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Accounting Services

QuickBooks

The not quite Microsoft option

Some years ago Microsoft tried to buy Intuit (the company that produces QuickBooks). The equivalent of our Commerce Commission deemed such a move anti-competitive - so Intuit survives today. Microsoft has ceased supporting MS Money - which is more akin to Quicken - the smaller brother to QuickBooks.

A long time ago I compared QuickBooks 5 with MYOB 8. Each had it's own strengths - but Inuit's R&D budget was greater then MYOB's turnover. This has showed as over time Intuit was able to address it's weaknesses fairly quickly. MYOB has since added significantly to it's range, but the basic accounting package was still embedded until recently in an old-fashioned typical accountant's structure.

Apart from not being limited to one financial year, Quickbooks also doesn't require account numbers, and generally works much more the way non-accountants think.

One lesser featured area it is generally unmatched is the accountant's copy. You take an accountant's copy (usually after we have reviewed it), and send it to us. You keep working, while we do your accounts. We then send back not only your completed accounts, but also an update to QuickBooks. When loaded in to your system, it brings your copy into balance with the accounts. This feature is immensely powerful.

The one area it doesn't match is it's American heritage - even though the version we buy here is a Kiwi version, it just doesn't do business the way we do. A major area where this showed up is in GST - although recent versions finally address this. Basically it's very good - in some areas even better than say MYOB. But there are some minor issues. In 2008 they issued a fairly major upgrade - and Kiwi users howled in protest. They usually issue a fix to catch up with all the known problems - but that year it took four fixpacks before we had GST working the way we wanted.

More recently the NZ Quickbooks distributor / agent (Reckon) has outsourced support to IBM in Delhi. While this shouldn't affect most users, as a support agency we have found the results less than startling. In fact they haven't solved one technical problem we've taken to them. So while the people we support aren't affected - it may become more of an issue in time.

Now you may tell from the fact that there's more information here then on the others, we use QuickBooks for our own accounts, as well as being a long-time support agent for clients. Switching accounting systems is quite a big job, so we haven't been tempted to do that - despite being enticed to switch by some attractive offers.

For further information on QuickBooks, check out Reckon's web site, or talk with us.