QuickBooks Pro 2005

Purchased this software because I got a deal with a special price break. I have a very small business, so a purchase of several hundred dollars needs to pay back quickly. The set up took a lot longer than I had anticipated. The customer service was no help - couldnt answer my questions. I ended up spending 6 hours to get everything right - another day wasted. Ive got myself stuck with this now and will use for a few months since Ive spent the money, but Im going to look for alternatives in the meantime. If this is Quick Books, I need to find Lightning Fast Books somewhere.

Just started a small business. I had Quickbboks already so I went with Point of Sale for the retail benefits. POS needs improvement on charge accounts. When you enter a purchase and supply it to an in house charge account you have to total reenter it to apply the payment, and reserve the first sale, it makes it look like a return. It is costly, you get technical support free for 30 days, after that you have to pay $299. for one year. I started out with 1499. invested and I have had to spend additional $400, for an upgrade and $899 for another quickbooks pro to work with two computers. Wish I had invested in Peachtree instead. Its more friendly and less complicated. and the integrating with the Quickbooks is not defined well.

Seller was very prompt. Item was exactly as described. I even e-mailed him to have the item shipped sooner and he e-mailed me back in the same day and upgraded shipping at no cost to me. He was very accomodating.

QuickBooks gives the small business owner essentially enterprise-level solutions at a fair price. Accounting is inherently difficult for most of us (me included!), and will remain my least favorite task. It does and will continue to consume hours of my time each week-especially when unusual situations come up. But the difficulties are inherent in the problem, and QuickBooks makes this as painless as it is ever going to get. For two years I ran my business using more of an account-oriented software package. It required that I speak double-entry bookkeeping as a fluent second language. QuickBooks, by contrast, shields you from most of the drudgery. You can drill down to look at the bare ledgers if you want to, but most of the time you can just work with your friendly old checkbook register. I reckon that it takes me about half the time to run the books for my $2 Million company, which saves me maybe a day a week. So why not five stars? Intuits marketing policies really are intrusive. Youll get a lot of pop-ups as you go through your daily tasks, shaking you down to buy other Intuit products. Mercifully, I have seldom had to use their customer service. Overall I have satisfied with the product, and grateful for the time it saves me, and I think it is sold at a fair price.

This is a great product. It is easy to learn and use. It sure has saved me time and helps me save on taxes because I enter stuff now that I use to forget about or throw away.

When I tried to upgrade from 2004 to 2005 I ran into a problem because I didnt have Flash 7.0 installed. Actually I had a later version of Flash (9.04) but of course Quickbooks couldnt handle that. Heres the fix: go to the Adobe site and download the uninstall program from them. Uninstall your flash player and then Quickbooks will then proceed. Good luck. Joe

I have been using QB Pro 2004 for over a year now. My main complaint is that online banking has been broken since installing (Its a credit card and a checking account...fairly simple, but cant get both to work at the same time. My QB-certified accountant cant get it to work either...if you want boring details, email me!) Youve already read about how bad the phone support is...my experience was no different, and they want to charge you for everything. Hey Intuit, why not make sure the software that your customers purchase WORKS at least ONCE before charging for support? I cant believe after all these years that some other software giant cant crush these guys with something basic and workable. After reading reviews of all the accounting packages, it still appears that QB is the least worst. ;-)

After I installed and converted my file to the 2005 format I was informed that the E-File and E-Pay features were removed in version 2005. The support folk in India could not tell me if this was temporary or permanent. The only option to continue E-File and E-Pay was to remove version 2005 and reinstall version 2004. What a way to treat customers! How about some up front disclosure Intuit? Ive been using Quickbooks for 7 years. This may be my last upgrade!

Two parts of my review, because Quickbooks is really a combination of Software and Services: 1. The software A mature blend of features that for many, will get the job done. Big improvements now are the ability to put invoice fields in TWO places on the print outs for tear-out-send-back-with-payment sheets. Why did it take YEARS for that basic feature that more than half of QB users use for payments!? 2. The support. Ok, here we go: To their credit, in 1999/2000 I made 3-4 calls to the call center for both technical and customer support related issues and was so impressed that I actually told others how good it was - and remember it today. The reps were humorous and helpful, and seemed to relate to my needs as a QB user. Now, in 2004, John (with an INTENSE Indian Accent) required me to spend 70 minutes on the phone, while repeating Just a moment, thank you for your patience, just a moment, Im getting that information, just a moment, please hold,... and ON and ON and ON until I had a headache from the netherworld. And youd think a 70-minute call would be over some intensely complex technical issue... BUT... this was a call to the billing department to ask about a charge I didnt recognize! I had my statement, card number, charge code, and amount in front of me. AND THEY NEVER COULD HELP ME. I hung up the phone without having my problem solved and disputed the charge with the Credit card company. The charge dispute process took 7 minutes. Flat. Done. Thanks FirstUSA for keeping your support top-notch. Back to Intuit: Hold a moment. Thank you for holding. One moment. Thank you for holding. Im getting that information. [click] Intuit is penny wise and pound foolish by outsourcing to this level. Update: Another call, November 2004, was even worse. Accent (and recording-like attitude) prevented us from doing business on the phone. I eventually appologized and hung up.

Nutshell: Intuit and a company called Best Software are the only two firms producing small-business accounting software. Because of this, theyve split the market between them and are now engaging in monopolistic gouging. Each year, the price goes up. Each year, the service goes down. This will persist until an alternative appears. If you are considering making small-business accounting software, do it! Youll find lots of customers ready to switch. But back to Quickbooks: you have to upgrade every other year at a minimum - Intuit turns your software *off*. You have to buy a service contract to make it function - the list price above is NOT what youll end up paying. So if you buy this, understand that youre entering an endless upgrade cycle with no way to escape, and a company that can turn off your software, remotely, at any time, with no refunds. Enjoy!