Has anyone used this product? If so what do you think about it?

Thanks

I have used several versions of quickbooks. There are a ton of accounting software out there for under $100 and all seem to keep track of income and expenses pretty easily. Be leary of the real cheap versions of quickbooks, as Intuit, the maker of the software, loves to put add-ons in the software which will only cost you more money down the road for features you could have had with either a different version or other software. Also, don't fall into the trap of thinking that you need to upgrade from Quickbooks 2005 to quickbooks 2006, its mostly a marketing gimmick, I have clients still using 2003 and in the past 2 years, I can not think of a single reason to dish out money for insignificant upgrades.

I found QB to be limited. They may have fixed these complaints since I purchases it last, but here is my review:

QB limits the number of transactions you can store in your file. When you hit the limit - AND THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL HOW CLOSE YOU ARE - you will simply have to stop using it and clear out some old customers or transactions or whichever one of the limits you hit. My accountant dislikes QB because it does not adhere to his ideas of accounting principles. I am not an accountant so I can't say more. Remote automation of quickbooks is not possible without a third party tool.

Peachtree is pretty good, but limited in other ways. The field sizes are small for foreign addresses - not good for international business. Peachtree makes automation somewhat easier than QB.

We are switching to , Lord Protect Us, Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2003 because it makes automation VERY easy from within .NET. All tables, stored proceedures, etc are available from within the API. Amazing really (No, I don't work for MS). Field lengths are good and it appears to do a proper job of double entry bookkeeping using the SQL server DB it uses. It is also cheap right now. MS SBA does not do payroll, but we use another program for that anyway.

Good luck. The non-accountants always struggle getting the softare set up right the first time.

I use QuickBooks 2003 myself and personally don't like 2005. It takes forever to load for one, and there aren't really any nifty features that I need, or features that I'd use which aren't in 2003.

If you have employees, unless you outsource your payroll, calculating it is a pain with QuickBooks. You're on your own when it comes to calculating percentages, and then if the company also contributes (Medi, Soc. Sec. Tax) you need to make sure you put the same amount on the company side. Otherwise it will be a headache to go back later to fix this when filing tax forms. Depending on the number of employees, it could be beneficial to pay for QB to manage it. But for one or two -- it's not worth the cost.

In regards to its limits for transactions, it depends what type of volume you have as well. Most people won't reach the limit in a year, I never have but thats because of the business I'm in.

Thanks again for the info.