Switching to QuickBooks Online
I'm finally making the move to QuickBooks Online!
At least I'm going to give it a real effort. One of my clients was interested in moving things online. We've been using QuickBooks desktop since Day 1, so switching to QBO made the most sense. I didn't realize it at the time, but this is really my only regular QB desktop client. I have some that I do year end work with, but in terms of daily bookkeeping...this is the last of its kind. (please read that last part in your best Sean Connery voice)
I know what you're saying. Yes, I'm really late to the party here. It's kinda like having someone come up to you and tell you how they just discovered Mumford & Sons. I was just sent a press release from Intuit that shows that QBO has just surpassed 1 million users. Being user 1,000,001 of anything doesn't get you cutting edge status so I'm aware that my indie cred is taking a real beating here today.
I have a good excuse. Back in 2010 when I needed to find some solid cloud-based accounting solutions, QBO was not available in Canada. By the time it did show up here I already had my clients setup. There was no good reason to move them over to QBO. Now I finally have that opportunity, and I'm going to take a lot of notes along the way.
My goal at the site is to help make bookkeeping and running a business as simple as possible. That means doing your own bookkeeping, running a bookkeeping business, or just hiring a bookkeeper. I should have been covering the largest part of the market since I began but I like to get my hands dirty and actually use the products and services I talk about. I know I could use a test file, but I'm more of a trial by fire kinda guy. I need to use real data and put it through real life scenarios, so I can see how it stands up to the pressure.
The Test
I'm not going to make this a QBO site, but I'd like to make this an ongoing series. I'm going to put QBO through its paces, and I believe the work I'll be doing in it will test how well it matches up with its desktop counterpart. As I wrote in my series about bookkeeping and technology, I still believe QuickBooks on the desktop is the fastest and most powerful way to handle the books for a wide range of clients. I hope Intuit took this to heart when developing and updating QBO.
I also want to find out how well it plays with others. If it's going to be a part of my bookkeeping arsenal, I need to be able to feed it data from other sources...even if its just during the initial setup.
Later this week I will have started the setup process, so I'll report back on my initial impressions. If you want to follow along with the series I will be tagging all of these with TestingQuickBooksOnline. That link will bring you to a page with all of the posts I will have on that topic.
Your Input
Let me know if you have any opinions, tips, or stories about QuickBooks Online. Or, better still, if you're thinking about using QBO and want to know about something I don't cover in the posts, please let me know. You can post the question in the comments or contact me directly.
If you don't use and/or don't want to use QBO please know I will be writing about many other topics. This won't be all I'm talking about. It's going to take a long time to put it through all of the tests. How it works over time is a big factor, so I'll write a few things about my first impression, and then check back periodically to let you know how it's handling things like tax remittances, payroll, and year end.
Wish me luck!
