If you are using QuickBooks for Mac, you’re out of luck. QuickBooks Connect will sync the data between the desktop and the cloud and QuickBooks Mobile will sync the data between the cloud and the iPad. It grabs the QuickBooks data from your desktop and moves it into the cloud so that you can access it remotely through a browser. This service is offered by Intuit for $9.95 per month per user. However, if you use QuickBooks for Windows, you will need an additional service called “ QuickBooks Connect”.

The app will go grab your data from QBOE in the cloud. If you are a QBOE user, it’s all you need. QuickBooks Mobile is an iPad app that you can download onto your iPad from the iTunes store. Surprisingly enough, QBOE is not compatible with the iPad’s browser. QBOE is the version of QuickBooks that can be accessed through a PC or Mac browser. We’ll look at each of these options in a minute, but let me highlight an option that would seem obvious and that actually doesn’t work: accessing QuickBooks Online Edition (“QBOE”) through the iPad’s browser. There are a few ways you can achieve this:

However, if you are on the go and you need to check on an account balance or send a last minute invoice, accessing QuickBooks through your iPad can be very convenient. Consequently, you wouldn’t consider the iPad to be an ideal platform for day-to-day use of QuickBooks. Using it on a small screen, without a keyboard (and to a lesser extent without a mouse) can be quite tricky. QuickBooks is, by nature, an application that requires a significant amount of data entry. By Patrick Bonnaure, founder of ProLedge Bookkeeping Services

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