Working with Intuit QB Enterprise

If you are using QuickBooks Pro or Premier, why upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise? Let me first list the traditional features that make the QuickBooks Enterprise platform unique and a significant upgrade compared to QuickBooks Pro, Premier, and Accountant (which I will refer to collectively as “QuickBooks Desktop”) editions:

The principal reason why you should upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise is that the database is designed for larger data files than what Pro and Premier can handle. You can surpass the recommended limit of 250mb for a company file and still work securely. In addition, QuickBooks Desktop has a limit of 14,500 records in lists, such as items and customers.
QuickBooks Enterprise was built with Windows terminal services (remote desktop service built-in Windows Servers Operating Systems) in mind, which means that it works optimally with multiple users connected to the same Windows Server, whether locally or remotely.
QuickBooks Enterprise is optimized to work in a local area network (multi-user system); therefore, it works faster and is more stable than QuickBooks Desktop when working with multiple, simultaneous users. Additionally, QuickBooks Enterprise can have up to 30 users, while Premier/Accountant is limited to 5 and Pro is limited to 3.
QuickBooks Enterprise can have up to 15 custom item fields and 12 custom name fields, whereas Pro and Premier are limited to 5 and 7, respectively. Additionally, in Enterprise the custom fields can be set with input specifications, and even drop down menus. The additional custom fields are designed to capture even more data that can be used to search or filter on custom reports.
Enterprise can search items within transactions, such as Purchase Orders and Invoices, which is a great plus for larger databases with lots of similarly named items!
Enterprise has the ability to add Advance Inventory and Advanced Pricing Features.
Enterprise gives you the ability to set up roles and specific task-based user security access. QuickBooks Desktop has a very limited user-permission scheme.
Another Enterprise feature is US-based technical support, and you can automatically upgrade to the latest versions available, with an active Full Service Plan.
With Enterprise, you can consolidate reports from multiple QuickBooks files into one combined financial statement in Excel.
Those are CORE traditional features that make QuickBooks Enterprise a more robust option than QuickBooks Desktop. Now, I would like to walk your through some of the exciting new features and improvements that are exclusive to QuickBooks Enterprise over the past 5 years. Why 5 years worth? Well honestly, I first became a RAGING fan of QuickBooks Enterprise in October of 2011, when version 12 came out, and I have been following every single improvement, no matter how small since then…

QuickBooks Enterprise 12 (2012)

FIFO Inventory Costing*: An alternative to the traditional (check out my article on Avg. Cost method at Intuit’s Accountant Blog).
Enhanced Inventory Receiving: Separates the receiving process from the accounts payable process, which is great to maintain separation of the receipt date of inventory from the bill date.
Serial or Lot Number Tracking*: You can now track individual inventory items by serial number or by lot number.
Automatic Price Markup: You can configure the MARGIN or the MARKUP of an item to be fixed, and QuickBooks will automatically update the sales price if the cost changes.
Find and Select Items: Very fast way to search for an item by name or description within a sales form, such as an Invoice.