both mitigated by hosting your QuickBooks Enterprise. Intuit uses encrypted transmission, firewalls, multi-layer access controls, and encrypted backups to take care of all of this for you.
On top of that, your data is automatically scanned with antivirus software and backed up nightly. Backed up data is stored for 90 days so if even a minor incident were to damage your computer, you likely can recover the data. This helps your company keep operating under any condition and gives you the flexibility to pivot to a different system or location if needed.

4. Help Your Business Grow
The efficiencies and time-savings gained from hosting your QuickBooks file will help you prioritize the things that grow your business. Using the cloud to your advantage also helps your business to become more location-independent. If you’re looking to expand into new areas or work with a company outside your local area, hosting your software makes a lot of sense and makes the process much easier.

5. Embrace the Future
By hosting your QuickBooks software, you’re helping your business take a step into the future and embrace the huge changes that are happening in the business world. The work environment of tomorrow is going to be drastically different than what we’ve seen before and accessibility to key data from anywhere and at any time is near the top of the list as a method to create fast growth, improve working environments and ultimately staying ahead of the competition.
If you have any additional questions on how to use cloud hosting or remote access to your advantage in your business, give us a call at 866-949-7267 and we are more than happy to walk you through process to see if putting your software online makes sense for you!