QuickBooks Pro 2011, a year later and no
complaints, well one ...
DIY-Computer-Repair can help!
A software review of QuickBooks Pro 2011, a financial solution for businesses
no matter how big or small.
More than just a "check book register" QuickBooks Pro 2011 allows you to
create accounts for credit,
debits, credit cards, vendors, and
cash flow, with more options and features.
Last October I decided to make my small fledgling business a LLC (Limited
Liability Company) from the old style Sole Proprietorship. My accountant
suggested I get Quicken Home and Business for my small enterprise and track my
income and expenses.
Well my Wife has Quicken Home and Business already so I tried to import the
different 'formats' that my bank, pay processors, affiliate programs, and some
vendors use in to Quicken.
After struggling for a couple of days with converting formats to plain text,
delimited text, tab delimited and other weird things I called Intuit.com and
explained my frustrations.
The support person was sympatric and offered a solution: QuickBooks Pro 2011.
For under $200 I decided this could potentially save me thousands of dollars
in fees that my accountant would charge me to manually input the data vs. me
importing it from the different institutions and business I deal with.
Note: At this time you can not order Intuit.com products digitally, maybe
in the future.
The install went pretty smooth, about fifteen minutes and once the updater
was setup for my firewall/proxy the update only took five minutes.
As with any data base program I had to learn how different features and
functions worked.
There are a few items that I think could be easier or could be changed such
as importing documents in to each category in stead of in to the main workbook.
Or setting up your income with out creating invoices, not all income is derived
from selling products through a conventional (brick and mortar store) but though
the internet.
After I finished the initial setup of my bank, savings, and a few investments
assigned to the business I proceeded to download statements from various places
like my pay processors for my products and the credit card I use for the
business account.
Once I had gathered all my documents I proceeded to import them in to my
profile. Most came in with out modification. There are a few that required
conversion with a utility provided by Intuit.com, the main one was the credit
card, although in a text file it would not put the debt and credits in the
correct columns. After reading the help file and talking to Intuit.com support I
had the conversion program.
For the first time in a long time I had all my information ready before the
end of the year, making my Misses and the accountant happy.
I rate this program at a 8 of 10, the support was in a word "fantastic" but
the ease of use of the program even after learning the nuances of the operation
is a little awkward and will place data where you don't want it causing problems
in other areas.
Over all I am satisfied with this program and would suggest anyone with a
business look at all the features and functions before buying it or another
similar program.
Note: April 15, 2012 has come and gone (Tax day in the USA) and once again
QuickBooks Pro 2011 helped me over the hump. After the taxes were gone over my
accountant told me that most of my problems stems from PAY PAL not QuickBooks
Pro 2011.
Seems the file format I download from Pay Pal is not what it should be and
does double or triple entries because when some one purchases an item from my
business or I use Pay Pal to do a purchase if the payment isn't done right away
it goes in to a "pending" status while the payment is approved.
This causes the problem with the QuickBooks Pro file format because the
"pending" entry is listed but then it is changed to either paid or debit but
never removed from the ledger at Pay Pal.
Away around this is to download the Pay Pal history in text format, you
have to edit the text file in a spreadsheet program and remove the excess
columns but the import of the spreadsheet doesn't have the double or triple
entries. A few extra steps but still worth the effort to your bottom line.
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