QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 8.0: Third-Party Power Plug-ins Abound This Certainly Isn't Your Daddy's QuickBooks Theresa Carey
If you move up to QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions (QBE), your first reaction may well be: This certainly isn't my daddy's QuickBooks. Setting up the traditional flavors of QuickBooks is a relatively simple affair — insert the CD or log into a Web site, and off you go. However Enterprise Solutions, designed for that nebulous mid-size "growing business" category, is considerably more complicated.
It's a network application, and the installation guidelines clearly state that a network administrator and/or a CPA should oversee the setup. Before slipping the installation CD into a single computer, you have to decide on your networking environment and whether a particular computer on the network will serve as a client or as a server.
For this review, we installed QuickBooks Enterprise (Standard Edition) in a client/server environment on a three-computer network. One of the client computers connected to the network via a wireless adapter, while the other two were traditionally networked with Ethernet cable and a network hub.
The server and one client ran Windows XP Pro, and the third client ran Windows Vista. According to the documentation, QuickBooks Enterprise can also be installed on a Linux server with Windows clients, but we didn't test that option. Each computer running QBE must also have Internet Explorer installed.
A key difference between QuickBooks Enterprise and other multi-user versions of the regular QuickBooks software is Enterprise's security permission capability. Enterprise allows an administrator to customize user-access levels to maintain data security by setting rules and permissions for 115 different activities.
For instance, you can allow your marketing manager to enter budget figures and run sales reports, but deny him or her access to accounts payable. Each individual's access level can be set to view only, create, modify, delete, print, or any combination thereof.
The menus and displays look a lot like the usual QuickBooks program, with icon flow-charts to guide you through the necessary steps. You fill in a form that uses familiar terms rather than a screen full of accounting jargon. QBE lets you customize the various menus to show choices that pertain to your specific company, which lets you de-clutter the icon flow-charts if you'd like.
The program can handle up to 20 users simultaneously and comes in six different editions, five of which are tailored for specific industries. The Standard edition can manage business finances, inventory, sales, purchasing, and employees for a wide range of companies
The Industry Editions, available in Contractor, Manufacturing & Wholesale, Nonprofit, Professional Services, and Retail editions add specialized tools, program navigation and reports. There is also an Accountants Edition that allows a financial professional to access a client's files via WebEx.
The file system is set up at a field locking level, so if two people access the same record simultaneously — say, one person in the customer file — they can each change different fields at the same time. If one person updates a customer's address, the other can simultaneously update the phone number. But if both go to work on the phone number, the second user trying to make a change will get an error message.
Given how most companies divide responsibilities for various accounting tasks, it's unlikely that two employees would hit the same field in the same record simultaneously, but it's good to know that QBE provides a warning.
