QuickBooks Enterprise Grows With SMBs

Intuit's QuickBooks Enterprise offers growing businesses specialized resource management and allows companies using QuickBooks Premier to easily upgrade as their company expands. There are many other resource management software vendors, but most of their solutions call for costly and extensive customizations that a large segment of midsize companies do not need.

QuickBooks Enterprise offers industry-specific solutions for accountants, contractors, manufacturing, nonprofit organizations, retailers, professional services and wholesalers. Workflows can be customized by industry and even by different businesses within the same industry. Workflows can be combined and further customized to work with multiple business scenarios--such as wholesale and professional services--in the same company.

With QuickBooks Enterprise, Intuit makes the transition from the Premier edition almost seamless for customers. Most of the forms and processes available in Premier are also available in the Enterprise edition. Even the Enterprise edition's user interfaces (UIs) are almost identical to those in Premier.

Up to ten users can connect to QuickBooks simultaneously in multiuser mode to access various parts of a data repository. Remote users can access Enterprise through a terminal server without local copies of the software installed on user PCs. Remote access service is available through a 12 month subscription.

Enterprise 5.0's new access permission roles allow administrators to place tighter restrictions on user access to forms and data views. Administrative duties can be assigned to users for specific workflows. Customers new to Enterprise will find an extremely shallow learning curve. A brief introduction to navigating and using the environment is all that's needed before users can accomplish tasks and manage activities. Users can write checks, create customer letters and manage inventory from multiple suppliers. Intuit also offers merchant account features for businesses that accept credit cards. One of Enterprise's unique features is the employee navigator, which processes payroll and can flag mistakes and override payroll errors. Enterprise 5.0 also provides many more searchable custom fields and notes fields, making it easier to search for customer information.

Human Resource management is crucial to growing businesses, and Enterprise incorporates an employee organizer to help businesses comply with federal guidelines for hiring or terminating employees. Test Center engineers did not, however, find any reference to medical benefits in the HR features.

When upgrading to Enterprise, customers make a $3,500 software purchase which includes 12 months of unlimited support and upgrades. After 12 months, customers can opt out of the service or automatically renew their maintenance plan. Users also have access to a dedicated support engineer and a one-hour consultation to help get a company up and running. The company offers QuickBooks-branded marketing templates to help developers create professional sales sheets that highlight product integration with QuickBooks.

Intuit does not offer a formal channel program for its products, but has announced a partnership with Hewlett-Packard to jointly market and sell QuickBooks Enterprise solutions. This partnership will give solution providers access to HP's PartnerOne program. The three-tier program requires that Platinum partners have 15 HP-certified technical consultants on staff or generate $75 million in HP product revenue annually. Gold partners must have five HP-certified technical consultants on staff or generate $10 million in HP product revenue annually. The Business partner level is open to anyone authorized to sell HP products. Gold and Platinum partners receive additional rebates and market-development funds, demonstration units and designated HP Partner Business Managers who create joint business plans twice a year. Margins vary widely based on product, services and deal size.

Intuit also provides a marketplace through which qualified developers can offer software customization. In addition, the software integrates with over 300 third-party business applications, all of which can be found at Intuit's Web site. Each third-party software link includes a guide that helps users integrate the application with Enterprise or any other version of QuickBooks.

CHANNEL PROGRAM SNAPSHOTS
>QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions Version 5.0
COMPANY: Intuit Inc.
Mountain View, Calif.
(866) 379-6635 ext. 1000
www.quickbooks.com
DISTRIBUTORS: Intuit ProAdvisors HP resellers, direct from vendor
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