Three Reasons You Don’t Like QuickBooks and One Reason You Do

Shannon Tucker for QuickbooksUsers.com writes:  Three Reasons Why You Don’t Like QuickBooks

1. It’s not exactly right for your business.
No, it’s probably not. QuickBooks is used (by Intuit’s count) by 5 million businesses. None of them are exactly like yours. You have a particular way you like your income statement to look, or a particular thing you want to track in your sales, or a particular formatting you want for your invoice, and QuickBooks doesn’t and can’t do it exactly like that. That is a characteristic of almost all off-the-shelf software.  The alternative? Industry-specific software, or custom software. Both are many times more expensive than QuickBooks.

2. There are technical glitches.
Yep. In our opinion, there are bugs in QuickBooks. Always have been, always will be. There is no way to write hundreds of thousands of lines of code (purely a guess) with perfect logic, that will anticipate and respond correctly to every possible user action and IT event. My first tech job was as an accounting software quality tester. My second tech job was as an accounting software development code writer. So I’ve seen software quality from different angles, and it’s just hard to write really good accounting code, and perfect code is a mythical beast. We shouldn’t expect unicorn horns and phoenix feathers.

3. It’s not supported the way it should be.
I guess we all have an opinion about what we should expect of a software company in their support of their product. I hear people express dissatisfaction with Intuit’s sunset policy, the cost of their support plans, and the quality of help received through support staff. (Less complaints about that last issue in the last year or so, it seems to me.) What we’d all like is great support, delivered fast, that’s free. But unless the cost of providing that kind of support were built into the initial product cost, that’s not going to happen. Resources like the Intuit Community and the QuickBooks Forums do offer free support that is often of high quality.

One Reason Why You Like QuickBooks. Maybe a Lot.

1. It’s a complete, affordable, flexible system.
Between QuickBooks Pro, Premier industry editions, Enterprise Series, Mac, and Online editions, there is a completeness to what QuickBooks can do for small to medium-sized businesses.  The price of the software and support is reasonable for what you get (in my opinion). And it’s flexible. You can scale up from Pro to Premier to Enterprise, (and even scale down from Enterprise if necessary), or you can scale over to online editions.
It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot to like.