Hosted solutions do not cost less to operate then other non hosted solutions and consider that when it comes to cost a merchant is at the mercy of the hoster for many items. Its not a feature its a potential disaster.
To be honest there are a number of rants in communities about "hosted solutions" Basically you put all your eggs in the "hosters" basket and leave your entire business to potential disaster should the hoster "go out of business", "be purchased by a competitor", "discontinue support for the solution as they migrate to new technology" there are a number of reasons why a small business should not go with a hosted solution. How does a hosted solution offer any advantage over a solution that is not hosted? I would agree with most elements of the last post except the part about going for a "hosted solution". We also do not want to spend $10,000 to import daily data if we can help it. Help we are looking for something not just for today but that we can continue to grow the company. It can export to any number of industry standard formats. Our POS (6th Sense) operates on a MAC/unix network. Have not received an email response yet to our question about importing daily data. We were using Quickbooks but daily receipts, AR, tax and current value of our inventory daily had to be entered manually. We can pull detailed reports that we need not just for our internal use but also for FDA. Also our accounts receivables from our wholesale accounts. It generates POs for our wholesale accounts and tracks receipt of our ordered items.
Our POS has an excellent and extremely detailed database of all inventory that comes into the plant tracks it through to sales, plus both retail and corporate customer tracking. Currently we are seeking an integrated solution with an accounting software and our new POS (point of sale) software. We are an ice cream company that manufactures and sells via both wholesale and retail.