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| Cloud Accounting Applications for Supplementing the Desktop QuickBooks Accounting System Richard Torian December 23, 2010 I. Introduction. This article identifies four Internet subscription applications that are intended to use data from a desktop QuickBooks edition or export data into QuickBooks. The four online software applications described in this article were developed purposely to use with data from a QuickBooks desktop edition or to export data into QuickBooks. By subscribing, at a reasonable rate, to any of these four applications, which are developed by third party (non-Intuit) developers or by Intuit, the QuickBooks user can make use of additional software applications to assist company operations. Each application provides what seems to be a very useful enhancement to the use of a company’s major asset – its accounting data. A purpose of this article, besides describing the four applications, is to show some unique and useful ways a desktop accounting software can be integrated with software applications on the Internet (in the cloud). The use of such separate online applications, which are quickly available, maintained by the vendor, and easily integrated with the financial accounting system, e.g. QuickBooks, can be an important use of the Internet, and likely will grow in use. These separate applications should greatly increase a company’s benefit from it accounting data at a reasonable cost. And, it is likely that more unique applications intended to integrate with the data of an accounting system will become available. A recommendation is for small companies, e.g. QuickBooks users, to stay abreast of available online applications and to plan to use those applications that are evaluated to be useful to the company. The following section describes the three online, in the cloud, software as a service applications developed for integration with QuickBooks accounting data. II. Three Online Software Applications that Integrate with QuickBooks Data. 1. Customer Explorer 2.0 can pull customer data from a QuickBooks company file and add that data to an online map, such as Yahoo Maps, to show many demographic features about the company’s customers. Features include showing the locations where customers are increasing and showing customer types by location. Looking at data on a map can show insights not otherwise easily obtained. Click http://workplace.intuit.com/appcenter/moreInfo.aspx?AppID=3381 for more details. 2. ExpenseCloud will import charges made using a credit card or deductions of a bank account and then those charges and deductions (company expenses) can be exported into QuickBooks and entered as expense transactions. Currently, charges can be imported from about 4,800 credit and debit card providers. Charges and deductions imported into ExpenseCloud can be segregated by employee, reviewed and approved, and reported on by employee before the charges are exported into QuickBooks as expense transactions. Click http://workplace.intuit.com/expensecloud for more details. 3. AuditMyBooks Analyzer will scan the data in a QuickBooks company file to find all transactions that fall outside (violate) criteria used by AuditMyBooks Analyzer in its evaluation of the data. Apparently, there are about 12 possible problems with transactions that AuditMyBooks Analyzer is able to detect. Once detected, analyzing what was found and then fixing the problem looks to be easily completed by the user. Click http://workplace.intuit.com/appcenter/moreInfo.aspx?AppID=3343 for more details. III. Conclusions. Here are some conclusions about accounting-related online applications and their integration with a company’s QuickBooks accounting system. 1. Many more applications (in addition to the four described above) that integrate with QuickBooks data will be developed, and will provide very useful additional results to a company by using data in QuickBooks. 2. Since these applications will be in the cloud (on the web), many of the applications will be available on mobile devices. Being able to access QuickBooks data from mobile devices will result in many new, productive applications by field personnel. 3. The applications will be reasonably inexpensive and when combined with QuickBooks will greatly expand QuickBooks usefulness and value to the small company, which will continue to be able to afford even more powerful computing that compliments QuickBooks. 4. These developments will help to increase the attractiveness of using cloud computing in combination with desktop computing. 5. QuickBooks desktop editions will continue to be used extensively as they have much different properties than the QuickBooks Online edition, properties that are preferred by users. 6. The use of these applications will open new business opportunities for small companies. |