Quickbooks Pro 2014

Well, now that I am ready to write my review I suppose Ill get right into it. I do not take product reviews lightly at all. I purchased this product over 8 months ago but in order to give a fair review I found it necessary to learn, feel and live in the product. This software package has to be one of the most advanced products I have worked with. The user interface is extremely intuitive and the home page “road map” has everything right where it needs to be(Customers, Vendors, Employees..etc. From what I understand this has always been and upside to QuickBooks. I switched to QuickBooks from another software package from A*******T (I spent 5 years with their software) that really never did it for me. It worked as a basic tool but not anywhere near the complexity of QuickBooks. QuickBooks pro 2014 is probably far beyond what most small business require BUT! How many times have consumers purchased products that never even meet the basics of what you need. QuickBooks in my opinion was designed to tackle every issue and feature your small business may need plus plenty more just in case you need them. That also allows them to spread that product over almost any type of small business with one software package. The fact that the business accounts are broken down into an actual chart of accounts vs a primitive sales and invoices category is really helpful for the beginner business owner/novice accountant to learn what they need to become their own bookkeeper. The customization options for invoices are amazing and this includes the changing of color schemes for invoice templates and the ability to choose what you see on the screen vs. what prints to the customer. The ability to set up terms options for your customers is good but could use some additional parameters. It does however do a great job of accessing finance charges and adding them on to the customer’s statements. The ability to integrate Intuit payments into QuickBooks is awesome. Download your credit card payments right into QuickBooks. This also works for banking and will download your banking information right into QuickBooks. QuickBooks does not charge for this but from what I’ve seen most banks will charge ~$10.00 a month to link up with QuickBooks. Even my local credit union has this capability. The ability to add time and mileage to an invoice is also great for those who document their time and apply it to invoices later. The notification when creating an invoice for a customer warning that there is an existing estimate for the customer is great. This gives you an idea of your estimate effectiveness when viewing reports. Automatically calculating sales tax to be paid to what tax agency also can’t be beat. That included printing tax checks on the spot. Also the shipping manager for the product business allows you to integrate your UPS and FedEx accounts into QuickBooks Free of charge. There are customer letters that can be sent out and customized but most software does it as well. The ability to E-mail batch forms later in the day instead of one by one is helpful though. It’s all great!!!! Reporting is beyond standard by all means. You can drill deep into reports and analyze trends and also identity opportunities for additional sales based on not only what your top selling products are but that can be broken down to what the top sellers are for your heavy hitting customers. The document center is great because you can store general documents or store documents for specific customers. Excellent move. The collections center makes it so easy for you to collect on customers who are slow to pay or no pay. Price levels are great for giving preference to a certain group of customers, allowing you to mark the invoice up or down. Classes are a great way to add to the reporting capabilities for those who want to keep digging deeper into their business. Payroll is good but not really a big thing for my business as I am either a one man show or utilize 1099 employees (independent contractors). The company snapshot is great in providing sort of a reporting dashboard of what’s going on in your business. For anyone who has never used a QuickBooks product before (myself up until now) and is doing a lot of research you may have read about the dreadful list limits. QuickBooks can only handle up to 14,500 Items, 14,500 names, 10,000 in the chart of accounts and there are a few more. But it does have the capability to handle 2 billion transactions. I think most small businesses would have an extremely hard time reaching that limit. If you are in the trinkets or custom business of selling high volume low cost products retail instead of wholesale you may have some concern with the customer lists. But there is always QuickBooks enterprise which has a significantly higher price point but has the list limits to go with it (1,000,000 names, 1,000,000 items). But for most of us we hope and dream about our business having 14,500 customers. That’s like doing business with everyone in a small town. Chances are slim. Either way it you are that good there are utilities available from QuickBooks and other third party companies that can help you clean up your company file. FYI…This product does not come with a manual but there is a book titled “QuickBooks Pro 2014 the missing manual” which is available on QuickBooks support site free of charge (or you can go pay the $20+ price tag elsewhere) What can be fixed you ask? Not a lot but I do have to pick on a couple of things. 1) In the income tracker if an individual transaction is selected to E-mail to a customer, a custom E-mail is generated based on the options you would have selected (or using the default letter template). When you select to do batch E-mails of all customers, they all receive a generic E-mail. This would be a large helper for people with a long list of Emails to send. 2) I would like to see the ability to create payment plans in the software. There are options of progressive invoicing and memorized transactions which I’m sure if you have an excess of free time you could figure out a way but by any means would that be convenient. Currently your selections are along the lines of date driven terms or terms due by (with the option of early pay discounts). And.. that is great for most people but what myself and I’m sure the whole small business QuickBooks using community would like to see is: Down payment, Due in, Deferred for X months, Payment then spread over X months, and hell even the option to amortize the payments (1’st month 15 percent down, 2nd month payment 25 percent etc… by how many ever months). That would be an absolute for certain types of business that may invoice like that and cuts down on additional bookkeeping hours. 3) Small but annoying. When using the vertical navigation bar the color stays as the default color. For some of the backgrounds this could be an eye sore (depending on your preference) 4) Service discontinuation. If you utilize any of the add on services such as payments processing and payroll you will need to purchase the new version after 3 years as Intuit will no longer support the product. But I suppose the cost of some business accounting system software can go into the tens of thousands of dollars a year so it could be a lot worse. But if you choose not to use the add on services after the three years or ever at all you will be able to continue using the software without service interruption. And just food for thought, all of these problems could have been addressed in QuickBooks 2015 which was recently released but I Have no evidence to support it. Even with my complaints. I still cannot find a legitimate reason to not give this product a five star review. I hope that this will allow you to make an informed purchase decision on QuickBooks Pro 2014 or at least the minimum expectations you should have for the 2015 edition. Thanks.

I've been using Quick Books for more than ten years. I find Quick Books to be a fairly robust and yet reasonably easy to use product that meets my business needs.I did all the tedious work of forms layout in the early years, so I can't say what that task is like in the 2014 version, but I've had no problems with compatability going forward for numerous upgrades. I like the layout of the screens in the new version better than the 2011, but it is a little slower starting in MS Vista.The only reason I rated Quick Books four star, is the lack of quality support. I remember when you could get Intuit on the phone to report bugs and suggest improvements, but they took away telephone support many years ago. Now you have to rely on the internet, and slog through hours of searching for solutions online and in blogs, many of which are useless or completely wrong.For practical purposes, Quick Books remains the only game in town, as far as I know. When I was first starting out I considered other products, but the learning curve they required was far more than I could afford (then or now). Quick Books has to be mastered, but is not too hard to learn and work with.I would recommend Quick Books to someone starting a small business, or someone needing more robust functions (quotes, invoicing, customer lists, inventory, etc) than a simple checkbook financial software can offer. (like Quicken, which I still use for my personal finances.)I have some errors in my data file left over from about six or eight years ago, which none of the previous versions could fix (and neither could I). I have not tried to fix them in this version, but will try soon and submit an update to this review.

I give this 3 stars because I'm still using it. I use this program to print invoices and balance my checkbook.There's no improvements for me in this version, other than it works on Windows 8, and I can print and email invoices again.As usual, it's slower to load than all previous versions. I finally installed the fastest consumer ssd on the planet (on my laptop) , and my 2.4 gz quad core laptop loads it in around 10 seconds now. Before that, it was taking a minute or more to load.Intuit's method of preventing multiple users from accessing the product introduced a new feature for single user versions. The new feature randomly announces that you can't open a company file because it's in use by another user. This happens quite frequently and requires the program to be loaded at least once prior to the feature being enabled. After the intial load, closing the program enables the random message. On subsequent loads you will randomly get the message. A reboot, or CTL/ALT/DLT and ending the quickbooks process allows the user to gain access again. It's a clever feature that allows the user to become more familiar with handling program crashes.The only reason I bought this was because the previous version I used, qb 2011, stopped handling pdf and email requests, and had issues with windows 8.