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Is Pro/Premier right for me?

Do I need Enterprise?

When deciding to use the Enterprise to Pro conversion service, you should evaluate whether or not Pro/Premier is suitable for you.

Consider the unique features to Enterprise and data size limits present in Pro/Premier that are different in Enterprise.

Enterprise Features

If you use features unique to Enterprise, those features will no longer be available to you after your data is converted. The data will still be in your file, but in various ways you may not be able to change it or add more of the types of data unique to that feature.

We don’t have an exhaustive list of features, partially because Intuit does not really publish them (their materials online are mostly marketing, high level, and gloss over details.)

In some cases an entire feature is unique to Enterprise and in others some functionality within a feature is unique. For example, Advanced Inventory is Enterprise only. Also, within the custom fields feature, which is used on sales forms, the pick lists you can pick from are an Enterprise-only feature.

Most users are aware if they’re using Enterprise only features, and generally this has not been an issue for our customers after conversion. Here’s a page from Intuit that compares features for different QB versions.

Data Size Limits

When considering differences between Enterprise and Pro/Premier, generally your company’s file size does not matter. Intuit often states that it does, but we have not seen that when testing. We have converted files well over 3 Gigabytes in size with no issues!

Transactions

The number and complexity of transactions in a file also does not seem to matter between Enterprise and Pro/Premier.

Lists

What does matter are size limits for various QuickBooks lists. Lists in QB are objects/structures like your items list, class list, chart of accounts, and your names list (which is the customers, vendors, employees, and other names lists combined).  There are many other minor lists like your terms, templates, payment methods and so on, but they are rarely an issue.

Each of these lists has size limits imposed by QuickBooks. These limits are different for some key lists when using Enterprise.

The lists that tend to impact our customers considering a conversion are the items list and the names list (most often the customer list.)

    • When using Pro/Premier, you can have up to 14,500 items on your items list and 14,500 names on your combined names list, the sum of the different types of names.
    • Once you reach that number you can no longer create new records on the impacted list.

See Intuit’s rundown for the various list limits.

Check your lists sizes by pressing F2 while in QuickBooks. Look in the lower right corner of the resulting Product Information dialog window in the List Information box.

Note

If your file has lists that are too large for Pro/Premier, we will still convert it if you send it.

We convert many such files, which are useful to keep for reference purposes when used with Pro/Premier.

You will be able to view the over-sized lists for reference, but won’t be able to add new records to those lists.

Multi User

Both Pro/Premier support multiple users working in a QB Company file at the same time, as long as the users are using different copies of QB, or different copies from a multi-user SKU. The primary difference is the number of users that can log into a company file using Enterprise compared to Pro/Premier.  Pro supports up to 3 simultaneous users, Premier up to 5, and Enterprise up to 30 users.