I’ll preface this by saying that everybody on this site seems to be more tech savvy than me (yes, all 12 of you). But I’m looking for a little help.

We’re a small business. We recently transitioned to a second office (on the same property, like 150 yards away in a different building). So we’ve got two separate internet connections at each office. We use quickbooks desktop. Don’t really wanna use quickbooks online (have heard some negative reviews from people I’ve talked to about it). In the most basic terms, I need the new office’s Quickbooks to be able to access the existing office’s Quickbooks files. It would obviously be great to not break the bank here. But I’m afraid this isn’t a simple solution. Any suggestions? Please don’t roast my internet ignorance this isn’t chit chat…or do roast me, I don’t care

10/28/2021 11:33:53 AM

Where are the Quickbook files being stored now?

A couple things come to mind offhand:

- 150 yards is close enough you could run cable/fiber and directly connect the networks in each office. Could potentially use point-to-point wireless here as well

- Use a VPN to connect the two offices

- A cloud attached storage solution (e.g. Azure Files)

- You may have some luck with OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

- Just use Quickbooks Online

10/28/2021 4:36:09 PM

Files are stored on the primary computer in the old office currently. We back the file up periodically to an external drive. But otherwise, it’s stored on the desktop and then shared via LAN to a couple of other computers in that same office.


Shortly after I posted this I stumbled across QB specific cloud hosting solutions (Right Network is one, but there are others too). I think that’s probably the solution I’ve been looking for but was too dumb to type the right words into Google to figure it out.

10/28/2021 5:34:22 PM

Yeah, that's probably the best choice given that it doesn't sound like you have much need for office networking beyond an internet connection. It's easy and should avoid some of the issues you can get from just copying files onto a network somewhere.

FYI, backups via external drives are usually pretty poor backups.

10/28/2021 8:13:42 PM

Quote :

"- Just use Quickbooks Online"

go QB online as soon as you can.

the flat internal database file that quickbooks uses in the normal file is shit when a lot of people get in it. Add in any latenancy and it gets corrupted more and more.

12/30/2021 5:21:26 AM

Do you use QB Online? Just curious to hear opinions. I do like the idea of being able to access it from the field (on a phone, for example). But that isn’t really a necessity for what we do either. I’ve read mixed reviews online. Mostly just about the interface and layout being different than Desktop. But I’m sure one could get used to a new layout of that’s all it is.

For now we’re doing just fine with the remote connection. Only have about 3 users on QB at a given time. Just accessing it from it 2 locations is the issue. But we’ve been pleased with the new set up.

1/3/2022 7:55:36 AM

This was 15 years ago almost - the problem we had was it was normally 10+ people in it daily.

The online was version was just coming out then and I left before they switched.

1/3/2022 9:17:49 AM