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5Major Threats moving from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online

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Pravin Gupta
5Major Threats moving from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online

Intuit is continuously promoting QuickBooks online. Most of the QuickBooks users are willing to migrate from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online. But,is it that easy to migrate from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online?

One recent research states that Cloud based applications are used by 37 percent of all small businesses in America. It is expected that this number might rise up to 78 percent by 2020. In another survey conducted by software researchers, it was found that approximately 46 percent of the small and medium sized businesses are using on premises accounting software such as Desktop QuickBooks.

They also concluded that nearly 20 percent of the accountants were practicing traditional methods like working of spreadsheets, maintaining account books etc.16 percent of the respondents are using software like QuickBooks Online (QBO) and 18 percent of the small businesses are outsourcing their accounting activities.

51 percent of the respondents havefaith in the safety and reliability of cloud-based accounting application. Fifty-three percent of the businesses that were using traditional approach of accounting applications are planning to move to the cloud.The major concerns stated were costs, training, usability and integration.

Deciding to switch over cloud can be cost saving. The cloud based application cost ranges from 0 to $40 per month, depending on the number of users and company’s requirement. Moreover, the cost of IT infrastructure can be minimized to a great extent by using cloud based services.

The major benefit of Cloud-based accounting software is that companies pay as per the usage basis.

As per Ernst and Young study, cloud based systems reduces IT support cost approximately by 25 to 30 percent. Although people are eager to switch from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online, they have to face several challenges as follows:

  1. Dependency on the vendor

Migrating to QuickBooks Online makes the user totally dependent on Intuit services. Intuit can raise the monthly prices of their online services anytime they want. QuickBooks online users cannot escape from such situations.

  1. Increase in Cost

Intuit does not provide support to the clients of the QuickBooks users. You need to provide support to your clients by spending few dollars extra from your pocket.

You need to pay extra for running multiple companies while using QuickBooks online. A separate subscription is purchased for each company.

Intuit also charges for the retention of older company files under the following few conditions:

  • If a company has been closed down and you have retained the access of its company’s file.
  • You want to restructure a company’s chart of accounts while retaining the older company structure.
  • Any corrupted file cannot be resolved with Intuit support.

 

  1. Usability of QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks desktop is entirely different from QuickBooks Online platform.People who work on the desktop version will have face a straight learning curve. You need to train your staff to use QuickBooks Online and bear its cost.

  1. Accessibility

 During tax season, Intuit experiences huge spikes in usage that lead to server crashes. As the server crashes, all your accounting work comes to an indefinite halt. So you will have to wait till Intuit gets it fixed.

  1. Compromise in features

There are many QuickBooks features which are available in QuickBooks desktop but absent in QuickBooks online such as audit trail track changes to transactions, audit sales track marking backup, auto deliver reports.

As discussed above, there are challenges moving from QuickBooks desktop version to QuickBooks online, and users will probably experience a steep learning curve.  But, there is still an option to avail all the benefits of QuickBooks desktop and enjoy the experience of cloud computing.

This option is hosted QuickBooks. It means that you can host the desktop version of QuickBooks on a third party cloud server. There are a number of benefits of hosting QuickBooks on cloud. Hosted QuickBooks meets all the challenges that come across while migrating from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online. Hence hosted QuickBooks is the right choice to make.  

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Pravin Gupta
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