Q & A with Will English
Question from colleague: I have a retail store owner who needs QuickBooks (QB) Multi-Store for his 4 remote locations and headquarters (HQ). HQ and the 4 stores are all under one umbrella for tax purposes; however, he wants to treat HQ and each of his stores as separate businesses (i.e.: separate bank account, payroll, expenses, income, etc.). Are we better to set him up in QuickBooks Premier using class tracking for each store or Enterprise? Any special suggestions for setup?
William English: So Premier or Enterprise is not really the issue as class tracking will allow you to separate sales cogs, etc. I can see some real problems with trying to coordinate all of the various accounts. For example, I am assuming they would want separate A/P accounts, etc. That means that you would have to move the bills that POS creates into the right A/P account, banking, etc, etc, etc.
I think it’s more difficult as you will need to match each deposit to the proper account. In QBPOS V2013, merchant service is broken as it doesn't give the drop down for each merchant account.
Colleague: The client does have separate bank accounts and wants to keep it that way. He pretty much wants to treat each store location as if it’s a separate business so he can sell one off or close it...but yet roll everything up to the parent company for tax purposes, etc. Not sure if this is a case where QB cannot complete all functionality that they want?? An Enterprise customer service rep told them that Enterprise will allow them to do everything he wants to accomplish...or that’s what he thought he understood the rep to say.
William English: So it’s apples and oranges. Enterprise will allow you to report on multiple company files, however, POS multi-store only synchs with one QuickBooks file. The store synchs with HQ and HQ synchs with QB Financial, so I see a lot of extra work to match the right deposits to the right bank account. It’s the same on bills. Unless you manually create and move the bills that POS creates into the proper stores account, you will end up with everything in one AP account. Not saying that any of this is not doable, it just will not be easy. So the other choice would be to set up each store as its own HQ and synch to its own file, but then the problem will be item creation, transfers, etc.
