If you work for Intuit, buckle your seat belt because I am about to unleash my anger.
I HATE QuickBooks.
QuickBooks (hereafter referred to as QB or crapbooks) is a piece of junk software that will cost you more in the long run and be nothing but trouble.
Just a few of the reasons I hate crapbooks:
1. Direct Deposit. My biggest client has one employee who is extremely well compensated. It is a new entity. They've been in business for nearly a decade but recently switched from an LLC to an S-Corp. I can't process payroll for the owner because crapbooks demands a 6 month balance history on the payroll checking account before they will let direct deposit payrolls exceed $75,000 a month. Because they had to get a new name for the S-Corp, they also had to get a new bank account and EIN. The account is only four months old, so the owner has to sign paper checks and carry them to the bank to pay herself because of QBs policies...until the account has six months worth of history. Ugh.
2. Customer Support. I have never once gotten someone on the phone who speaks English as their primary language. I'm sorry to be completely inappropriate, but I can't understand a word that is being said to me in a heavy accent. It took me three hours to resolve a billing problem in 2008 because I couldn't understand that he was trying to repeat my credit card number to me.
3. It's too user friendly. That may sound stupid, but it's true. Clients with no knowledge of double entry bookkeeping end up coding a zillion checks to the wrong account. It takes me time to fix errors. Time is money in my business. Half the time, I could have done the whole year faster in some other program than I can sit and fix all the mistakes in QB. If you are using QB and wonder why the bill from your CPA keeps getting bigger and bigger, it might be because he/she is having to make 30 adjusting entries to correct problems in your books.
4. No forced "close" on accounting periods. This is my biggest problem with crapbooks. You are basically allowed to keep it open and running for as long as you want without having to close a period. This means you are free to change things from prior periods all you want. I once had to deal with a woman who decided to delete checks that had cleared the bank for no apparent reason. She wondered why her reconciliation was off by thousands and thousands. I wish that one was required to close a month before the next month could be tinkered with.
5. They sock it to you with fees. First you buy the software. Next you buy the payroll. Then you have to pay a fee for direct deposit. $1.25 per paycheck...so if you have 100 employees, you get hit with $125.00 in intuit fees. Every. Time. You. Run. Payroll. The payroll has to be renewed every. single. year. The payroll is only supported for a few years. For example, another great client of mine is a manufacturer. He bought QB in December 2007. It is the 2007 version. Because I show up on-site every week and handle 100% of his accounts payable and payroll, it has worked out really well. Until now. QB will no longer provide payroll updates for versions earlier than 2008. Even though the software he has works just fine, he is going to have to spend a fortune on 2010 Enterprise and 2010 payroll just so I can update the payroll tax tables.
There are times when crapbooks is a completely appropriate choice. There are times when I want to hunt down the team responsible for it and tatoo all of them with QB error messages that I see on a regular basis.
I actually feel better now that I have gotten that out of my system. It's just been a really frustrating week with Intuit.