Answers...

to commonly asked questions.

Can I share Quickbooks files without using Quickbooks Online?

I am working with Kim Moore and Nancy Taggert on their new venture, Cashion Hill Design.  Because the online version of QuickBooks does not fit their needs, we are hoping to find a way to use the desktop version in a shared environment so we can all access.
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This is a question I get often and an important one. How do we share a Quickbooks file without using Quickbooks online?

I understand that Quickbooks online is not the best solution for everyone. It’s come a very long way but it still doesn’t fit the needs of all users. So we are then left with two other choices in the Intuit world:

Use Quickbooks for Windows
Use Quickbooks for Mac

If you have found that Quickbooks online is not enough, you may also find that Quickbooks for the Mac doesn’t reach that bar as well so at this point you may be looking seriously at Quickbooks for Windows. But then how do you share the account between two computers? You don’t really. Quickbooks is not designed to share the same account information between two different computers. That’s why they created QB Online.

Work arounds:

You could store your QB backup or standard file on a portable device and go back and forth between computers but you’d ALWAYS have to work off of that drive. The problem here is that someone will open and edit quickbooks data on one machine then the other person will come along and overwrite those changes with a previous backup. It would take stellar communication between users for this workflow to work.

Or:

You could store the backup or standard file in Dropbox. Again, dangerous. If two users open Quickbooks at the same time with QB pulling from the Dropbox folder, you’re going to end up with “conflicted copies” as Dropbox will see two users modifying the same file at the same time, get confused, then duplicate the files. So that’s a mess.

Or:

The old school way was to have an accountant remote in to the client’s machine and work on Quickbooks on that person’s personal machine. The modern day translation of that might be: accountant and client login to zoom, accountant asks for control of the client machine, account updates the books, signs off. The issue here is that the accountant is using the client machine (albeit remotely) while the client cannot.

All of this to say: the local version of QB is dying. QB online will be the future. The same can be said for Microsoft Office, Photoshop, etc…. Local software is very limiting when compared to the benefits of online software. Work from anywhere, always backed up, multiple users working at the same time. That’s where we’re all headed but for now, not all features are there online yet. It’s the same with Microsoft Office. Younger people are using Google docs while old people like me are still waiting for Microsoft Word to open on our machines so we can edit a document that only lives on my hard drive.
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