QuickBooks Pro 2005

Stay far, far away from QuickBooks. The literally every year forever charge for tax table updates is completely unethical - based on very simple numerical updates available in IRS Circular E, Intuit charges you (currently, and increasing every year) $ 214 per year for these updates - which happen about once every few months. Problem is, if you discontinue your tax table update service, ALL tax tables are removed from your program and your are essentially unable to do payroll based on the free tax table data which you can enter yourself. There is no internal, empty tax table into which you can plug the percentages/calculations. It is inexcusable that Intuit does not provide the facility for manually entering the very simple tax table data yourself and continuing to process payroll - especially for small businesses with less than 10 employees. Note that you can continue to manually calculate each of the deductions and enter them yourself on each paycheck screen - and thus trod through payroll. A site such as [...] The above site will calculate an entire paycheck and all deductions, all you need is W-4 (withholding allowance) info for each employee Intuit is engaged in extortion - declaring themselves a non-government institution levying a tax on all businesses. Once you buy (and keep using QuickBooks), you MUST subsidize Intuit every month - FOREVER! In addition to their famed unreachable and unusable support, this company, which was once a fantastic provider of wonderful software and essential business tools has taken the downturn into corporate greed and unethical business practices. Expect to see many class action lawsuits coming soon towards Intuit for the way they are holding their customers hostage and disabling the ability to REALLY do Do-It-Yourself payroll, organized calls for FTC and Justice Department intervention, organized boycotts, major magazine articles, action by CPA groups, state constitutional amendment petitions and legislative action. Intuit, according to their published data, controls 85% of the market (which is more than Microsoft in its market) and has a profit margin in excess of 75%. They make tons of money off their software and ancillary services. [...]

As a small church, weve been impressed with the Quickbooks products. It is user friendly and can be adapted to the needs of a church with little difficulty. The software package is reliable and does not break down often (if at all).

In my life I have used a variety of scientific and other software. I have never come across something as cumbersome and difficult as Quickbooks. The help menu is completely useless and the technical support is an absolute joke. I actually got some poor woman in India whose idea of help was to say UM for 3 minutes. So far I have figured out what I can on my own, the only thing they seem to be good at is putting you in a position where you have to spend more money.

The item whas worked well. I was a little bit confused about the mail-in-rebate. It stated that I needed to have owned a previous version to get the rebate. The product is great though.

WHAT A BUNCH OF MONEY GRABBING IDIOTS! IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING BUYING QUICKBOOKS, DONT!!!!!!! I HAVE NEVER HAD SUCH A HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE WITH A PRODUCT. THEY TAKE FEATURES AWAY, ESPECIALLY WITH PAYROLL, IF YOU DO NOT BUY THEIR PRODUCTS. THEN WHEN YOU CALL TO ASK WHAT IS GOING ON, THEY TELL YOU THAT YOU HAVE NOT PURCHASED THEIR SUPPORT PROGRAM AND THAT THEY CANNOT HELP YOU!! I HATE QUICK BOOKS. THEIR IS NOTHING QUICK ABOUT IT AND THE SO CALLED SUPPORT STAFF ARE A BUNCH OF LIARS!!!

This is very difficult to use if you are not selling wiggetts but a service. Hard to see the big picture or delete invoices. A problem at every turn. I am disappointed as I thought this was going to be great. I ended up getting an accountant.

QuickBooks is not bad if you think that your business will not grow! The application will get slower if your business grow or the size of your file increased. Other reviewers are correct about other things they have mentioned it, and so I will not write it about them. I would personally recommend Small Business Manager (SBM) from Microsoft [...] or another alternative and less expensive is Quick Business Manager (QBM) from Business Aim [...] There are other accounting applications I could recommend but it seems that these two are really using great technologies such as Microsoft .Net and SQL Server. Both of these applications can be downloaded for trial uses. Good Luck.

QuickBooks is the de facto accounting standard for small businesses, and justifiably so. Its relatively easy to learn and get up and running at a basic level, and if necessary, will provide sufficient data for an accountant to clean up and provide you with proper financial statements. Over the years, a group of bookkeepers well-versed in using the program has developed (mostly women, perhaps because they are over-represented in college accounting classes and often prefer flexible hours); they add value at reasonable rates, and are recommended for medium size businesses. Still, as with any computer program, the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle applies, and there is a tendency for business people who turn their bookkeeping over to these consultants to ignore accounting controls, especially segregation of duties. Such companies often suffer embezzlements, so its a good idea to have a CPA oversee the bookkeepers work and establish controls. Forewarned is forearmed. I buy a new version of QuickBooks every few years. What I dislike most about it are installation problems, resulting from its security features. Also, the program is backward compatible but not forward compatible, i.e., the 2005 version will read files created by earlier versions, but not files created by QuickBooks 2006 and later. So, if youre a consultant who relies upon files created by others, you have to stay up-to-date. As mentioned in other reviews, Intuit relies upon tech support located in India. I found the young man I dealt with to be quite competent (more so than the typical American tech support person), but had difficulty understanding him because of his heavy accent and his speaking too fast. Intuits greed is worth a mention. Once youre on their mailing list, they bombard you with advertising. More significantly, several years ago I noticed that after I installed it, the automatic update feature was quite active, with most of the communication going from my computer to Intuit. I suspect that they were sucking up company information for marketing purposes. This is a serious problem for CPAs (who have a legal duty to preserve the confidentiality of client information), as well as any company that wants to preserve the confidentiality of its own data. So, turn off the automatic update feature and run a spyware checker. And, never, never, never subscribe to the online version.

Made my life easier. Thanks

Intuit has shut down my payroll calculating and tax form prep functions. How can they do this? You must purchase Intuits expensive payroll subscription for the software to work as advertised. My five month old software no longer does payroll. I have entered the current tax rates and all should be well but...Intuit demands that I manually enter every single deduction on every single check. Isnt that great?