QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

I started out learning QuickBooks on the desktop version for a previous job, and the software has come a long, long way since then. The online version is well organized, easy to use, and in the three years I've been using it I've never run into a single glitch.

Overall, the software is very functional and user friendly. The extra steps that I use outside the software would be nice if they were integrated, but I have been doing them for the last 4 years, so it doesn't affect my routine. I like how quickly I can create an invoice if someone asks and I can fill in the blanks for tracking later without affecting my bottom line.

QuickBooks Enterprise at first glance seemed like a good fit for my 5-location business. The feature set is rich, is a widely accepted accounting package and came with a nice support package. The fundamental features of the software are quite impressive and met the core needs of my business with range from retail sales to large projects. To handle the multiple locations, there is a "class" (location) construct that allows you to use a single chart of accounts and use class to designate where things apply. For standard income/expense accounts this works well and I can track sales and expenses easily. Where the implementation fall very short is with asset/liability accounts. For example, if you have 100 widgets in class A and 0 in class B (store A and store B) and you transfer 50 widgets to class B, the count of widgets is done correctly, but the inventory value of the transferred widgets still remains in the first class. It's made a mess of my inventory values and we've had to resort to processing manual GL entries anytime we transfer items from store to store. The same holds true with banking - the class structure is only partially implemented. There are work-arounds, but they're slow and cumbersome.

Reporting is another soft spot. There are plenty of pre-made reports that are decent and you can build custom reports. The issue is that custom reports are very unstable and more often than not, you'll find that reports lock up (or frozen as you'll read everywhere). This makes them pretty much worthless unless you enjoy creating a new custom report every time you want to use one.

Customer support is very energetic, but it's mainly people who have never used accounting software outside a PowerPoint driven training scenario. The usual answer is to either use Google or look on the Intuit community forums. Fairly disappointing. We've managed to figure most things out, but it's taken far longer than if we had access to people with real-world experience. There are a couple of great YouTube users (Hector) who were very helpful with their videos.

Overall, my company has been happy with our switch to QuickBooks. We previously used Netsuite for our accounting software, but the subscription fees were outrageous and the features were difficult to manage and execute. QuickBooks offers what we need for a very reasonable price on a user-friendly format. I would definitely recommend this to small businesses who do not need a lot of advanced functionality.

After self teaching on YouTube, I can say, the software is a wonder to those of us who work with all of money. It helps organize everything and with a click, you can generate any report