Question: I have sales of $1.2 million annually and am using QuickBooks Premier. I see that QuickBooks recommends its Enterprise software for companies with sales in excess of $1 million. Should I upgrade to Enterprise?
Answer: Whether you should upgrade to Enterprise or not at this point will depend on your particular company needs.
Enterprise is an advanced version of Premier; it’s Premier on steroids, if you will. As such, there are some factors that might make you consider upgrading to Enterprise. Two such factors are:
- Premier: Maximum 5 users and less than 20 employees
- Enterprise: Maximum 30 users and 20 to 250 employees
In my experience, there are few ad specialty distributors who need Enterprise based on this criteria.
Two other reasons most often cited for upgrading to Enterprise are the Advanced Inventory features and an increased capacity of number of items in Enterprise.
First of all, as distributors, we rarely, if ever, inventory items, so upgrading for Enterprise’s superior inventory features generally is not necessary for us.
Premier has the capacity for up to 14,500 customers, vendors and items combined, while Enterprise has a capacity of 100,000. Rarely have I seen a distributor max out of the 14,500 total.
If you are still on the fence, I would suggest that, unless you are unhappy with Premier, stick with it. I would not be dictated solely by your sales volume. Enterprise is much more expensive than Premier. Intuit makes it very easy to upgrade to Enterprise, but coming back to Premier is expensive and messy. Don’t upgrade until you have a real need.
QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise can be modified to better serve ad specialty distributors. Harriet Gatter is a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, a former accounting professor and a former ad specialty distributor. She advises ad specialty distributors to use QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise, often in conjunction with other industry-specific software, to manage the complexities of the ad specialty business, with the results being time saved, errors eliminated and an overall accurate accounting of your business. Contact her at [email protected]
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