Checksoft Premier

I bought the Check soft personal deluxe which their support told me was the same as this product. If you are looking for a program that takes hours to learn to use and is full of bugs, look no further, you have found it. I have worked with all kinds of personal and business software for 25 plus years. This reminds me of a dos program that was poorly reskinned to run in windows 3.1. Here are just a few problems: 1) It runs painstakingly slow. This is really two programs, one for designing the checks and the other for the accounting. You enter your transactions into the accounting and then the other program opens and they get imported into the other program for printing, 2) The check designing program has templates that are poorly designed and almost impossible to customize. It took me hours to design a business style check that included the name of the business and the signatory and had all the routing and account numbers correctly coded and positioned. Although acceptable to the banking system, it still looked awful. 3) It purports to download data from your bank, in several formats. My bank could supply all their formats and none could be imported. I bought conversion software to change formats and it still would not recognize the usual Quicken, Quick books or MS money formats. 4) Support is by email and all responses seem to be cut and paste generic ones that solve nothing or are a referral to a forum with lots of questions and few answers. 5) You cannot print blank checks to be issued on the fly. All information must be entered when the check is created. e.g. You cannot create and print a check to the grocery store with no amount and fill it in at the grocery store. 6) If that is not enough, imagine this: One of the checks you make out every month is to a landlord that includes separate amounts for rent, electricity, heat, water, telephone,etc. and your check program allows you to split that check amount into each separate category so at the end of the year you think you can print out your annual expenses for each of those categories for taxes and other purposes. The end of the year comes and when you print out your Checksoft expenses by category report, all those checks you carefully split into different accounts when you issued them come out for the full amount under one category split. ARRRRG.

I have been using this software for over 15 years, but I must give it one star for its bugs and total lack of support. I have spent days getting this thing to work properly, repairing it when it stopped working and fixing its problems. It can be frustrating and unusable for the unenlightened. Ill write quite a bit here so you can figure out if this will work for you. Checksoft Premiere consists of three programs -- a really crappy bookkeeping application, a print on the fly virtual printer that captures Quicken or Quickbooks print data and creates a check on blank stock and a design application to design those checks. The checks print with MICR numbering, so if you buy magnetic toner, you can print them for the bank. I have a number of checking accounts on Quicken, so this application lets me keep blank check stock in the printer and print on it from any of several accounts without switching stock. It also permits 100% freedom in the check design, including images, fonts and placement of elements. So it has all the things I want. The problem is that it is buggy and unsupported. Designing a check and figuring out the program will take you literally hours. The virtual printer installs well and you set Quicken to print to this virtual printer. Whenever Quicken sunsets a program and requires you to update (every 3 years now), you must wait for CheckSoft to offer a new version of their Virtual Printer. So you must buy a new copy whenever you buy a new Quicken or QuickBooks. Then you must take a few days out to get this thing working. My most recent experience is with Checksoft 14 -- made for Quicken 2014. I loaded it and it worked fine for ten days. Then the Check Alignment adjustment stopped working. The only support available costs $10. You can email the publisher for free support but the help they offer after waiting four days will be useless. They only read to you from the manual. I spent perhaps 30 hours getting this thing back working. Ultimately, I uninstalled the program, which left many corrupted files behind. I searched for these files and deleted them. Then I searched the registry and removed any reference to Check Designer, Checksoft and Nova. Then I reinstalled the program and it worked. Zero help from Avanquest, the publisher. So if you need the features I describe, buy this with a credit card so you can stop payment if you cant get it to work. The publisher wont do a thing to help you or give you a refund.