QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

QuickBooks online gives me one place to track everything related to money for my small business: income, expenses, taxes, and payroll. It's easy to set up and use, and I like knowing that even when I'm not paying as much attention to some of the bookkeeping as I should, it's still being tracked for when I have time to get to it.

It's a little pricey and the help/FAQs aren't always that helpful, but those quibbles are greatly outweighed by how easy and useful it is.

The QuickBooks software is very affordable with lots of good out-of-box features. AR and AP functions are very easy to use for novice users of the software. There are a lot of templated reports that are very helpful for weekly and monthly accounting tasks (Payroll, Vendor Payments, Sales, etc.). The software also allows you to add on a variety of additional features through plug-ins, which you can access for a nominal monthly fee. For example, the BIll.com integration is excellent for paying your vendors online, eliminating the need for mailing out checks each month.

The biggest issue with QuickBooks is their customer service department. Whenever we have issues that cannot be resolved by an internal administrator, it takes days and sometimes weeks before an Intuit rep returns our messages. We've been using the software a little over a year and have already been passed around to several different account reps. At one point, their response time was so poor I had to request a different rep. The other thing I find cumbersome with the software is the sales reporting. While the templates are helpful, I often end up with a lot of superfluous information, and the reports are not very malleable, even once exported to Xcel. This is an area I feel could be greatly improved with minimal effort from Intuit.

QuickBooks does a fine job with basic accounting functions, is relatively easy to use, and the report suite is more than adequate for small businesses.

QuickBooks Enterprise Manufacturing & Wholesale version simply does not work as advertised, as two examples among many will demonstrate. QB offers 'Advanced Pricing' functionality which enables the user to define and apply pricing rules across their client roster and inventory items list. These rules are intended to allow the QB user to apply a 60% across-the-board discount for clients Ajax and AAA, while clients Acme and Consolidated receive that same discount plus custom pricing on items X, Y, and Z. However, after the pricing rules have been applied and those clients are being billed, changing the invoice or ship date results in the deletion of the shipping cost line-item, and changes to the pricing of items on the invoice. Research with QB support revealed that Advanced Pricing suffers from a bug that was known to Intuit for at least 1 month prior to when I invoked the Advanced Pricing functionality, and a full month later Intuit has been unable to remedy the bug. After invoking the 'Advanced Inventory' feature-set, which automatically creates a drop-ship warehouse site, I learned that product being purchased from a supplier and shipped directly to our client was being removed by QB from the count of physical inventory resident on our premises. Intuit tech support rep's response was (paraphrased) "That doesn't seem right, but I don't know much about Advanced Inventory - you should call back tomorrow morning, as the day-shift staff have more tenure and are more knowledgeable".

This software is very user friendly. Getting to individual accounts is easy and straight forward. The importing of bank records saves me a ton of time doing payroll and reimbursements each month. I can track all of the owner's businesses in one place without paying extra per company added.

We opted for this version because of the PO tracking. The problem is, the PO's are not created by us. They are created by our customers so we can't actually use that part of the software that we paid for. I can still run reports and track project time and expenses, but I can't track a PO given to us and how much left to be billed. I still have to do that manually. It also doesn't integrate with T-sheets without renaming projects on one platform or the other. One is for my engineers, the other is for our customers tracking. The two do not use the same formatting.