Comments On Macworld 2007 News

QuickBooks 2009 For Mac « help2solaris

Product Description

Organize your business finances quickly and easily with QuickBooks 2009 for Mac. Access everyday tasks like invoicing, bill tracking, check-writing and payroll from a convenient home page. Track sales and expenses and know where your business stands. Use the Customer and Vendor Centers to locate customer and vendor data when you need it. Download bank and credit card transactions into QuickBooks and save time. Stay on top of your business with the Company Snapshot and over 100 customizable reports. Share your data with Microsoft Excel and your accountant. Save time completing routine tasks and paperwork and spend more time on your business. Try the 30-day trial version first, decide if features are worth itUPDATE 11/22/08 (*also note edits in main review): During my test of the 30 day trial (instructions on where to find it are 7 paragraphs down), I had a crash (the first day). A crash report was automatically generated, which I allowed to be sent to Intuit. Lo and Behold, within a few hours, a Mac-oriented software engineer responded to my crash report with further questions, opening a dialog by email which also solved a vexing problem I’d had with large fonts appearing in reports. He told me this used to happen when QB files were sent to a Windows user and back repeatedly (such as from me to my accountant). You can fix it in the Company Setup sub-menus, something regular tech support had not mentioned when I contacted them some time ago..This technician, with his kind offer of help in clear, well-written sentences, was a godsend to me. I have such a negative opinion of Intuit and he has started to turn this around a bit.I did learn that the version of the trial I downloaded was not the most currently available version of the Mac software…believe it or not, Intuit is apparently so large that getting a new version posted by its own people does not happen in a day, possibly not in a week.But I am assured, and have confidence it’s true, that the Mac team is reading all “feedback reports” you can send from within Quickbooks, even if they don’t respond to them, and they do try to fix known issues.Upshot to my update: there is at least one good Mac guy at Intuit, but he’s working in a corporate structure which does not appear to care much about Mac users (an obvious example being they don’t offer a reduced upgrade cost to those of us who have been running QB for years, we pay the same price as someone just starting to use QB with the latest version).I still don’t know if I will actually purchase the new Mac version, but I’m closer than I was when I wrote the review below….Original review continues: This will be a long review since I know others rely on these as much as I do before making a purchase (thanks, Amazon!) I also feel this is a significant way for users to get Intuit’s attention about the many problems with their product and maybe by 2012 or 2015 they’ll have something that works as well as the dozen of other Mac apps I run every day.There are relatively few new features worth paying around $200. for. Details below…If you are considering this “upgrade”, you should definitely run the TRIAL version first (it’s good for 30 days, all features apparently enabled). However, you will NOT SEE the trial version link on the main product page of Quickbooks 2009 for Mac over at Intuit. I finally found it on a page titled “switching to Mac” (where it was also offered for sale). Look for that page over at Intuit.Scroll to the bottom of the page “switching to Mac”, and there’s a link titled “download free trial of QuickBooks 2009 for Mac”. You then have to log in with your Intuit account (or set one up, I suppose) in order to go through checkout for the trial, for which you will be “charged” $0.00. Bizarre, but since I had already registered my 2007 version it went OK and the download proceeded (around 80mb size). (Note: this procedure is an improvement over the rigamarole Intuit had for downloading the 2007 trial version.)Now for the review:Let me first say, I’m getting by OK with QB 2007, and I use it almost every day. I don’t have payroll, or massive inventory issues, I just use it to invoice and generate receipts for a few items and services, and keep track of who has paid me and who still owes me money. I also use it to generate a sales tax report each month, and I give the data file to my accountant every year for Federal taxes. This more or less works with QB 2007.I like my invoices and receipts to look a little nicer (they are free advertising pieces), and the 2007 form designer does work, with some glitches…one being that I have found that no matter how I configure fonts on my form, the text will appear in a related, though different font…italic instead of bold for example. By fooling around with it repeatedly, I got to something I could live with. Like I said, Quickbooks works more or less.OK, I got my 30-day trial version downloaded, and it installed without a single hitch (Mac OS 10.5.4). I had taken the precaution of backing up my entire hard drive to a separate bootable drive, just in case things got really whacky. At a minimum, you want to make a backup copy of your current data file, and let the 2009 version convert THAT, rather than your main working data file. GOOD NEWS: I found I was able to run the new version, and still launch my old version, side by side, so I could continue to do business while testing the new version. Just make sure you know which data file you’re in, they look very similar (the logo for the software is identical except for the name).QB 2009 launched OK, offered to convert my file once I pointed it to the test file, and a couple minutes later I was using it, the conversion went smoothly. The “about” splash screen says I’m running “Version T10.0″, however when I run “Check for updates” it says I have “the latest version”, QuickBooks 10.0f1627, whatever that means. I would assume Intuit would offer the “patched” versions for download, but who knows. (UPDATE: at the time I downloaded the trial, it was NOT the same latest version which was shipping at that time, an Intuit Mac engineer told me. Your mileage may vary.)What’s GOOD about the new version:There’s a company snapshot feature which is a very quick way to see the status of your payments, invoices, overdue invoices, etc. Very useful, but not alone worth the price.In spite of what has been said negatively in other reviews, I found a search function in the “Transaction Center”, which let me find a client, or even a check number, by typing the first few letters….a list quickly appeared, which got shorter as I typed more letters. Very useful, possibly the most useful new feature I found.There is a lot more room for description in the invoice and receipt windows (and possibly elsewhere), it doesn’t cut you off after a few words in the item description.I had no problem printing to my Epson 2200 printer, current or past invoices or receipts or reports. (One other user I think reported printing problems, possibly before installing a patch Intuit issued.)Runs side-by-side with old version (2007) so you can throw away 2009 when you decide it’s not worth keeping.What’s BAD about the new version, from my perspective:My online bank, which appears in the 2007 version “online” listing of banks, is not shown in the 2009 version list of banks. I won’t bother trying to find out why, that’s another deal killer here. (*update: a later version of 2009 QB does now include my bank, and I was able to use the feature of downloading account data and then importing it into QB 2009. This also works in the 2007 version, it is not a new feature).”Email as PDF”, a useful function I need almost daily in the 2007 version, DOES NOT WORK in the 2009 version. The menu item is there, it just doesn’t do anything. During testing, I could “print” a PDF file of an invoice to my desktop, thanks to Mac’s basic software, then save that PDF and attach it to an email, but not directly from Quickbooks.When I clicked a link “tell me more about blah blah blah” in one of the new panels, the help viewer launched but there was no content whatsoever shown in it. However, the help viewer DID work in another area.There are some new user interface features (such as the “Transaction Center”) which are useful, but behind them are mostly the same menu items and displays as in the 2007 version. For example, the accept payments window, the accounts window, the invoice window, all look exactly the same as far as I can tell.I’m going to stop here…I didn’t test every feature, but I found that the ones that concern me most either have not been improved, or are in some cases worse. There is little reason to upgrade if you are already running the 2007 version. If running a version prior to 2007, I believe there would be some benefit to going to the 2007 version which is still for sale here and there. If buying your first copy of QuickBooks/Mac, I suppose no harm would be done buying the 2009 version except it probably costs more than the 2007.There are other reviews, almost universally critical of this upgrade, elsewhere on the internet. Try google on macworld and/or macnn along with “Quickbooks Mac 2009″. 90% of these reviews make it quite clear that Intuit and Quickbooks are despised by most of their Mac users for a poor product, poor tech support, and an apparent lack of interest in trying to do any better over a period of time now stretching into a decade.*Update: The Mac engineer mentioned at the beginning of this review changed my feelings about all this considerably. I still believe Intuit as a company is not all that interested in the Mac market but I believe the Mac team there is trying hard in spite of this!

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