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To Host or Not to Host? 4 Reasons to Consider QuickBooks Hosting for You or Your Clients

Published: February 16, 2023

As a “Customer Care Hero” at SmartVault, I work with dozens of CPAs and accounting firms every week, all with unique methods and tools for working with their QuickBooks clients. Some use SmartVault’s QuickBooks backup feature to share their QuickBooks file, a few are still driving to their clients’ offices, some are using remote access technology, and many are moving to QuickBooks Online for a cloud-based alternative. But many opt for QuickBooks hosting, which can be a great option for firms and clients that want to leverage the benefits of working in the cloud, but don’t want to move to QuickBooks Online.

What is QuickBooks Hosting?

According to Intuit, QuickBooks hosting is defined as a set-up that “allows end-users to have their licensed copies of QuickBooks desktop software installed on servers in an authorized remote hosting facility, and then access that software over the Internet on a virtual desktop via a secure connection and a web browser.” If your client is sharing their QuickBooks company file with you via remote access, I recommend considering hosting instead. Here’s why…

Reasons to Consider QuickBooks Hosting

No matter how it’s configured – you login outside their business hours and on weekends when staff are gone, or they dedicate a PC in their network for your 24/7 remote access, it will ultimately cost less in efficiency and risk to host for these 4 good reasons:

  1. Scanning – you can take advantage of free or low cost local PC to remote PC scanning directly to a transaction in QuickBooks, which is provided by many hosting companies. Direct scanning can cut in half the time of data entry.
  2. Drive mapping – Need a document that’s on your network? A mapped drive to your local PC is another efficiency feature you might have to live without when you remote into your client’s computer to work on QuickBooks.
  3. Security – we know you will pass a security audit, in the event of a breach, but will your client? Good hosting companies, like our partners, already do.
  4. Data corruption – trading the company file, back and forth, wastes your time because only one of you can work in the file at one time, but it also exposes you to more risk of data corruption. If you’re going to continue to trade the file and not host it, use SmartVault’s backup and restore feature to reduce your risk of a corrupted company file.

If you’re considering QuickBooks hosting for your business but don’t know where to start, you can find a list of SmartVault hosting partners at smartvault.com/integrations.