QuickBooks at Remote Locations

Running QuickBooks and the POSQBi at two different separate locations can be described as a difficult scenario at best. Having an off site QuickBooks location can occur when there is a corporate office separate from the store location or if an off site accountant is being employed. Below are a couple of suggestions that might help if this scenario should arise.

Using a VPN

You can try to use a VPN connection where POSQBi is mapped from the store site to the remote location. The issue here is the speed that data is transferred. Transferring data over a VPN can be extremely slow. This method is not recommended due to time issues.

Using RDP Connection

Using a RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) requires that QuickBooks and the POSQBi are at the same location. Basically the user can log in from a remote location to post data. The advantage is RDP can be setup where the user can operate in the background without be intrusive. The major draw back is the RDP requires opening ports which can put the sites data integrity at rick (i.e. PCI Compliance).

Using Logmein

Logmein is similar to RDP where as ) it requires that QuickBooks and the POSQBi are at the same location and a user can log in from a remote location to post data. The drawback to this method is that the user may be intrusive to the restaurant computer operation. It is important to remember that two factor authentication is used to remain PCI Compliant.

ASI's Central Manager

Using ASI Central Manager allows restaurants to automatically port data to QuickBooks application itself. Since POSQBi does not rely on using an import/export file to transfer the data, it requires very little time to port a day's (or week's) worth of data in just a few minutes.

If set-up properly, the efforts and the cost involved for the interface and set-up man hour cost, it will be easily recovered within a few weeks of man hours saved having bookkeeper or accountant to manually put in these data.

Central Manager Set-Up

The data being polled by Central Manager from different sites should be placed on one main folder (ie main). So if you have four sites, your folder set-up may look like this:

\main

\main\store1

\main\store2

\main\store3

\main\store4

POSQBi Set-Up

To be able to use POSQBi to port data, you only need one license but you need to put this licensed SYSCNFG.SCR on all the store's data sub folder. This way, POSQBi would be able to run on the folder where it is installed. If for some reason, you need a different SYSCNFG.SCR to have on the store's folder to perform some functions, then you should have multiple licenses of POSQBi for each store so you can do those functions as well as for make POSQBi work.

For each of the sub folder, you need to run POSQBi.exe and set-up the interface so that it will be able to port the data to quickbooks properly. There are two ways to set-up the quickbooks:

1. using one master quickbooks company file with each store having a sub-account for each account POSQBi is interfacing to. This is highly recommended way as this would allow the central office staff to have consolidated reports. Two possible ways could also be employed in setting up the quickbooks company file chart of accounts:

1a- account > store sub-account

example: discount expenses

• discount expenses: store1
• discount expenses: store2
• discount expenses: store3
• discount expenses: store4

1b. store account->accounts are sub'ed

example: store1 expenses

• store1 expenses: payroll expenses
• store1 expenses: discount expenses
• store1 expenses: miscellaneous expenses

The advantage of using 1a is that you can view the each specific store's discount expenses and also have a consolidated view of all the site's discount expenses. While when using 1b, you can have the ability to see each store's different expenses as well as the total for the stores' expenses. Whatever the customer prefers, both should work fine. For a better set-up, it is strongly recommended to employ the services of a bookkeeper or a QuickBooks Advisor.

The quickbooks company file should be placed in the \main folder (ie \main\ChatAndChew.qbw) instead of where QuickBooks usually creates them.

2. using different quickbooks company file for each store which should be placed in the store sub-folder, as the following example shows:

• \main\store1\ChatAndChew.qbw
• \main\store2\ChatAndChew.qbw
• \main\store3\ChatAndChew.qbw
• \main\store4\ChatAndChew.qbw

This is not recommended as you would lose the overall view for all the information of the store which, normally, is very important to head offices accounting department. However, if preferred by the customer, this should work. Employing the services of a QuickBooks advisor or bookkeeper is strongly recommended.

Creating Shortcuts

For each of the store, you should create a desktop shortcut in the workstation that where QuickBooks Pro/Premier is installed for all the POSQBi.exe that is located in each of the store's folder. If set-up properly, all these POSQBi.exe's would act like it's a single store install but since they could be accessing the same quickbooks company file.