QuickBooks Online: How it scores in comparison to QuickBooks Hosting

Bookkeeping is an integral part of today�s business environment as record of financial transactions are as important as the business goals themselves. But it is considered as a necessary evil in the business community, as it is not the core domains of small and medium business.Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Hosting by Application Service providers has emerged as important platform for making your BookKeepimg process easier,cost efficient and at the same time allow multiple access and file sharing.But let me help you compare the respective features of both , to reach a definite point of view regarding Online QuickBooks and Hosted QuicKBooks.

QuickBooks and many other software were introduced with specific aim of simplifying the book keeping process, so that even non technical people can make entries after some learning. But the advent of Software as a Ser vice (SAAS) technologies provided new opportunities to software service providers to simplify the way we use the software. Now instead of buying them we can simply, in a sense, lease them for monthly fee. QuickBooks online almost falls in this category .You do not have to buy the license for using the service and thus save your upfront investment. Other benefits are also obvious. Since you are not running the software on your own system hardware requirements for your system are minimal and you get liberated from the need for backup facilities and server requirements, as all of them are provided by the service provider, of course, at a price.

But there is another group of technologies called Cloud Hosting which provides not just software services but also hosts your Hardware requirements and has the potential of drastically reducing your IT infrastr ucture cost. This third party Hosting Service Providers hosts your licensed software on their terminal servers.

We will discuss QuickBooks Online and Hosted QuickBooks in this context. QuickBooks Online edition has the benefit that it provides you access to your Book keeping account any time any where through online connection. Also they provide backup facilities for your data which is more reliable than that of the local data backup. Further you can exchange files with other persons online through your account.

But these services come with some limitations. Online QuickBooks compromises with some features which the desktop versions such as QuickBooks enterprise, pro and premier provide. For example it do not have feature of online bill payment or customized inventory. Also since QuickBooks online is a completely new platform the user has to invest considerable time in learning the new interface.

And the user always wants a local copy of data which QuickBooks Online do not provides. Also QuickBooks Add-ons have become an important feature of book keeping as it allows the data generates on QuickBooks to be used for other purposes. Online QuickBooks do not support these Add on Software.

In contrast to this, Hosted QuickBooks truly brings you the innumerable benefits of cloud hosting. First they provide anytime anywhere access to the version of QuickBooks that you want to host. This means that you do not have to learn anything new for using the new service. Then you have the benefit of hosting many different versions of QuickBooks from the same user account.

And most important of all it is most reliable in terms of data security. Hosted QuickBooks service providers such as Real Time Data Services provides dual backup of your data. Also they provide the facility to print local copies of your files and also their backup, as well as using them on your desktop versions of the Software.

And now something about the true power of cloud computing. While QuickBooks online can give you access to only one type of software hosting with Real Time Data Services you have the benefitting of hosting innumerable other services such as Tax software Hosting, MYOB hosting ,MS Office hosting, QuickBooks Add-ons hosting and many other Applications Hosting so as to meet the entire range of services you need. What I am stressing here is that the breadth of services that cloud computing provides is unmatched and here Hosted QuickBooks scores over Online QuickBooks.