Top 13 Features of QuickBooks Enterprise for Retail Businesses to Use in 2024

Running a retail business involves much more than just selling products. Retailers need to manage various critical tasks, such as stocking inventory, setting competitive pricing, tracking cash flow, processing payroll and taxes, paying bills, and handling credit card transactions. Balancing these operational demands can quickly become overwhelming, especially in a fast-paced environment.

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise offers a comprehensive solution tailored to meet the unique needs of retailers. It includes powerful features to help streamline inventory management, optimize cash flow, and simplify payroll and tax compliance, ensuring all aspects of your business are handled efficiently.

Additionally, QuickBooks Enterprise integrates seamlessly with various third-party apps, expanding its functionality to cover point-of-sale systems, e-commerce platforms, and more. This all-in-one solution helps retailers stay organized, save time, and focus on what matters most – growing retail business.

Here’s an overview of some of the most useful QuickBooks Enterprise features for retail.

Retail Chart of Accounts

Having a proper chart of accounts for your retail business is crucial for tracking where your revenue is coming from, where your expenses are going, and what the company owns and owes. Many retailers have similar accounts: Product Sales, Sales Discounts, Rent, Utilities, Insurance, Advertising Expenses, etc.

With QuickBooks Enterprise, you don’t have to worry about creating a chart of accounts from scratch. The software comes preloaded with many of the accounts retailers need, and you can easily customize and organize the template chart of accounts to display the information you need in the way you want to see it.

Advanced Pricing

Pricing products is one of the most important parts of running a successful retail business. Price too high, and your customers won’t buy. Price too low, and you won’t be able to cover costs and stay in business.

The Platinum and Diamond subscription levels of QuickBooks Enterprise include Advanced Pricing, which gives retailers the flexibility to control, customize, and automate their pricing.

Some of the things you can do with Advanced Pricing include:

• Entice volume sales by establishing and automating quantity discounts at whatever breakpoints you select
• Create manufacturer-specific markdowns and apply them to a specific date range, if needed
• Set up special promotions well in advance of sales and apply them to all customers or only certain customers
• Tie your pricing to a margin or markup cost so if suppliers change your wholesale costs, your pricing will change automatically
• Strictly enforce pricing rules or give employees the flexibility to override pricing rules at the time of the transaction
• Get precise in your pricing by setting prices based on location, customer, vendor, or other classes specific to your business
• Track and apply sales tax automatically, even when sales tax rates change from state to state, city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood

All of these features make it easier to manage pricing in your retail business, giving you more control over customer relations.

Bill and Purchase Order (PO) Workflow Approvals

Streamline your approval process with customizable business templates designed for repeatable purchase orders (PO) and bill workflows. QuickBooks Enterprise allows you to delegate the creation of bills or POs to your team while retaining full control through a structured approval system.

Ensure timely oversight by setting up automatic reminders for staff to meet approval deadlines, reducing delays and bottlenecks in your operations.

With QuickBooks Enterprise’s unified dashboard, you can efficiently manage cash flow, improve transparency, and safeguard your business against fraud. Every transaction is backed by a detailed digital audit trail, providing accountability and clarity for approvals and revisions.

Data Level Permissions

One of the benefits of a retail business is that it’s easy to scale. Business owners can hire employees and delegate many essential tasks, allowing them to grow the business without doing all of the work themselves. However, few retailers want to give access to all of their financial data to every employee.

That’s why QuickBooks Enterprise makes it easy to create different user roles and permission levels.

In QuickBooks Enterprise, you can set user permissions for each role, customizing access to the specific data, customers, and vendors they need to do their job. Plus, if you’re not sure where to start, the software comes preloaded with predefined user role templates that you can easily customize to meet your needs.

Advanced Inventory

Inventory management is another crucial aspect of running a successful retail business. If customers visit your store or website and can’t find the items they need in stock, they move on to a competitor, and you lose the sale.

Proper inventory management helps ensure the items your customers want are always available without carrying excess stock during slower sales months.

Platinum and Diamond subscriptions of QuickBooks Enterprise come with Advanced Inventory, which gives retailers a clearer view of their inventory management.

Some of the things you can do with Advanced Inventory include:

• Tracking inventory across multiple warehouses and easily transfer products from one location to another
• Track stock by bin, shelf, or rack within a warehouse to fund products quickly, reduce inaccurate inventory counts, and avoid order fulfillment errors
• Track products by lot number or serial number
• Manage your entire pick, pack, and ship process from one central dashboard
• Use the First In, First Out (FIFO) costing approach instead of the average costing approach that is standard within QuickBooks
• Automate receiving, speed up the order picking process, and reduce data entry errors with mobile barcode scanning
• Print barcode labels with sales prices so customers and employees can easily find prices on products
• Consolidate vendor information in one place, making it easy to find vendor information, make better sourcing decisions, and reorder products

These sophisticated inventory management features make it easier for retailers to count, track, and maintain the products that drive sales.

Schedule & Pay Bills Faster

Simplify your payment process by scheduling and paying bills directly within QuickBooks Enterprise. Whether using a credit card, bank transfer, or physical check, QuickBooks allows you to choose your preferred payment method and format based on vendor preferences.

Once a payment is processed, the system automatically updates the bill status and notifies you that the payment has been completed.

This feature not only saves time but also offers financial flexibility, allowing you to manage cash flow effectively while meeting your vendor obligations on time.

Integration with Salesforce CRM

A good retail CRM system can help drive customer loyalty. It helps the business better understand customers’ needs and concerns, nurture relationships, and create repeat customers.

QuickBooks Enterprise integrates with Salesforce CRM, giving retail businesses full visibility into how well operations are running and identifying areas for improvement. The accounting software and CRM share accounting and sales data and customer information, which reduces duplicate data entry and drives better sales forecasts.

You’ll enjoy all of the benefits of integrating these two powerful tools – no developer needed.

Automatically Total Columns on Sales and Purchases

Eliminate the need for tedious manual calculations by using QuickBooks Enterprise’s automatic column totaling feature. Whether you’re dealing with quantities or custom fields such as weight, the system ensures you have accurate totals on your sales forms and purchase orders.

This reduces the risk of manual data-entry errors and ensures that you’re ordering the right quantities without any guesswork, helping you streamline your purchasing process.

Enhanced Payroll or Assisted Payroll

Managing payroll for a retail business can come with several unique challenges. Retailers might staff up with additional full- or part-time workers during the holiday season, have high turnover rates, and move employees between multiple store locations.

The QuickBooks Enterprise Gold and Platinum subscription levels include Enhanced Payroll. This feature can help your retail business save time and money by creating unlimited paychecks, taking advantage of free direct deposit, filing state and federal payroll tax reports, and managing payroll for an unlimited number of employees at no additional cost.

A QuickBooks Enterprise Diamond subscription plan takes payroll a step further with Assisted Payroll at just $1 per employee per pay period. This feature allows business owners to issue a paycheck in three minutes or less. QuickBooks will also handle state and federal payroll tax filings and deposits for you, including quarterly and year-end filings, with a guarantee that your filings will be on-time and accurate.

Another tool, QuickBooks Workforce, allows employees 24/7 access to view and print pay stubs and W-2s. When you activate Workforce, every time you run payroll, employees will receive an email informing them that their paystub is available online—no more printing and mailing pay stubs or replacing lost or damaged forms.

Advanced Reporting

Tracking the financial health of your retail business over time is essential. You need to organize your business transactions, keep track of sales to make decisions, file accurate tax returns, and satisfy lender and investor requirements.

All QuickBooks Enterprise subscription levels include Advanced Reporting, which gives your retail business more insight into operations and financial results with fully customizable report templates and more power to create your own reports.

Despite having so many reports available, QuickBooks Enterprise makes it easy to find the reports you need by bundling many of the reports retailers find most useful.

Plus, the Advanced Reporting Training Center provides helpful how-to videos and tutorials that can help retailers quickly get the support they need to handle reporting or simply learn something new.

QuickBooks Payments

Cash is king in any business, but it’s especially important for seasonal retail companies. QuickBooks Enterprise includes Payments for QuickBooks Desktop, which helps your business accept all major credit cards, debit cards, and ACH bank transfers.

When you accept payments through Payments, customers can pay anytime, anywhere, and the software will automatically record the sale in your books. Credit card payments will be deposited into your bank account the next business day, ensuring you always have access to the cash you need to purchase inventory, pay advertising and marketing expenses, cover payroll, and run your retail business.

Enhanced Search in Item Lists

Work smarter and faster with QuickBooks Enterprise’s enhanced search functionality. Power users can easily find specific items within large lists of memorized transactions, fixed assets, or payroll items. Instead of manually scrolling through lengthy lists, use the search feature to quickly locate and edit items or transactions.

This time-saving tool boosts productivity, especially for users managing complex datasets, ensuring you can navigate your records with speed and precision.

QuickBooks Priority Circle Support

Every retailer needs a little extra help sometimes. That’s why all QuickBooks Enterprise subscribers have access to QuickBooks Priority Circle service. The Priority Circle gives QuickBooks Enterprise users:

• Unlimited access to a dedicated customer support team to help with everything from setting up your QuickBooks company file to establishing workflows to best fit your business needs.
• Premium support, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Users can get quick answers to any question via phone or chat from experienced QuickBooks Enterprise specialists.
• On-demand QuickBooks Training. Your subscription also includes $3,000 worth of on-demand training courses and webinars so you can expand your own QuickBooks knowledge or train new users on the software.

Bottom Line

QuickBooks Enterprise Retail Edition offers robust sales and inventory features, making it ideal for large retailers with more complex business and reporting needs. Because it’s designed with retailers in mind, the software makes it easy to record and reconcile transactions, monitor cash flow, collect required tax information, and run crucial reports – all of which help busy retailers better manage the bottom line.

Additionally, QuickBooks Enterprise with cloud access can help retailers enjoy remote access to their software and manage their multi-store business on the go. Reach out to one of our Solutions Consultants at +1-855-223-4887 for more details, or book a free trial to get started with hosted QuickBooks today!