Small organizations grow in stages - when you move your QuickBooks Desktop to the cloud, you are actually moving one step forward to transforming your business.
In reality, this is the growth graph followed by all successful small and medium enterprises.
However, this migration from using QuickBooks Desktop in your office to using it anywhere requires close scrutiny and mindful decision-making. To make your task simpler, we have discussed 5 factors that can help you migrate QuickBooks to the cloud.
5 Things to Consider When Migrating Your QuickBooks to The Cloud
Before we move on, let’s understand what QuickBooks hosting is.
QuickBooks hosting means transferring your application and data to a cloud instance managed by a service provider. This means that after this implementation, you would be able to access your QuickBooks Desktop remotely from any location. There are multiple other benefits attached to this migration. You will get a glimpse of it below.
Let’s see how you can decide whether you should agree on a hosting service provider or not.
1) Check What You Need
QuickBooks on the cloud has two meanings: either you are trying to take the subscription of QuickBooks Online, or you are trying to host your QuickBooks Desktop on the cloud.
Both are different.
QuickBooks Online has very different features than QuickBooks Desktop. In fact, QuickBooks Online has fewer features. If you are already using QuickBooks Desktop, you may not love this version that much. This is because desktop interfaces are more advanced and flexible. One major advantage is the remote access capability that you get with this version of QuickBooks.
With QuickBooks Desktop hosting, you get the same desktop-client but with added features and functionalities of remote capabilities and security. Here, you can host any QuickBooks Desktop to the cloud, such as QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Accountant, and QuickBooks Enterprise.
If you want to make the right decision, then make a list of pros and cons to understand better. This would also help you clarify the requirements of your business as well as employees.
One piece of advice that we can offer is in favor of QuickBooks hosting. In the long-term, you would not regret this decision. It might cost a notch higher than QuickBooks Online, but you would be able to gain benefits in the long-run. This is because you may need to move to QuickBooks Desktop at some time because of the advanced functionalities it offers. So, why not move in that direction now only.
2) Understand How Hosting Works
Another thing that you should make yourself familiar with is how hosting works. But, before that, here’s something that you should know first.
Your user experience is the same. QuickBooks Desktop and hosted apps have the same look-and-feel. So, you don’t need any training or extra time to get acquainted.
You need to understand hosting to understand how your business will run and what processes would be involved.
A list of things that you should explore:
How will your application be migrated?
Do you need a public or private cloud?
How would you scale?
How would you manage disaster recovery?
How are charges calculated?
What is the uptime?
When you explore these points, you would be able to make a wiser decision. Otherwise, it is not very hard to fall for a provider who offers poor services and cheap pricing packages.
3) Check Pricing
Pricing of your cloud hosting is the biggest issue you are going to face. There are multiple deciding elements here:
The cost of the hosting
The cost of the QuickBooks Desktop software
Hidden charges
The cost of up-scaling and de-scaling
Your budget
Of course, you should start with your budget and then move up and define every factor. But, before you do all that, find 4-5 service providers and compare their pricing models. This would allow you to set a budget. Once you have the budget, you can put a number on each factor and find the right pricing.
Here’s what you need to avoid:
Hidden pricing
High pricing
Too low pricing
Here’s what you need to get:
Flexible pricing model
Discounts & Special offers
Predictable monthly pricing
4) Uptime Value
You should know that uptime is important. To realize how much, let’s consider this example:
You have decided to work with a service provider that offers 95% uptime because their pricing is (say) $2,000 less than the standard rates. But after a month, you realize that you are at a loss with this implementation.
If your team works with the hosting provider for 100 days, then this service won't work for approximately 5 days or 120 hours. If your hourly earnings related to QuickBooks software is as less as $1,000 (just an example), then you would end up losing $1,20,000. You would only be saving $6,000-7,000 on the pricing. Is the loss worth it?
Hence, the uptime you are looking for QuickBooks hosting is at least 99.999%. That’s the bar multiple leading cloud hosting providers have set.
5) Check the Security Architecture
Finally, let’s discuss security.
It goes without saying that if you are putting accounting data on software and hosting QuickBooks software on the cloud, security is imperative.
To make sure that your provider has necessary security controls, ensure these things:
Ask them about all-time system monitoring. They should have automated security measures like intrusion detection, firewall, antimalware, antivirus, etc.
They should offer multi-factor authentication for secure access to your data.
The provider should backup your data regularly for disaster recovery.
Their server and data redundancy principle should be strong. This means multiple servers at multiple geographical locations.
Their server room access should be limited.
You should have an access control feature to define who can or cannot view specific data files.
Conclusion
When you are migrating your QuickBooks Desktop to the cloud for the first time, you should analyze your requirements. There must be some pressing issues which may have compelled you to take this decision. Keeping these issues as your baseline, choose the right provider. Remember to clear all your doubts and ask as many questions as you want before choosing a provider.
