Pose POS And QuickBooks, Because Integration Is Key For Small Businesses

Anyone who has worked within a small business will know that the hassle involved with disconnected technology systems is even more of a pain for these small organizations than it is for larger ones. Small businesses have neither the resources nor the time to create custom integrations. Yet while larger organizations can utilize a variety of business suites, small businesses generally have to make do with solutions held together with metaphorical band-aids.

Given this fact it’s always interesting to read about a new integration that helps small businesses – case in point is an integration being announced today between POS vendor Pose and QuickBooks, perhaps the most well known and used small business accounting system on the planet.

With the integration, every transaction in Pose’s cloud-based POS will feed directly into QuickBooks. Currently customers using both systems would have to manually import all transactions – a laborious, time consuming and error-prone process. Pose is only a young company, its POS system only emerged from beta a few months ago. The company focuses on small, brick-and-mortar retailers – a massive potential customer base.

Of course Pose aren’t the only ones to realize that many SMBs could use a cloud-based POS system, competitor Vend has a similar product and Vend too has a QuickBooks integration they announced last month. That disputes somewhat Pose’s claim to be the “first and only POS system integrated with QuickBooks”. Of course there are degrees of integration and Vend spokespeople admitted that they’re “continuing to work on the integration and will have more news to share soon”. In response Pose stated that “Other POS vendors are not integrated natively so the transactions are not as seamless and it still requires the dreaded Excel spreadsheet uploads and downloads from one system into QuickBooks”. Hmmm, confusing huh?

No matter who was first in this space, POS/QuickBooks integration is a no-brainer. In the US, and despite QuickBooks-competitor Xero being focused on snatching customers away from the product, Intuit’s QuickBooks family has a stranglehold on the market place – it would be crazy of any vendor even remotely connected to SMB accounting to not integrate with the QuickBooks powerhouse.

http://www.forbes.com