When you’re faced with a serious health issue, you want to have access to the best medical professionals to help guide you through the diagnostic and treatment processes. As an accountant, my clients expect the same level of expertise and guidance from me when it comes to their financial operations.

It all comes down to being their trusted advisor and earning their confidence. This is something I have done for the last 23 years, consulting with hundreds of businesses on the tools and technologies they use – software, servers, and even desks and monitors. The whole nine yards.

My clients trust me because I know firsthand what it takes to grow a business. I’ve done it myself with blood, sweat, and a lot of tears. As a tax practitioner and efficiency consultant, small businesses look to me to be their trusted advisor. And I take this responsibility very seriously – but I also have SO much fun helping a business run better. It’s what I am deeply motivated and passionate about doing.

QuickBooks® is a huge part of what I recommend to my clients. And to me, Enterprise is the mothership. Based on my experience working with hundreds of clients, I know the signs to watch for, which means it’s time for a company to move from QuickBooks Premier or Pro to Enterprise. Here are some examples:

1. Growing out of their current data capacity. If a potential client comes to me, and their primary pain points are about their data file – reports are running slower and data seems less manageable, but they can’t condense the file – I know they’re outgrowing their setup.

As a client experiences this, they start to panic with the idea that they need to delete some portion of their file. When I tell them they don’t have to, the sense of relief it gives them is priceless.

QuickBooks Enterprise eliminates these kinds of growing pains because it gives a business space for a combined million customers, vendors, and inventory items. It provides breathing room and room to grow.

2. Need for additional users and user access restrictions. Another way I can tell a business needs Enterprise is access. For example, some businesses just have two users, but if they ever grow to a point where they need to add more, the forensic accountant in me always advises them not to give everyone the keys to your castle. Not only is much of that data irrelevant to an employee’s work, but some of it is also sensitive financial information that’s susceptible to fraud.

With the custom user permissions in Enterprise, you can assign the separation of duties and tailor each role yourself. After that, each team member gets only the information they need and no more.

I’ve seen this scenario, in particular, play out over and over again in my practice. Recently, a business owner in waste management came to me because they were growing quickly and needed more people to handle their accounting. I introduced them to Enterprise, and we set up permissions for each new employee. They were so impressed and relieved that the permissions applied to all the years of data they had brought in from QuickBooks Premier.

When you have this separation of duties in place, it means you can delegate more of the busywork you’d been doing yourself, so that you end up with more time for your business.

Assigning roles also means more employees can take on more of the work in QuickBooks. Enterprise allows for up to 40 simultaneous users, rather than just three or five. This helps my clients learn the art and benefits of delegating. If they’ve never had the chance to delegate before, I help them get used to it!

3. Inventory management headaches. Sometimes when a business needs Enterprise, their main symptom is an ongoing inventory headache.

Consider a business that has separate locations or supply chains – however large or small. If those locations or supply chains don’t talk to each other, they’re going to have stock-outs, backorders, and unhappy customers. Not to mention, they’ll have no idea what it costs to create and provide their item or service to a customer.

Of the whole QuickBooks family, Enterprise has the most comprehensive and user-friendly tools to manage inventory, allowing you to track it across warehouses down to the specific bin or pallet. Orders are pulled from the right locations, inventory levels are updated in real-time, and it’s all reflected in your numbers.

You can also track the landed cost of each item you sell and set automatic POs for when an item or material starts to run low.

The marriage between accounting and inventory found in Enterprise is a really beautiful thing. And this beauty extends into job costing, which is the perfect union for businesses that work on a project basis. Enterprise has the most powerful job costing of any QuickBooks product.

Having access to data for cost analysis is critical because if you don’t know how your actual costs compare to your estimate during the job, you can easily end up eating a lot of the overages, which means lower profit margins that can really impact growth potential.

Enterprise makes it easy to track the cost of a job during a project, giving you the ability to adjust, which can maximize the profitability of every project.

When you know your true costs, you can also make your estimates more accurate. So many of my clients have been surprised at what their estimates should be!

Another one of my favorite tools within the Enterprise reporting dashboard is custom fields. These are fields that a business can set up with whatever unique detail they want to track, sort, or filter by.

This feature was especially helpful for a client of mine who owned a marina. They had a specific need for a custom list of multiple choices on their work orders and invoices that they couldn’t satisfy using QuickBooks Premier. It was the perfect time for them to upgrade to Enterprise.

I showed them how to create drop-down lists that they can write themselves. Numbers, text, whatever they needed. They added these custom fields, which helped them create a workflow for their work orders and get the reporting and insights they wanted.

The bottom line for businesses: Enterprise gives you more options for custom fields. More data types, more control over requirements, and more fields!

4. Automation and pricing customization. The need to be able to quickly flex pricing is a key pain point for service-based businesses that offer discounts or variable pricing. However, it is easily alleviated with Enterprise because clients can make their own flexible pricing rules and discounts.

Enterprise is so intuitive that clients can set these rules up themselves to meet their specific criteria. If you have a client who wants to add a discount rule for long-time, preferred customers, they can easily choose how long it takes to be a preferred customer, and then determine the amount of the discount. From there, they can literally set it and forget it. Whenever a customer qualifies for that discount, it will be automatically applied to their order.

Beyond these pricing automations, Enterprise can automate many other functions in the background, increasing overall efficiency. Plus, because manual entry errors are also reduced, clients will have the peace of mind associated with higher levels of accuracy.

5. Problematic purchasing and payroll workflows. The powerful automations and customizations Enterprise offers allow businesses to work smarter, save time, and provide a better customer experience. Purchasing and payroll are two areas in which many businesses can benefit from these features.

Take purchase orders, for example. While QuickBooks Pro and Premier users make one manual PO in five to ten minutes, Enterprise automates this task. The POs are created straight from the system, saving significant time – not just in creating them, but also in the elimination of time spent fixing errors that can occur in a manual process.

The same is true for errors in payroll processing – where the stakes are even higher! It’s so important to get it right because you don’t want to mess with the IRS.

When I tell clients that Enterprise Diamond includes Assisted Payroll, it offers additional relief with data that syncs with their bookkeeping, which is another major time saver. Plus, the data can then populate all your reporting.

Getting a team paid within QuickBooks gives business owners the confidence and comfort that it’s done right, with all of the responsibilities taken care of. Not only that, payroll taxes can be filed and paid automatically.

6. Troublesome time-tracking. Another feature included with Enterprise Diamond is time-tracking, which is another common pain point for many businesses. With Enterprise, employee time syncs straight to a business’ job costs and payroll. Plus, location services automatically track time and job details throughout the day.

The advanced integration available with Enterprise also means clients can track labor costs, material costs, and project income, so that they’re delivering profitable projects on time, every time!

Enterprise helps me keep my clients’ businesses healthy!

These are just a few of the reasons that I love QuickBooks Enterprise – and my clients do, too! Enterprise provides the tools and technology I need to confidently diagnose and treat many of the most common issues that my business clients face.

Whether my clients are outgrowing Pro or Premier, or need more efficiency in specific areas, the difference Enterprise makes is truly amazing and helps me be the most trusted business advisor to my clients. Another plus is the intuitive QuickBooks design that’s always easy to use, so it truly can help anyone increase and maintain the health of their business – including you!

To learn more about QuickBooks Enterprise visit https://quickbooks.intuit.com/desktop/enterprise/.