Quickbooks is still the best for small business, despite its shortcomings

Overall, Quickbooks is great for small business, particularly those that have all employees on-site. If you have employees off-site or want a third-party (accountant, for example) to have access, you may want to plan ahead of time and determine if Quickbooks is a great fit. There are third-party apps (QBOX) that can help off-site employees access it, but there are limitations. Otherwise, you need IT to help you set up servers or pay higher prices to Intuit for their customized solutions. That issue aside, Quickbooks is a great product after you get past the learning curve.

Pros

Quickbooks is universally known, compatible with many banks and third-party apps, and can be quite helpful for small businesses. You can customize reports, memorize transactions, and make use of many other time-saving features. Once you get comfortable, you can very quickly manage your accounting and see where your business stands. Also, since it is so popular, there are numerous websites that share helpful tips and tricks.

Cons

There is a steep learning curve for most users. You will not feel comfortable with it for the first few months. Since it is so popular, however, you can search for nearly any task and find several websites that explain how to perform a task. As a CPA, sometimes I just wanted to see the transaction behind the curtain and it can be difficult to see that. Also, remote access for an external accountant or off-site employees is cumbersome and can require paid assistance.

Fast, Simple to use, Easy to Integrate, Support is light, and price is a touch higher than others

Overall, I have no intention of leaving QuickBooks.

Pros

QuickBooks is easy to import into, export out of and directly integrate with certain platforms. The software was built with the user experience in mind.

Cons

The price is a bit higher than the competition, so technically its a con. However, I don't consider this a negative because sometimes you get what you pay for and I found QBO to have better features and a better reputation as a whole. The support is not as easy to work with as I would like. But compared to some of the competiton, its better than not having any.

QuickBooks Enterprise - not really suitable for multi-location businesses

QuickBooks Enterprise at first glance seemed like a good fit for my 5-location business. The feature set is rich, is a widely accepted accounting package and came with a nice support package. The fundamental features of the software are quite impressive and met the core needs of my business with range from retail sales to large projects. To handle the multiple locations, there is a "class" (location) construct that allows you to use a single chart of accounts and use class to designate where things apply. For standard income/expense accounts this works well and I can track sales and expenses easily. Where the implementation fall very short is with asset/liability accounts. For example, if you have 100 widgets in class A and 0 in class B (store A and store B) and you transfer 50 widgets to class B, the count of widgets is done correctly, but the inventory value of the transferred widgets still remains in the first class. It's made a mess of my inventory values and we've had to resort to processing manual GL entries anytime we transfer items from store to store. The same holds true with banking - the class structure is only partially implemented. There are work-arounds, but they're slow and cumbersome. Reporting is another soft spot. There are plenty of pre-made reports that are decent and you can build custom reports. The issue is that custom reports are very unstable and more often than not, you'll find that reports lock up (or frozen as you'll read everywhere). This makes them pretty much worthless unless you enjoy creating a new custom report every time you want to use one. Customer support is very energetic, but it's mainly people who have never used accounting software outside a PowerPoint driven training scenario. The usual answer is to either use Google or look on the Intuit community forums. Fairly disappointing. We've managed to figure most things out, but it's taken far longer than if we had access to people with real-world experience. There are a couple of great YouTube users (Hector) who were very helpful with their videos.

Pros

Simple interface Widely used by the industry 30 user capability Mid-rage price tag on a subscription basis

Cons

The class implementation is only partially implemented and causes great pain when using this to run multiple locations The performance is marginal Required a lot of extra plug-ins to accomplish things Custom reports are reasonably flexible, but are very, very unstable and aren't very usable. Customer support is lackluster with the common answer being, "have you looked on Google?" Credit card processing through Intuit is not competitively priced

Backoffice and Front officework at ease

I am very happy to use this package for payroll mangement. Earlier I had to use multiple excel sheets for each functions.

Pros

I worked on payroll management package of Quickbooks. I saved so much time in tracking expense and accounts receivable data at the same time removing human errors in payroll processing. It has very easy to understand features for state wise payroll processing based on very flexible job conditions. It tax payment system is reliable and you can have peace on these legal matters.

Cons

too many customizations lead to duplicate effort.

Business easy for all accounting needs

Overall it made business easy for inventory, accounting, payroll, and being an all in one solution for me. I had more pros than cons. One of the biggest user experience pluses is the easy to understand layout and input of data.

Pros

I liked that I could navigate most data entry without feeling frustrated like other competitive products. Any extra help was given through explanation on overviews you could read through. The wait time for product service questions and the service given was step by step as I am not the hippest person on understanding technology.

Cons

I don't like that payroll customer service is sourced out of the USA as there is a language barrier that hinders communication on big issues. I do wish the reports were a little easier to understand or find. I had to call to get help using and finding a couple reports needed for presentations.