QuickBooks Pro 2009

QuickBooks Pro 2009

Review
By: Mike Block

This is an updated review, based on comments on earlier versions. I added many details for my rating, but must first admit pro-Intuit / QuickBooks prejudice. If a company consistently has far better products and service, at excellent prices, then prejudice makes good business sense. More than 94.2% of small business accounting software buyers, and more than 90% of home checking program buyers, recently showed such prejudice in retail QuickBooks and Quicken purchases. You also can Google: Intuit + Net Promoter, to see Intuit has, by far, the highest Net Promoter score in its industry. Intuit has been earning outstanding customer ratings for 25 years. Read "Inside Intuit" if you really want to understand this near universal prejudice. Amazon lets you read quite a bit free. Buy with the bottom right widget on my QuickBooks-Blog and I get 4%.

I am a very independent Fort Lauderdale CPA, not an Intuit employee. Intuit sometime pays me for consulting, design tests, advertising (via Google) and advisory council service, but it is never close to 1% of my income. This counts my entire web income, not just the Intuit part. It also takes far more time to get my Intuit income than it does to get comparable client income. For example, Intuit gives active pre-release QuickBooks testers about $600 of not-for-resale software, but this takes us more than $3,500 of time. It paid $500 for an advisory council meeting, but that took four days, counting travel. Intuit does not pay for reviews like this, for my QuickBooks Community site or personal blog, my websites or about 9,000 of my mainly QuickBooks forum and newsgroup answers (in 13+ years).

My legal duty is to the small business who provide almost all my income. We all rely on increasingly faster, easier and more complete Intuit tools to keep records and manage better, for less. Intuit, and most users I ask it to help, do not pay for such help, though Intuit often provides senior manager priority help when I request.

My Intuit independence was shown when I got upset due to Intuit decisions that hurts small businesses. I twice called for Intuit product boycotts and was the main reason Intuit dropped a $40 million payroll tax price increase (Google "Intuit products phone home"). Instead of dumping me from an Advisory Council, the CEO wrote, "Keep raising hell when Intuit does something wrong." This is as it should have been, as Intuit always had customer-directed-innovation as its foundation. It was the first to use software engineer Usability Tests to create Quicken, so we collectively really decide how Intuit products work and what they contain. For more on this Google "Intuit Mission and Operating Values." Please read the Operating Values from "WOW! Many companies say their most important job is satisfying the customer. We don't. We believe that satisfying the customer is simply the minimum requirement for staying in business. Therefore, we don't seek merely to satisfy our customers; we seek to wow them." These sections also are important to getting you better help and products from Intuit: Integrity Without Compromise; Do Right by All Our Customers; Seek the Best; Customers Define Quality and AFTERWORD. The last section starts, "What about results -- things like market share, growing our revenue, profits? We barely mention them in our values. Don't we care about results? We do. Market share is a measure of how well we are serving customers." I have been closely watching top Intuit managers live by these values for 10+ years.

As to specifics, we have been heavily using QuickBooks 2009 for four months, in pre-release tests and production. We make nothing on QuickBooks sales (as we rebate commissions) and rarely install it for clients (it is too easy). We only push it because it is the fastest, easiest, most bug-free QuickBooks. It also should help your accountant correct your errors, while keeping your records in-synch with his. Here are some of the many compelling improvements.

Even if you have a support contract, go first to the QuickBooks 2009 Live Community help. Intuit created it because customer-directed innovation research showed that users prefer getting help from other users, especially from those in the same industry, to getting it from Intuit support people. Therefore, QuickBooks now has a great many in-context links to specific user-to-user forum threads. Even before you post a question, QuickBooks checks where you are and what you asked, to suggest a one to three answers, not 25. One more click and it posts. QuickBooks support people answer questions users do not answer quickly.

The first very successful test of this used TurboTax, which has 7 million users. In the first year users gave answers to 40% of the questions of other users, before support people could. That percentage should rise as we become more accustomed to this. Whether it is because we want to show off, to give back help we got or to help build a professional practice, users also tend to provide better answers than support people. Most important, to products badly needing peak-season support, this tends to get the most potential answer providers online at the same time as you get the most potential questions. The result is so good that we quickly and almost accidentally got answers to two serious nagging problems during testing. My quickbooks-blog has a video of Brad Smith, Intuit CEO, explaining this.

Unfortunately, Intuit phone support does not tell you about Live Community. Due to the Live Community shift, there may be too few remaining employees for all QuickBooks versions. There is now only one way to get unlimited top U.S.-based phone or email (web form) support: become a ProAdvisor (Google QuickBooks ProAdvisor), which gets you QuickBooks 2009. This comes with top quality accountant support, including calls at times you specify, by people who know your issue. It costs only $449 for $349 in support, plus a $399 QuickBooks Premier edition. Savings get far bigger if you need payroll, extra copies of QuickBooks or many included items. You need not take a test or really be an accountant or bookkeeper, as QuickBooks effectively makes us this.

As to phone support, even ProAdvisors should know some magic words: CASE NUMBER and ESCALATE. Find out who us talking to you before saying this. It may be a made up name, but it is usually used consistently. Also note the exact time you call, reach someone and for a case number. It is very rare to get a hang-up, but it sometime happens. When it does, or when the person refuses to give you a case number and escalate, you will want the information for me or the next Intuit person to whom you talk. This is not to get them fired or demoted. It is to get them the extra training that top Intuit people want for them.

The new Client Data Review Center is very important for accountants, but this makes it very important to users. We can save hours of time with new clean-up tools. From one screen we can review and fix errors in general ledger balances, lists (like the chart of accounts and payroll items) and open items in accounts receivable and payable. We can do this Review at clients offices or with remote access. A new log-in lets us track changes we make versus the current client/administrator.

The Accountant's Copy is now far more important. Like the one in 2008, it lets you quickly and easily transfers files to and from accountants via Intuit servers. However, it now lets us do far more, including bank reconciliations after the "dividing date," mapping accounts to 1099 fields and modifying and merging classes. Most important, it has a far better import process. We had to use QuickBooks data recovery four time last year, to import Accountant Copies with many changes. Each had only one bad entry, but that stopped us from importing thousands of entries. This added countless hours of work and long delays. Users will now be able to import all good entries, even if there are bad ones. This will give many users accurate QuickBooks files for the first time. It also will mean accountants no longer must get frustrated adjusting client files for many of the same prior entries, as many as five times a year, avoiding many related errors. We even will be able to now do this with the Simple Start free edition, which will now be able to import Simple Start files from older versions.

Accountants will save still more time, while being able to do far more, with an optional advanced statement writer. This will use Excel to quickly format changes and styles, share them, use 20 pre-set templates or create our own, access budget to actual and class reports from one tool and control the flow of QuickBooks data to statements with one click. I also expect it to have wide use in interfacing other QuickBooks add-ons.

One big tragedy involving QuickBooks relates to the failure of accountants to get users to try some of the more than 500 mature and tested QuickBooks add-ons. These generally very inexpensive programs (free to generally less than $400) can extend QuickBooks in countless custom ways. They can end duplicate data entry and related errors and delays. For some, who may think they are outgrowing QuickBooks, spending less than $3,000 on these add-ons can avoid serious delays processing each transaction, conversion disruptions, training, expensive consultants and more than $50,000. For others, this may easily mean not needing QuickBooks Enterprise, saving more than $2,000.

On a related note, you can host any desktop version of QuickBooks on the web, with any or all of your QuickBooks add-ons, for as little as $26 per user per month. You can easily make that up by cutting back on extra copies of programs that some users need only occasionally and in file transfer time to accountants. As Intuit itself quickly adds more and more web links to QuickBooks 2009, there should be increasingly less hesitation about doing this on the part of users.

For anyone using QuickBooks in a multi-user mode, QuickBooks 2009 is an absolute no-brainer. One user can now create an invoice while another user runs a report. You also can backup in multi-user mode. Then there is the new QuickBooks Messenger, for instant chats between users. I know that I do not really want a new Messenger, but this is the only program we know that forces an absent QuickBooks user to log off, without risking QuickBooks data file damage.

There is now a company snapshot (dashboard), which provides a real-time overview of a business and warns about what lies ahead. One screen show an income and expense graph, customer balances and reminders. That was a $100 - $200 option previously. It should help many to finally use QuickBooks to manage businesses, instead of simply using it for checkbook balances and taxes.

Accountants and users will save time while reconciling bank accounts, thanks to new data sorting by check number, date, amount, payee and other column headings. Many users very much wanted this. In the online banking area, which many here did not like, Intuit said, "Save hours of data entry and reduce errors by securely downloading banking, credit card, and credit union transactions directly into QuickBooks. The new Online Banking center improvements include: Automatic transaction mapping to appropriate QuickBooks accounts to improve accuracy. Mapping defaults easily customized to save time. More than 3,000 participating financial institutions. New wizard simplifies set-up."

This makes it sound like they are implementing the Yodlee approach, which was the subject of a long conference call I had with them two years ago. Mint recently took a similar approach. That is why it makes me especially sad when someone feels we missed something in pre-release tests, as we may have this year with online banking. In this case, however, I believe one user already correctly indicated the problem was simply user error. I did not test this because banks often do not change formats, security or logins in time for our tests. Intuit also went to 2048 bit encryption this year, before most banks. In any event, I emailed the adverse banking and login reviews to my main Intuit manager as soon as I saw them. In less than a day he replied, "Mike, Timing is perfect, we are in the process of mining for online banking feedback. This will go to ... tonight. Thanks again." I am sure there will be a fast further follow-up. Intuit has been really listening to users since inception and often acts very fast. I got a post-release bug-fix for everyone in 5 days, including the weekend before Christmas, when the problem only affected one small QuickBooks add-on developer. That makes me very sure sure there will be a fast resolution for online banking users. There also was an equally fast response to inconsistencies I pointed out between new and renewal prices, for affiliates and ProAdvisors ("there will be changes this week"). You might note that Quicken online became free a few days ago, apparently in reaction to Mint. Intuit initially quickly devastated 45 competitors with Quicken. It did so again with QuickBooks and TurboTax. It repeatedly crushes Microsoft (9 times by my count, including Microsoft Money dropping retail sales).

Microsoft also is a good example of finding an accountant to use or support other accounting programs. It says it has about 20% of the QuickBooks market, based on free downloads and bundled giveaways. Included in the giveaways is the Microsoft Action Pack for Accountants ($299 a year for around $15,000 of software, with free support and accounting professional listings). However, the New York City area recently had about 200 times as many QuickBooks ProAdvisors as there were Microsoft accounting professionals. This, the relative paid sales (where mighty Microsoft is not even #2), and many comments I will not list, should tell you what accounting professionals think about the value of these accounting packages. Many CPAs are ProAdvisors. We have a legal duty to provide advice in your best interest. You do not have to listen, but then you may have to find one of those two CPAs in New York. Since they are also probably QuickBooks ProAdvisors, they will probably start by suggesting you use QuickBooks. I have yet to find a CPA who did otherwise, unless you wanted the $20,000 Microsoft package.

Finally, if you do not leave your email address here it is hard for Intuit or I to help. I have a very good relationship with Intuit, including its CEOs. If I cannot help you myself then I often get top Intuit people for you. This quickly made many upset users into big QuickBooks boosters. One said he would invest his entire IRA in Intuit stock.

QuickBooks Pro 2009