QuickBooks Pro 2005

QuickBooks gives the small business owner essentially enterprise-level solutions at a fair price. Accounting is inherently difficult for most of us (me included!), and will remain my least favorite task. It does and will continue to consume hours of my time each week-especially when unusual situations come up. But the difficulties are inherent in the problem, and QuickBooks makes this as painless as it is ever going to get. For two years I ran my business using more of an account-oriented software package. It required that I speak double-entry bookkeeping as a fluent second language. QuickBooks, by contrast, shields you from most of the drudgery. You can drill down to look at the bare ledgers if you want to, but most of the time you can just work with your friendly old checkbook register. I reckon that it takes me about half the time to run the books for my $2 Million company, which saves me maybe a day a week. So why not five stars? Intuits marketing policies really are intrusive. Youll get a lot of pop-ups as you go through your daily tasks, shaking you down to buy other Intuit products. Mercifully, I have seldom had to use their customer service. Overall I have satisfied with the product, and grateful for the time it saves me, and I think it is sold at a fair price.

Quick Books Pro is a good value for its cost. It is far superior to Quick Books especially its cost accounting ability. Unfortunately many users dont take full advantage of its features. Not only does the cost accounting provide valuable information, in service oriented business the use of the time card and allocation of employees time to various jobs gives a truer cost of a project than estimates. I really recommend this package if you are a small business.

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?

Excellent tool for small business. Takes a while to get the correct use of it, particularly what accounts to use if you do not have an accounting background. The quick tours are vey helpful. The number of transactions that have to be carried out are a little tedious, but so its keeping accounting books.

Nutshell: Intuit and a company called Best Software are the only two firms producing small-business accounting software. Because of this, theyve split the market between them and are now engaging in monopolistic gouging. Each year, the price goes up. Each year, the service goes down. This will persist until an alternative appears. If you are considering making small-business accounting software, do it! Youll find lots of customers ready to switch. But back to Quickbooks: you have to upgrade every other year at a minimum - Intuit turns your software *off*. You have to buy a service contract to make it function - the list price above is NOT what youll end up paying. So if you buy this, understand that youre entering an endless upgrade cycle with no way to escape, and a company that can turn off your software, remotely, at any time, with no refunds. Enjoy!

Pro 2005 was perfect for updating from 2003 to new computer. Worked perfect. Delivery was very speedy. Would highly recommend if trying to switch from old system to newer one.

Having used QuickBooks in my retail business for 7 years, I was gung-ho to upgrade to QB 2005. After doing so (easily), I used the product for one week when it stopped responding. It turns out that my data files had been corrupted. The 2005 format is not compatible with previous versions, so I had to recreate a weeks worth of checks, payments, payroll, and desposits - a task that took the better part of a day. I pity a larger business that could easily spend much more time than I. After waiting on hold for 2 HOURS, I was instructed to e-mail some files to QB so that they could fix the errors and mail them back to me in a usuable format.. guess what - its been 2 months and no one has responded to that, or several subsequent, e-mails... Im glad I rolled back to 2004 on my own... now, if I can get someone on the phone to get a refund...

Very user friendly, helpful to a small business. Guided step-by-step to get started. Than there are many other uses once it is initially set up. Great investment for the money.

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.

We upgraded our software from the 2003 version on Friday evening. The upgrade was fine and easy to follow. We started using the new program right away with minimal confusion. We didnt close the company file until last night, when we shut the computer down before going home for the night. Today, the new version no longer recognizes our password. Intuit technicians are mystified by this happening and Ive been switched from service number to service number trying to get it resolved. Most recently, I spent an HOUR AND A HALF on hold, only to get a recorded survey asking me to rate my satisfaction with a customer service rep that never answered the phone, and then the survey hung up on me. An entire day of work has been stopped, and an entire day of being on the phone waiting for someone to help us has typified the experience weve always had working with Intuit any time weve had questions. I am now sitting on speakerphone again, hoping to get an answer. 25 minutes and counting....I may prefer to go back to the good old fashioned ledger and pen method.