Premier vs. Enterprise
In our last blog post, we looked at the features and differences between QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Premier. In this post, we’re adding QuickBooks Enterprise to the comparison.
While QuickBooks is designed primarily for small businesses, Enterprise is meant to be competitive in the ‘mid-market’.
Some examples:
QuickBooks, Pro or Premier, limits the Names list, that is Customers, Vendors, Employees, and Other Names lists combined to 14,500 names.
The number of items allowed on the Items List is also 14,500.
The maximum number of accounts on the Chart of Accounts is 10,000.
There are restrictions on the number of list elements allowable on other lists as well, but these are the most useful for this illustration.
As businesses grow, some of these restrictions may become cumbersome. QuickBooks Enterprise will allow up to 1 million names on the Names List and 1 million items on the Items List.
That isn’t to say an Enterprise user should approach those levels. Performance degradation (slow performance) would certainly be experienced before these limits were ever reached.
Still, Enterprise will handle much larger lists than QuickBooks and continue to perform briskly.
While Intuit does not place a size limit on the size of company files, there are, in the industry, generally accepted maximum size guidelines. Several things can influence the performance of a QuickBooks company file, but most users will start to see some slowdown as their QuickBooks company file reaches and surpasses 250 MB.
The Enterprise accepted maximum is several times this amount and will handle a far greater load for list entries and transactions.
Another enhancement in Enterprise is the security.
In Enterprise users are assigned. These roles can be edited down to the point of selecting the user’s ability to create, modify, delete, or print in various areas of Enterprise, like Banking or Accounting.
The design of Enterprise looks and feels like QuickBooks.
In this way, those persons familiar with QuickBooks and how it works will be just as comfortable in a much larger product designed for a much larger business.
Additional subscriptions are available for QuickBooks Enterprise. The Advanced Inventory ($999 per year) adds the capability to track inventory by site and bin (or aisle, shelf, etc) location, serial or lot number, and FIFO costing.
The Pricing subscription ($399 per year) adds complex pricing rules to the system in order to change prices automatically for customers, events, etc. These are much like Price Levels in QuickBooks, but much more sophisticated.
In addition, just like QuickBooks, there are a multitude of third-party vendors with products that seamlessly interface with Enterprise and increase its capability.
QuickBooks Enterprise, with sufficient licenses, will allow up to thirty users. Anyone approaching these levels however, needs an experienced ProAdvisor to help them decide if what tasks this number of users might be doing and how many can access specific parts of the software at one time.
Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
12401 Orange Drive #136
Davie, FL 33330
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com
