Quickbooks on two separate computers

[Neil Naismith]

I want to use Quickbooks point of sale at our shop but use Quickbooks Pro at home to do the accounts. the two machines are not linked by network. Can someone tell me how to set up this system ie what machines have Admin, POS and Pro on them and is the only way to transfer the data through a restore facility?

[gibbo]

Neil, QuickPOS requires that you have a copy of QuickBooks, the Administrator and QuickPOS all available at the shop.
There are several ways you can handle this. The first is my absolute preferred solution. It is the only one that I can guarrantee will not get you into trouble. Do all your POS inventory work using one file, but use another file for the accounting. The problem with QuickPOS, (and I have made my thoughts well known at Reckon), is that the accounting programme is not really a good place to control inventory in a retail store. The stock control in QuickBooks is rudimentary to say the least. And posting every single transaction (or even a massive daily single transaction containing every item sold) is not very clever. The file size grows, reports take longer, data integrity becomes a problem. Plus the fact that you really don't really need all the detail. I seriously suggest using a totally separate file for the accounting and posting summary transactions only into that. I used QuickPOS for four years like this and never got into trouble - unlike virtually everyone else I know.
Taking a backup home and remembering to bring it in every day is fraught with potential problems. You could elect to connect remotely to the work computer, using something like PC Anywhere, or one of the web-based progremmes now available (Webex is one), if you want to do it all in the one datafile.
The way QuickPOS works at the end of the day is to post back to QuickBooks (via the Administrator), an IIF file (re-named to disguise the fact - and actually badly written - try opening a Credit Memo) containing all the data. We actually provided a utility for a user of QuickPOS in New Zealand which extracts the data (and re-writes it where they did it badly) from QuickBooks after it has been entered from the POS and emails it to another location for entry into another QuickBooks file - you could use that - but I don't recommend it as the best method. Using a separate file is my preferred solution.
Then there is the difficulty of correctly writing summary transactions - but that is another story. We have just completed an integration module that is being released by Scanning Systems Australia that does it all in under 30 seconds.