Quickbooks®

Quickbooks Overview

The Bottom Line

QuickBooks, the iconic small and medium business accounting software, has undergone an overdue facelift in its newest version. Its interface is more intuitive, stylish, customizable, and generally easier to use than in previous versions. The program performs all the accounting and financial tracking, organization, and reporting a small business is likely to ever need, but it can be difficult to use for people without a strong accounting background.

Pros

• New, more intuitive workflow
• Integration with a wide variety of online and cloud services, as well as third party apps and online banking platforms
• Simpler, less crowded interface

Cons

• Steep learning curve for customizing some features and templates
• Mediocre performance on older or budget hardware

Quickbooks Screenshots

Quickbooks Review

QuickBooks Overview

QuickBooks is feature rich desktop accounting program that lets businesses manage all of their finances. As a “double-entry accounting system,” it follows modern Western accounting standards and automatically manages all crediting and debiting functions in the background. In most cases, you can focus on just inputting income and expenses (although advanced features do give you much more granular control if necessary).

Interface Changes

The most important changes to this year’s annual update of QuickBooks are to the program’s user interface. In addition to a more modern, high-contrast color scheme, Intuit has tried to color-code more processes to guide users through standard workflows for common accounting transactions. There’s also a new sidebar on the initial flowchart that’s easier to customize with shortcuts than the navigation menus of previous versions. For better or worse, you’re locked into the new look. Fonts and color schemes are not customizable (beyond changing font size in your Windows settings).

The program’s main flowchart is organized by role (company, employee, vendor, customer, banking) which makes it fairly easy to find what you’re looking for. In each of those groupings are lists of specific tasks, like entering bills, creating purchase orders, and receiving inventory. The only downside is that businesses that never use some of those groupings can’t remove them from the flowchart.

The customer and vendor interfaces are especially useful for businesses that work with a number of known clients and suppliers. Both menus provide you with access to the complete customer or vendor history, and it’s also possible to create bills and invoices and enter other transactions from right within the menu. The menus also contain information like customer contact information and “notes,” which can double as a very basic CRM system in a pinch.

Transactions and Reports

QuickBooks really serves as a single source of performing all of your major financial transactions and reporting. You can create invoices, pay bills, process payroll, print checks, file taxes, track inventory, and run reports all from within the same interface. You can also see a history of transactions in like categories and customize reports on the fly to compare essentially any time frame you want. Most of the reports that you’ll likely be interested in are automatically included in QuickBooks’ presets. And if you create a report that you want to use again, you can automatically save it to the list of presets.

The built-in transaction forms look very much like their traditional accounting books’ paper counterparts. If you’re familiar with basic accounting and bookkeeping methods, you’ll feel right at home within QuickBooks. Where possible, the software does try to automate the process and refer you to information that it thinks may be helpful (via links, dropdown menus, and tables) already contained in your company file.

Third Party Integration

QuickBook’s popularity pays off for its users in the large selection of plug-ins, add-ons, and third party software that integrates with it. Some of the most prominent examples of this include:

• CRM integration (e.g. Salesforce, Mavenlink, and Zoho)
  
• Integration with most online banking platforms and credit card processing systems
  
• AgileShip (for comparing US mail, parcel, and freight rates)
  
• Troende (Facebook storefront)
  
• Inventory management integration (e.g. SOS and Fishbowl)

It often feels like any application that deals with finances offers some sort of option for integrating with QuickBooks.

Final Thoughts

QuickBooks continues to stand as the flagship small business accounting solution. Given its popularity among accountants, the wide variety of powerful and flexible features it offers, and its integration with a large number of other financial applications (both online and offline) it’s hard to go wrong with QuickBooks—as long as it fits your budget.

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