The Pros and Cons of QuickBooks Commerce

As a bookkeeper, or someone taking a bookkeeping course online, your ability to stay on top of the latest developments in bookkeeping standards and tools is important to staying relevant in your career. QuickBooks is a staple in the bookkeeping sector, which makes QuickBooks training a necessity, and their services are constantly expanding. Just recently they launched “QuickBooks Commerce” which integrates data with QuickBooks Online and all your vendors to let you manage your inventory, sales, customer information and expenses all from the same place.

With a new feature out, bookkeepers, people taking a bookkeeping course online, and anyone with QuickBooks training, are bound to be asked by employers, both current and future, if they know about QuickBooks Commerce, and more importantly, if they recommend using it. While some of it may come down to personal preference, we’ll go over some of the pros and cons of this new software to help you determine whether the program is a fit for you or your business.

Pros

Any bookkeeping course will tell you how important it is to stay organized. QuickBooks Online rose in popularity precisely due to its ability to help bookkeepers stay organized and that’s why bookkeepers often take a QuickBooks online course. QuickBooks Commerce’s key feature is its ability to maintain organization across multiple channels. Many businesses, particularly those exclusively in the digital space, operate through several partners, and keeping track of all those different outlets can be difficulty. Commerce allows you to synchronize all your major channels, including Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, WooCommerce, Magento, Zapier, ShipStation, and more, to one platform. This allows bookkeepers to easily access and manage pertinent information without having to jump back and forth between multiple platforms.

Multiple channel synchronization also means having sales data available on demand. Getting a holistic look at your sales data would usually involve manually inputting the information from all of your different channels, but QuickBooks Commerce puts all of this information in one place, which helps to save time and have more accurate data.

Intuit is currently offering QuickBooks Commerce at a discounted rate of $20 a month for the first 12 months. This makes the investment relatively small for users who might be uncertain about jumping to a new software.

Cons

Currently, QuickBooks Commerce is only available for new QuickBooks accounts, which means if you’ve already taken a QuickBooks online course, and are using QuickBooks Online, you can’t upgrade to Commerce. This also means you can’ take advantage of the discount mentioned in our pros section. There is a wait list for existing customers who wish to be informed when the product will be available to them, but there is currently no known timeframe.

QuickBooks Commerce is not perfect for all business types. The software was developed for product-driven businesses, particularly small businesses. If your business does more than 30,000 orders a month, or if you have an SKU list with over 20,000 entries, then this won’t work for you. The current release does not support multi-language UI needs, multi-stage manufacturing product sourcing, backorder stock reservations of inventory, or systems where every inventory item requires a unique serial number. If you’re looking to enhance the capabilities of your large-scale business, then you’ll have to look somewhere else for now.

Another downside to this product is the fact that it’s brand new means a majority of users are not familiar with it. Naturally, if you get stuck with anything you can still reach out to Intuit’s customer support but finding colleagues and other users familiar with the program’s ins and outs won’t be easy in these early stages of release. Additionally, you won’t be able to find QuickBooks training for this program easily either.

Final Verdict

QuickBooks Commerce is not the ultimate bookkeeping software. That said, it provides some invaluable tools to a specific set of businesses, particular small/medium businesses that are product focused. The ability to seamlessly integrate data from multiple platforms into one place can save you time and headaches. However, limited access, and a lack of support for business outside of the specific target market means this software might not be able to help your business. Whether or not QuickBooks Commerce is for you, it’s good to stay informed on the latest developments in bookkeeping technology by taking a bookkeeping course.