For many small businesses, QuickBooks software is a crucial part of doing business. The accounting and payroll components may be more familiar to the general public, but QuickBooks POS is a complete POS platform for the small- to medium-sized business. Navigating the world of QuickBooks can be somewhat intimidating to the technological novice. In order to help make some sense of the QuickBooks empire, we spoke with Ruth Perryman of theqbspecialists.com, an Intuit “Premiere Reseller.” In the following interview, Perryman demystifies the QuickBooks programs and makes the case for authorized resellers to help businesses get the most from a POS investment.

The POS News: What is the difference between QB POS and QB Enterprise?

Perryman: QuickBooks Enterprise is an accounting system, not a Aloha pos help manual. Even though it has a Retail version, it’s not really designed for retail stores. It’s really more appropriate for warehouses.

For instance, the only piece of POS hardware [Enterprise] works with out of the box is the credit card swiper. You can add an advanced inventory subscription to use the barcode scanner, but printing tags is still limited.

It’s also a pretty expensive option. QuickBooks Enterprise is the most expensive version of QuickBooks – it costs several thousand dollars alone. The advanced inventory subscription is currently $999/yr, and you must also renew the annual full service plan (which is currently $950-$2400/yr) to continue using it. In other words, you’re looking at an annual cost of $1949 - $3399 per year (depending on the number of users) for advanced inventory in addition to the upfront cost of purchasing it.

QuickBooks POS is an inventory and customer management system, not an accounting system. It’s designed to exchange sales data with QuickBooks. Most QuickBooks POS users can get by with QuickBooks Pro, the least expensive version of QuickBooks, as long as they don’t need more than 3 users and change their settings to exchange summary instead of detailed information with QuickBooks. This is because QuickBooks Pro can’t have more than 3 users and [is limited to] 14, 500 names and items.