The 6 Best Things about Quickbooks Online

The last piece of software that resided only on my work computer is gone. Long live the cloud. Cloud computing and cloud service providers have made great strides to include functionality usually reserved for a desktop application. Coupled with mobile internet everywhere, Quickbooks Online has become my choice for my business financial system. It is pretty cheap, around $10 per month, and has increased my cashflow like crazy. My favorite things I like about it are:

1. It works everywhere. I can make invoices and receive payments on my phone and have them be reflected in my live quickbooks company file. This is a great feature for field service workers like myself in that we can log our time and bill our client immediately, which gets me paid faster.
2. I don’t have to back it up as often. I just have to secure it with a good password and secure my access to those devices, which I have done. Since it is in the cloud, it is backed up for me. I can export my data out if I really want to back it up, and I do that weekly.
3. It better integrates with my payment gateway. I switched to Intuit to do my payments for credit cards simply for the fact that it integrated easily. When I email an invoice out, people can click to pay online. And they do. And I get a notice when they open the invoice and pay it.
4. It looks the same everywhere. I am a Mac and PC guy, but my quickbooks runs exactly the same on both screens. It runs in a web browser. The ipad and android apps are different, but still pretty much the same, just slimmed down.
5. It isn’t a gamble. I can move back to desktop at any time by exporting my data out. Data portability was a big deal for me and a reason I never want to move to the cloud with my accounting system. I figured they would hook me and then I couldn’t get out. Not true. I can leave at any time.
6. The migration was easy. Going from an intuit product to an intuit product was a piece of cake. As a matter of fact, there was a button for it on Quickbooks Pro 2014 waiting for me.

It has really changed the way I do my billing and I won’t go back to the desktop version. I encourage you to try it and see what you think. Please leave your comments in the comment area below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.