QuickBooks Hosting Pricing Explained

We are going to discuss a lot about the pricing to host your accounting & tax software’s specifically, QuickBooks, in this blog, we will discuss the costs, factors involved with hosted QuickBooks & then there will be comparisons with different solutions. However, our main area of focus in this blog will be on HOW QUICKBOOKS HOSTING PRICING affects accountants & CPAs primarily?

By the end of this blog, I hope you would have a much better understanding about the pricing structure for QuickBooks hosting and you should be able to make an informed decision about whether or not, you should go for the cloud technology to avail any benefits that comes with automation or is it best to have your QuickBooks desktop on your local setup.

I am going to show you the pricing for all versions of QB including QuickBooks premier hosting pricing, QuickBooks pro hosting pricing, QuickBooks accountant hosting pricing and QuickBooks enterprise hosting pricing.

Without further ado, lets dive into it, so before discussing about the QuickBooks hosting pricing, it makes sense to shed some light on the pre-requisites that can come to your mind, like,

What is QuickBooks Hosting?

I am expecting most of the my readers are aware of QB, basically, it is an accounting software developed by Intuit widely used by accountants, CPAs and small to other large business for tracking & managing expenses and carrying out other accounting & tax activities.

A basic installation of this accounting software on your local desktop or workstation can be termed as local desktop installation of QuickBooks, whereas, installation of QuickBooks on a cloud server managed by a third party QuickBooks cloud hosting providers that allows a user to access the application through internet by eliminating any location limitations is known as QuickBooks hosting.

Now, obviously, having your QB installed on hosting provider servers is chargeable and falls under the category of paid services. There are many benefits that are associated with this type of network installation of QuickBooks that gives you cloud accessibility via multiple supported devices.

In this type of setup, the technical aspects of your QuickBooks will be managed by the cloud hosting provider including update, upgrades & server maintenance etc. You will have sole focus on your business and managing your books. These are the positives that are drawing more & more accountants to think or opt about moving their business to cloud and that beg the questions

How much does it cost to host your QuickBooks in the cloud?  What factors affects QuickBooks hosting pricing?

There are different structures of QuickBooks hosting pricing that are followed by different hosting providers in the industry. These are determined by several different factors and can be completely different from one provider to another.

The logic behind this invariable difference in the QuickBooks cloud hosting pricing is based on the fact that every QuickBooks cloud hosting provider has a different set of rules, practices and methodologies they have in place that cost them differently to provide managed QB cloud server hosting to end users, so the QB cloud hosting pricing is based on their expenditure for managing & maintaining the cloud. Hence, each provider charges somewhat a different amount for hosting your QuickBooks on their cloud server.

Let’s understand the different pricing models available for hosted QuickBooks:

 Pay per user:

In this model, QuickBooks cloud hosting providers charge you on the basis of the number of users you have which will be working on the cloud server. 

For example: Suppose you have 4 users who should be working in the cloud, and the cost of hosting one user on the cloud is $30 per month, it means it will cost you

$30 x 4 = $120 per month (for 4 users)

Basically, the QuickBooks hosting pricing goes higher with the more number of users with this type of scheme, this is the most commonly used method by cloud service providers to charge their customers.

Pros:

Not only this is very easy to understand but also gives you the exact amount you have to pay on monthly basis to the service provider.

Makes future calculations easier for your operations and helps you set a budget prior to hiring any new accountant or bookkeeper.

Cons:

Irrespective of the fact that either your users utilizing the cloud or not, you still have to pay the fixed monthly charge as per your user count, even if the users are working for may be just a few hours on the cloud.

 Pay per hour:

As the name suggests, this model is based on the number of hours worked upon by the users on the cloud server in a particular month. You can have a fixed hourly charge that you have to pay to use the server irrespective of the number of users.

Suppose you have worked on the server for 160 hours in a month and the per hour charge is $2, it will cost you 160 x $2 for that month.

Pros:

The number of users will not matter in this equation; the pricing will be based on the number of hours so you can only work on the server as per your needs. Basically, when you are not using the cloud, you are saving money.

Cons:

Sometimes it gets hard to track the exact billable hours, although cloud providers have different software’s installed in place to track that but still the hours worked may vary from the hours billed.

The other disadvantage is not become aware of the exact monthly charge you are looking at for that month which can results in budget misleads and make it hard to track your exact finances. Cause, you may get billed higher than what you are expecting with this method.

 QuickBooks dedicated server hosting:

A dedicated server is assigned to you for working with your QB and other applications, this server is dedicated to your organization only, so you will be paying for a dedicated server that has been allocated to you and also dedicated rights have been given to perform tasks on the server. It is like leasing a server on a monthly basis.

With this method of hosting, we are looking at a starting price of $350 and that can goes up to triple times as per the configurations of that server which will depend on your business needs.

Pros:

You will be granted administrative rights on such server so that you can be able to manage the server your way and can also make changes to make it best suited for your needs. It gives you the ability to tailor the QuickBooks dedicated server as per your business demands.

Cons:

Generally, this kind of a dedicated QuickBooks hosting server pricing is pretty expensive as comparison to the other pricing parameters. It is like paying for your in house server but on cloud.

Hosting your QB on a dedicated server allows you to manage & maintain the server on your own like performing updates/upgrades and if you opt for a fully managed server, it will cost you more for the server to be managed by the QuickBooks hosting provider.

Quick Cloud Hosting is one of the leading cloud hosting providers for QuickBooks desktop, and in the business for more than 7 years now.

John Smith (Assistant Manager- Cloud Hosting solutions) from Quick Cloud is closely following this trend on QuickBooks hosting and has an insight that says modern day accounting requires modernize accounting solutions to gain benefit from cloud. 

One of the largest benefits that accountants & tax professionals can get with hosted QuickBooks is automation; it gives the flexibility to collaborate, effective resource sharing that leads to productivity.

Let’s take a look at the pricing structure of one of the leading QB hosting provider, Quick Cloud Hosting with this graph:

Despite the above given pricing, John Smith does says that the pricing cannot be fixed as different business owners have different requirements, so we do offer the customized/tailored quotes as well to our perspective clients.

Comparison between the QuickBooks desktop hosting pricing VS in house server hosting?

One of the alternatives of QuickBooks desktop hosting pricing on the cloud by a third party is in house server hosting which means having a server of your own with QuickBooks installed on it. Now, this method has been very popular and still there are businesses that prefer to have a server setup of their own instead of using a third party. There are different factors involved with both the methods, the setup is different so if the pricing. 

As we already established above, the pricing of QuickBooks desktop hosting pricing varies based on the type of model you are going with and mostly depends on the number of users. Now let’s take a look at the pricing for In house QB server and you can decide which is best suited for your budget.

There are few things we need to take in consideration before looking at the in house server pricing. We need to see: What is different in house server than a third party hosting provider for QuickBooks?

 Infrastructure Setup:

In house server demands a lot of hardware resources at your disposal to form a large infrastructure setup that can be very hard to implement. Cloud hosting providers already have the infrastructure to support QuickBooks on cloud with while performing daily tasks that comes with QuickBooks hosting.

 Access Options:

When working with In house server setup, the users can only accessible through local systems and cannot be accessed via remote from multiple locations. This makes a huge difference as it limit your ability to access your QB company files to a particular location.

 Managed VS self-managed systems:

You are responsible for managing your own servers which includes:

a. Server maintenance

b. Performing updates & upgrades

c. Taking & Storing Backup copies

d. Handling & resolving issues in QB or servers

Other than this, one major factor that contributes to this is the additional IT expenses that you have to manage and may have to hire a local IT person to keep your system up to date and tackle with any technical issues that may come along while working with QuickBooks in house server.

Whereas, on cloud, managed hosting provider take cares of all these for you.

 Scaling of resources with growing business:

In an in house setup, one of the major drawbacks is every time you want to add resources to your setup like RAM, CPU or space, storage systems etc. you are going to need additional hardware for that, you cannot scale your systems without adding hardware parts to your local server setup.

Whereas with QuickBooks cloud hosting, the resources can be scaled quickly without adding new hardware & the users does not have to face any downtime for that.

Let’s take a look at this table for comparison:

The pricing for in house server setup will completely depend on these factors for you:

 The Organization size( Number of users)

 Size of the office location or area of work

 What is the Choice of Hardware (Reliability)

 Internet, Printing & scanning setup

 Hire a local IT help (Installation, configuration)

 Storage solutions for QuickBooks company file backup (HDD/SSD/Portable drives)

 Other infrastructure costs

Basically, you can consider these factors to get an idea of setting up QuickBooks in house server on your end, this will be different for you with your infrastructure & implementation choices as compared to others, so there is no fixed pricing one can put on this type of setup.

However, a ballpark idea is no matter how small an organization you are, the minimum cost can be < $600 and it can easily go up to 5-6 times of this figure depending on your implementation.

I know this all seems in house server setup has all the cons but there are some pros as well that are associated with in house QuickBooks server hosting:

A. Your QuickBooks data will be stored locally on your end with your servers, that gives you more sense of assurance and security as compared to a third party provider hosting.

B. You will have all the administrative rights on your local server in order to perform or implement anything related to your QuickBooks. You do not have to place a request with your QuickBooks hosting provider for performing any such tasks.

Does QuickBooks cloud hosting for different editions and versions of QB impacts the hosted QuickBooks pricing in any way?

If you are wondering QuickBooks have different versions and editions and does QuickBooks cloud hosting pricing depends on the edition/version of QuickBooks you are hosting?

The answer is simply NO, so the QuickBooks hosting providers does not give emphasis on the edition/version of QuickBooks you are using, this does not make any difference at all.

You can have any QuickBooks desktop hosted on cloud and it will cost you the same whether its Pro, Premier, accountant or enterprise, and it could be of any versions released prior to the year 2010 and goes up to the latest version 2022, all of them are supported and the hosted QuickBooks pricing does not gets changed or depends on the edition or version of QB you are hosting.

As discussed earlier, the QuickBooks desktop hosting pricing is based on the number of users, so the edition and version of the application does not comes into play here. You will get charged on the basis of no of users, whatever QuickBooks you are using.

You must be thinking if all the features of QuickBooks software will be supported on the cloud or there are any limitations in terms of the features. In the pricing of QuickBooks cloud hosting you will be getting all the features of your favorite accounting software; as it works just like local on the cloud.

Does QuickBooks desktop hosting worth your time & money or just hype?

So far, we have discussed QuickBooks desktop hosting pricing and other factors affecting it. With this growing trend of moving your QuickBooks desktop to the cloud, the biggest question it begs in front of a modern day accountant is if they Should opt for QuickBooks hosting or is it just a trend?

To answer this, we need to understand how accountants are continuously looking for modernized solutions that can keep up with the pace of their work and automate tasks for them so they can break the barriers that create a lot of hassle for them.

QuickBooks hosting is not just a trend but it does provide a lot of value to accounting industry, we have discussed the benefits associated with it. QuickBooks Cloud technology has been around for many years and it’s only recently that the term has become prominent in conversation. However, implementing cloud technology for accounting purposes only started about a few years back. QuickBooks Cloud hosting solutions have brought about a revolution when it comes to accounting.

QuickBooks hosting has generated many positive results for the accountants that are directly having an impact on their productive capabilities. There are many points that lead to this conclusion of accountant being benefitted with this trend:

 Enterprise grade securities provided

 Daily data backups

 Remote accessibility

 Scalable Systems

 Managed servers

 Multiuser collaboration

 Free Technical Support

Considering all these factors, it is safe to say that instead of just a growing trend, it really adds value to the QuickBooks accounting software and make it more capable for better collaborated efforts.

When choosing cloud computing solutions, you want to rest assured that your QuickBooks application and data will be safe, secure and easily accessible at all times. Cloud computing service providers can guarantee this by implementing security methods such as encryption of sensitive information and data manipulation monitoring. Enjoy 99.999% uptime or less with the guaranteed quality that a reliable provider likes Quick Cloud Hosting offering to CPAs, accountants and tax professionals from all across the world.

This concludes my findings on QuickBooks hosting pricing and its worth. I hope by now, you have a fair bit of idea about this topic and how can your small business can get benefit through it.