QuickBooks Online v. Desktop (2022)

so the big question is is quickbooks online that looks like this better than quickbooks desktop that looks like this hi folks i'm hector garcia cpa and quickbooks reseller i have been selling implementing and trading on both quickbooks desktop and quickbooks online for over a decade and i get this question via email and via my youtube comments at least two times per day so i really thought about answering this question in an in-depth way in a video to make sure that i cover all the bases and i'm able to give you a long thorough answer now prior to 2022 so up to 2021 that was a really easy question to answer because it was bar known without a shot of a doubt quickbooks desktop is better or was better than quickbooks online however in 2022 and beyond this question gets a little bit more complex because while quickbooks desktop in many ways it's better the pricing of these two things have gotten really really close together starting 2022 quickbooks desktop went to subscription only so if you grab quickbooks desktop premiere 5 user for example it's going to cost you about 150 a month and if you go with quickbooks online advance which has up to 25 users but not many use with so many users it goes to 180 a month so all of a sudden these two things are pretty comparable quickbooks desktop pro 3 user it's about 65 a month quickbooks online essentials it's about fifty dollars a month and quickbooks online plus it's about eighty dollars a month so right now um it's a more apple stop us comparison when it comes to pricing but beyond pricing there's a lot of little nuances a lot of moving parts that require you to sort of think about it and think about your business and your business needs to really understand whether quickbooks online is a better choice than quickbooks desktop now if you have a startup business and you've never used quickbooks desktop before you're probably going to be super happy going straight to quickbooks online it is the present it is the future but if you have an existing business that has been using quickbooks desktop for a while you really really want to think about what you're going to be losing by moving to quickbooks online and what you're going to be gaining to be fair there are some things that you gain and lose in the process now i went into my notebook and i took copious notes i really wanted to think about this answer and i'm going to go ahead and give you a thorough answer of quickbooks online versus quickbooks desktop so whether you're a brand new user or you're an existing user you can have a good sort of apples to apples comparison now i'm gonna write an article in my website there's the link right there on the screen i'll put the link in the description as well where i'm gonna continuously update so this video will have this article as an add-on and any new things that change in the process i will put information in this article and also i'm going to add links to other videos that could support the claims i am making in this video i'm also going to talk about how to purchase quickbooks online or quickbooks desktop if there are any promotions special pricing in the article you're going to have all that stuff updated so let's jump right to it and let's start with quickbooks online i'm going to start with the pros of moving to quickbooks online most people this is what they're doing they're starting with quickbooks online or they're moving from desktop to online so the first pro or the first thing to point out about quickbooks online is that is 100 cloud-based it's natively cloud-based which means you can use on a pc you can use on a mac you can use in a chromebook you can use in any computer that has a web browser it doesn't need to be installed anywhere it's always on always available but you need internet access the second feature was talking about is a tablet or a phone app the desktop editions don't have this quickbooks online has an accompanying tablet app and a smartphone app that you can do a lot of things on it's not going to be as powerful as being in your computer and using the browser with all the features but you can do a heck of a lot in your phone in your tablet and i think that's one of the main reasons why people like it they want to do things on the go now because this is a hundred percent cloud-based integration with other apps like getting data from shopify getting data from paypal that stuff is a hundred percent easier with quickbooks online because a lot of these apps have native quickbooks online integration and they don't have native quickbooks desktop integration or you have to pay some third-party integration tool to bring it to quickbooks desktop or there's some additional sort of it drama to get your server connected to the internet to uh integrate with these other apps so generally integrating with third-party apps it's just going to be better in quickbooks online the other big feature about quickbooks online is there's no need for backups now that's a kind of a loaded word because the way quickbooks presents this is quickbooks online is always on the cloud it's always on a secure server and intuit quickbooks is always backing up the servers so there's no need to backup for the purposes of worrying about losing your data although this is one of the cons really you cannot make temporal backups so you can quickly and easily go back to last month and last year if someone were to like screw up your entire accounting per se now there are some apps and some add-ons that allow you to do this but it doesn't work as well as with quickbooks desktop it's just natively better but this concept of no need for backups for security purposes that's going to be a total pro for quickbooks online now a lot of accountants and consultants especially sort of the old-school ones this is one of the things that they don't like about quickbooks online because you really don't have control over your data you own it but you don't have control over it when you're working in a desktop environment you can backup the data you can keep it forever you can have a backup of the data exactly as it was put together so there's an audit down the road you got the data you control the data with quickbooks online not so much if you shut down your quickbooks online system if you shut down your company if you stop paying the monthly fee you don't have access to your data anymore you have to sort of export it or extract it to like an excel based general ledger and yes all the financial data will be there but it won't be organized and it won't be easy to run reports and sort of compare what it looked like when it was active so that's kind of more of a point for quickbooks desktop but when you hear no need for backups that's exactly what what what it means now the other cool thing about having quickbooks online any cloud-based system really is there's no need for it infrastructure when you have a desktop system whether it's quickbooks or any other type of business system and you have multiple people working at the same time you need a server you need workstations you need a local area network you might need to open the server to the internet so somebody can connect it from remote if you have any remote workers so with quickbooks online this is all sort of baked in there's no need for potentially costly big investments into infrastructure or monthly maintenance fees if you have to pay an id company to help you with all that the next one here is there's no single user versus multi-user drama if you came if you come from the quickbooks desktop world with multiple users you know this is sort of a pain in the butt where you have one person working in a particular transaction type and the other user cannot work on the same transaction type when you're working with quickbooks desktop or you're doing certain functions that require for you to be logging as admin or single user and you gotta kick everybody out this is what i call the single user multi-user drama with quickbooks online you don't get any of this so it's actually definitely a point for quickbooks online the other thing is quickbooks online does have some features better than quickbooks desktop just some it doesn't outnumber it in any way but the ones that are there are really really powerful for example online banking is super powerful much better in quickbooks online versus desktop the amount of flexibility control customization and bank rule configuration is much much powerful in quickbooks online also with quickbooks online into it quickbooks has metadata it has millions of users categorizing transactions and they can see what most people do with a certain transaction type with a particular vendor particular expense and they can suggest categories are likely to be correct so there's a lot more automation and automatic suggestion of categorization with downloaded transactions also a quickbooks desktop in many cases you actually have to pay an extra fee 10 15 bucks a month to the bank to be able to automate downloading those transactions with quickbooks online there's no extra fees to pay most banks most credit cards connect to quickbooks online for free which is pretty amazing really the other set of features are pretty cool in quickbooks online is anything that has to do with automation specifically if you're going to automate reports to be automatically emailed to certain people or groups of people quickbooks online can do that super easily it's pretty seamless actually quickbooks desktop there's a lot of sort of moving parts and there's some chances that it won't work because it needs to be uh on and active and somebody that needs to be logged in for the emails to be sent out with quickbooks online it pretty much happens completely behind the scenes the other automation type of features in quickbooks online have to do with recurring transactions creating recurring transactions automatic sales receipts that charge a credit card for someone that you might be charging automatically every month in quickbooks online it is just better it's more powerful period and lastly it's easier to use quickbooks online has a lot less moving parts has a lot less buttons you can press it's just easier to use there's more quickbooks online users than any other accounting system in the world that i know of at least in in the in this english-speaking world and much more than quickbooks desktop at this point so you're going to find more videos in youtube more tutorials more people talking about it and in some cases more accountants using it as well so the probabilities of you finding a consultant that can help you or finding the answers to your question or having less issues quickbooks online is just easier and simpler to use now let's move on to quickbooks desktop because yes quickbooks online has all these great features but quickbooks desktop has more features i think that quickbooks online wins in the convenience category where quickbooks desktop wins in the capability category let's start with a better feature in quickbooks desktop which is payroll quickbooks desktop payroll or it's called enhanced payroll it's actually best in class i've used many payroll systems and there's no more powerful payroll system in the market you have total flexibility you can edit paychecks you can make after the fact paychecks you can make adjusting payroll entries you can allocate expenses by customer by job by class fully burdened payroll that includes payroll taxes and other payroll expenses like benefits to the employees and that sort of thing there really isn't anything better in the market than quickbooks desktop payroll period every uh quickbooks consultant that has more than five years under the belt will tell you this is the absolute best thing out there second to that is generally job costing so because payroll allows you to do really in-depth job costing for job costing reports to know how much profitability you have per job especially when it comes to pay including the payroll cost quickbooks desktop wins on top of that with quickbooks desktop you can add your estimated cost or estimated expenses for a project for a job and you can compare how much you spent on a project versus how much you estimated you were going to spend on a project and the difference between these two gives you your working progress percentage which is crucial for construction companies to figure out their work in progress amounts their percentage of completion amounts it's just really important to know when you're project-based business or construction business what percentage of the way you are done that way you can project if you're gonna lose money or make money on that uh on that deal so payroll and job costing those two things are sort of close together but you also for job costing not related to payroll material subcontractors quickbooks desktop is just going to be better mostly because of the reports really next we have inventory in quickbooks desktop premiere you have the ability to add sales orders sales orders allows you to track back orders of your sales when you don't have a particular piece of inventory in stock when somebody orders it you need to know that somebody paid for it somebody's ordering it and you need to deliver in the future quickbooks online doesn't have sales orders that's probably the principle thing that quickbooks um desktop has over quickbooks online is the ability to do that sales order also uh importing uh inventory items and editing inventory items in batch which is something you need to do very often just quite frankly when you're dealing with inventory it's a lot easier a lot cleaning in quickbooks desktop even in the pro edition of quickbooks desktop now for manufacturers you're going to need quickbooks desktop premiere at least which is going to have something called an assembly and build of materials the bill of material allows you to take multiple components inventory non-inventory payroll whatever you want and you can add it and you can figure out what is the cost of your final finished good inventory with all these raw material inputs labor overhead and that sort of thing so for manufacturers quickbooks desktop premier at least premiere enterprise probably a little bit better it's going to be crucial quickbooks online doesn't do anything really when it comes to manufacturing the other thing is multiple units a measure you can have inventory that you receive in units and you sell in boxes of 20 or vice versa so having the ability to have a quickly calculate inventory by the unit of measure that's functional to the purchase transaction or the sale transaction is going to be really really important mostly for manufacturers but in general for anyone dealing with inventory management next feature is going to be advanced inventory you have the ability to track either serial numbers or lot numbers so you can control your inventory a lot better there's no expiration date tracking on quickbooks desktop unfortunately but lot numbers could serve as a workaround for expiration dates at the moment so there's just a lot of flexibility if you can track serial number and load numbers the other major advanced inventory feature is multiple site locations so the ability to know how much inventory you have in location a versus location b or transfer across locations it's really really powerful so if you have inventory in more than one location and you want to know what you have in each location that multiple inventory side locations with advanced inventory is key the next one is going to be barcode scanner support you can plug in either a usb cabled barcode scanner a usb bluetooth barcode scanner and you can use your backhoe scanner to create invoices and select all the products you're gonna include in the invoice or you can use a barcode scanner to receive inventory from a purchase order into an item receipt or into a bill it also has an android version in a mobile app in a phone where you can get this sort of phone barcode scanner built-in app and you can without being connected to the computer in any way you can either pick products that are in open sales orders you can receive products from open purchase orders and you can do cycle counts from your mobile android device with the barcode scanner extremely powerful the next advanced inventory feature is going to be having big pack ship workflow so all your open sales orders show up in a screen you can send them to picking then you can send them to packing then you can send them to shipping and you can even print shipping labels for ups usps and fedex straight from quickbooks so you don't have to open another software and enter the address of the customer by hand you literally do it all from quickbooks desktop which is great now everything with the word advanced inventory you're gonna need enterprise platinum which is the most expensive version of quickbooks desktop and it's a lot more expensive than any other versions of quickbooks online so when it comes to price to price comparison quickbooks desktop at this level at the advanced inventory level at the enterprise level thus does become more costly than quickbooks online one of the last features that quickbooks desktop requires recognition is customizing reports the reporting module in quickbooks desktop is a gazillion times more powerful than quickbooks online it has been for years the ability to add filters and and customize reports the way you want them quickbooks desktop it's better period however coming soon quickbooks online is currently beta testing something called the custom report builder tool and it's becoming so powerful that at some point in the near future quickbooks online advance might have a better reporting features and quickbooks desktop so 2022 2023 might still be the year that quickbooks desktop still has more powerful reporting features but quickbooks online is getting there so i'm actually very excited very excited to see quickbooks online kind of making making some some some major strides there in custom reports but for now quickbooks desktop more powerful for reports period and if you go to quickbooks enterprise highest version of quickbooks desktop there's something called the q bar quickbooks advanced reporting tool which actually requires an actual reporting programmer to build them for you it's not really something you can use on your own but you can build some crazy incredibly customized reports and it's really not that expensive to get something like that done um and you can be like an enterprise business that has really custom reports and lastly when it comes to quickbooks desktop uh fully customizable transaction forms this is the thing that most people like about quickbooks desktop better than online where you can take an invoice a purchase order any form that's customer facing and you can really design the heck out of it and make it look exactly like you want it quickbooks online just doesn't give you that flexibility quickbooks online has very small subset of templates for your forms and you kind of have to work with what they give you now will they work on that in quickbooks online maybe but i'm not sure how long it would take for something like that all right let's move on to final recommendations and this is obviously the part that people want to get to which is okay okay for my business which one is better now i want to make sure that you log in into the article i talked about earlier and you're gonna see a spreadsheet there's gonna be a link to a spreadsheet right there and this is a master spreadsheet that i've been building for about seven years now and i continue to update this spreadsheet this is my what i call the ultimate comparison guide through the quickbooks ecosystem and it compares quickbooks online the lowest edition quickbooks online the highest edition quickbooks desktop pro premiere accountant enterprise all of them and you can go feature by features over 200 features being compared here so you can see what version of quickbooks has what this could be a great companion to this video check out the spreadsheet freely available for everyone out there so here's my recommendation if you are in inventory if your business has inventory or manufacturing you probably want to look at quickbooks desktop premier or enterprise if you're a construction company that's going to need job costing and sort of detailed payroll job costing you probably want to look at quickbooks premier uh desktop premier or or enterprise if you're a service-based business that doesn't have uh advanced inventory needs or advanced job costing needs quickbooks online essentials plus advanced works really well i normally put people into plus at least because it has a feature set that i like in advance obviously if the business can afford paying a little bit more because quickbooks online has the i mean quickbooks in advance has the best custom reports and to me custom reports it's really the probably the most important thing about running your business what's the point of spending hours and hours inputting data if you can't see the report that helps you make that decision quickly and with confidence so i think custom reports are the most important thing reports in general this is where you might want to look at quickbooks in advance or desktop in general to get better reports if you're going to go with quickbooks desktop i like premiere quite a bit i like the accountant edition quite a bit which is the same thing as premiere but it contains all the tools that i use to fix my client files uh batch transactions batch reclassify there's a lot of really cool things that the accounting edition has and if you have can you get your hands of it on it typically it's only sold to accountants and through resellers like me but if you can get access to the account in edition over premiere i would definitely recommend that accountant is just awesome it's just it's what i use it's it's been my weapon of choice for a very long time and again if you're going to be using anything with more than five users or inventory or job costing needs or even to customize forms in a very detailed way or custom reports that's where you might want to start looking at quickbooks enterprise anyway make sure you check the links i'll put in the description below i hope this video was useful for you share it with your friends and family fellow business owners if you haven't subscribed to the channel already subscribe to the channel hit like add some comments and i missed something was there something not answered put it in the comments i'll do my best to answer that for you thank you and i'll see you on the next one you

Channel: Hector Garcia CPA

Views: 18,637

Keywords: quickbooks, tutorial, desktop, online, pro, premier, enterprise, accountant, bookkeeping, accounting, quickbooks online, quickbooks tips and tricks, quickbooks online vs. desktop, online vs. desktop, qbo vs. qbdt, qbo vs. desktop, versus, vs., quickbooks online vs. quickbooks desktop, online versus desktop, qb online vs desktop, qb online vs qb desktop, qbo versus desktop, is quickbooks online better than desktop?, quickbooks online compared quickbooks desktop, comparison

Id: O4zS5TNrH_I

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022