The Intuitive Accountant Review : Sync QuickBooks Desktop files with Qbox

William "Bill" Murphy for the Intuitive Accountant writes: For years I have fought attempts by users to ‘make use’ of QuickBooks files over the internet; after all Intuit tells you that QuickBooks is designed to run in only three environments, on a local computer as a standalone product, on a local area network (emphasis on ‘local’) in multi-user mode, or in a Windows Terminal Server environment in multi-user mode.  QuickBooks was not designed, or intended, to be used across a wide-area-network via a VPN where users accessed a remote file from the QuickBooks application on their remote computers.

My own experiences with these unapproved alternatives have been with the results of users attempting to use QuickBooks in this manner and the resultant data corruption those users created. I usually ended up being called when someone had already corrupted their QuickBooks data, or had ended up with a file that would no longer open.

Commercially hosted QuickBooks is essentially a version of Windows Terminal Server in which the hosting company is providing the terminal services to you on a subscription basis. Even in a hosted environment, just as when you are running your own terminal server, the quality of the computing environment (resources vs. demand) and internet connectivity (bandwidth) are essential to successful performance.

A few years ago, with the advent of ‘file sharing services’, the craze (or perhaps I should say ‘crazy’) became attempts by people to ‘share’ their QuickBooks file via products like Dropbox. The same problems existed as with ‘wide-area-networks’ if users attempted to actually open their QuickBooks file while it was still in the ‘file share cloud’.  Of course if they were trying to ship the file back-n-forth between users, the issue became who used the file last, and is the file ‘in the cloud’ the most current version of the cloud? [snip]. The article continues @ the Intuitive Accountant, click here to continue reading...

Intuitive Accountant is an independent news and information source written specifically for the small business advisor who needs to stay current on the latest news and offerings from Intuit and the hundreds of Add On products serving the small business.    William (Bill) Murphy, better know as "Murph", is our Senior Editor in charge of all things related to content.