QuickBooks Online

Vorteile

I find QBO to be super user friendly. I love that they have a training program so you can become basic and advanced certified. We make everyone in the office do the certification program, but nothing beats user experience. QBO is the first cloud-based accounting software I was introduced to, and I find it fabulous. I even recommended it to my parents for their business instead of their custom desktop-based software and they are going to move to it at the end of August.

Nachteile

Sometimes the banking feeds have a hard time staying connected which can be very frustrating. It's not Quickbook's fault for this - it's the banks. But it is still frustrating at times when you lose a connection and have to call up your client to re-enter their details. Thank goodness for screen-sharing!

Their customer support has lovely people, but they are not always knowledge in the ways they should be. A lot of the times, we already know the issue that we are experiencing and need to speak to someone high-level to be able to resolve the issue. There should be an advanced call center to be able to speak to extememly well-versed people that know QBO in and out.

Vorteile

Quickbooks is the most well-known accounting software on the planet. It's slick, the software is implemented and developed well with no bugs in my experience, and the capability fits any size business via their subscription plans. This was very much needed for me as a small business owner and it's been a great step up from what I was previously doing.

Nachteile

Here's the cons: When setting up an employee the software gave me a notification and wouldn't allow me to go further once I selected that I had paid the employee previously and would be paying back taxes on them myself rather than charging those to the employee payroll. The notification wanted me to contact Quickbooks for "special handling". The problem is that the QB staff didn't seem to know what or why it was doing that and in the end basically I just had to bypass that whole question altogether to get the employee in the system and I'll have to figure out the previous taxes come tax time. This was like a 2 week process of asking QB repeatedly about this issue.

The last con is the software's insistence to have me running payroll on the same day as the end of the pay period. I've never worked anywhere that did this and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering you don't have the hours for that last day yet. But nonetheless, I cannot find any option to change this and I end up waiting a week later, then running payroll, but the software ends up changing the pay date to the previous pay date after a couple of days, so my records are off. This has been the single most frustrating part of the software and nobody seems to know how to modify this particular aspect of it.

Vorteile

I love QBO - their software just works! I own a bookkeeping firm and nearly all of our clients use QBO. Nearly all bookkeeping activities can be completed, including accounts payable/receivable, financial statements, journal entries, bank reconciliations, sales tax, and even payroll. I find our clients want us to use QBO and they are eager to learn it. Along those lines, it is an easy piece of software to teach someone how to use, but still packs many robust features.

Nachteile

Two items:

1) The Intuit QBO customer service needs work, and lots of it. I have only web-chatted with them on three occasions, and on all three occasions, I solved the problem myself before the support agent could find a solution. A company as big as Intuit should know that their support agents need to be MORE knowledgeable than the end-user. In my experience, this is rarely the case. Possibly more training is necessary?

2) Intuit keeps raising monthly subscription prices on their QBO products. In using them for just about five years now, I have gone through five price increases/changes for their QBO Essentials and QBO Plus products, and an additional two on Intuit/Quickbooks Payroll (their payroll increases actually caused me to switch to another provider). Watch your e-mail for notifications diligently.

Vorteile

The ability to assign classes in creating rules for the electronic bank transaction imports. The desktop version does not offer that function. It's sad because I know that if the QuickBooks Online software code writers can create that functionality in the online version, then they certainly should be able to create that functionality for the desktop versions which most subscribers have been using for decades now.

Nachteile

The unexpected price hikes on your account without formal notification or fair warning. Quickbooks has probably been the worst software vendor in that they always find a way to raise your rates by using creative and deceptive means such as switching online account holders and their client accounts to the Advanced Online version as a trial run without the account holders authorization. They leave the burden on the account holder to cancel the Advanced version trail for each of their online client accounts, which most account holders are not even aware that their clients have been switched. Terrrrrible! I'm sure there are laws that prohibit this type of deceptive behavior. Currently I am switching most of my clients back to the desktop versions until I can find an alternative Accounting software that my clients and I can appreciate.

Vorteile

Quickbooks is easy to "plug in" and go... You can use their templates and basic accounts and set up your own accounting system in no time. I had no bookkeeping or accounting experience before using QuickBooks Online, and I was proficient after about 6 months of part-time use.

Having an accountant log-in is so helpful in today's world so many people are working from home/ traveling/ etc. It is indispensable for my organization to have an online accounting platform that I, my organization's volunteer treasurer, and our hired accountant can all access from our home computers.

As a non-profit organization that only pays a tiny amount of sales tax, that portion of the software is very functional and is one fewer thing I have to deal with.

I do not use payroll through this system, so I cannot comment on the functionality of that portion.

Nachteile

The bugs in the software (accounts that won't delete, messing up check numbers, etc) are the most annoying part of using QuickBooks Online for me. If you are a small team, you can just work around them and you eventually learn what they are, but it is repeatedly annoying. Their customer service is weak, but there are lots of affordable training courses that can fill in those gaps as you use the program.

I sometimes wish that Quickbooks Online were MORE customizable (i.e. allow you to delete certain generic accounts), and I sometimes wish it were LESS customizable (journal entries can be numbered ANYTHING which confuses me). Overall, I think it allows me to do most of what I need to do in bookkeeping for my non-profit.