Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Another upgrade to a very good product
Intuit has issued another annual installment in its QuickBooks series. The changes from 2002 are mostly cosmetic for most small business users. The program comes in five versions Basic, Pro, Premier, Contractor, and Accountants Edition. If you are a contractor it is time to step up to the new Contractor edition.Simplicity and ease of use are the mainstays of QuickBooks. People who have come to QuickBooks, for the pure ease of use will not be disappointed. If you purchase the additional services such as Merchant Card Processing, Payroll and Online Banking which integrate directly into the program you will save considerably on your routine accounting work. However, you need to be prepared to pay rates that are sometimes considerably higher than the lowest cost provider, as only a few select providers are directly integrated into the program. As with the last couple of years, you can not run payroll out of the box, you need to subscribe to one of Intuits "Payroll Services" The additional fees for Payroll range from tax and form updates at $169 (annually) to fully outsourced payroll services including printing of payroll checks for considerably more. The ability to maintain your own tax tables have long been a feature of many competitor products.. Who should be buying one of these programs? Companies who are in the retail, contractor and service businesses who are willing to pay slightly higher prices for some services, to gain the ease of use. Or people who are willing to forego the integration to use QuickBooks many other easy to use features, such as invoicing and accounts receivable, Billing and accounts payable, and overall accounting. People who use existing versions of QuickBooks will not be disappointed in 2003. Intuit has done little to satisfy the existing critics of the program. Indeed, QuickBooks is even more tightly integrated to outside suppliers than in the last several versions. While these vendors are all top of the line, it makes it difficult to use a lower cost provider.
Small manufacturers and other companies that build assemblies from inventory parts are once again disappointed as support for manufacturing inventory is once again omitted.
Rating: - Exceptionally Poor Product
I have owned the "Pro" version of this product for all of two weeks. If I can still get a refund, I will. Here are my list of problems: The application crashes often in my windows XP environment. I have 40 other applications on my machine and not one of them has crashed. Quickbooks touts that it is compatible with ACT! and Outlook, but only with older versions of either applications. I went to install the Timer and while it installed on my machine fine, I was amazed to find that the only way to make copies of the Timer for legal distribution was on a floppy. I don't have a floppy on my machine. I have never needed one before Quickbooks 2003. I am willing to pay for support on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, but then I expect such service to be 24-7 not 6-6/M-F. This application is going out of date, Quick. I am not impressed. (Also, Kathy Levin's 'The Offical Guide' has less value than the enclosed manual. Skip this, too)
Rating: - Very good product, reasonable price
Let me preface this by saying that I have absolutely no vested interest in giving QuickBooks a positive review. That aside, the program delivers everything one would expect, and while not perfect, is reasonably user friendly. It seems so fashionable to criticize QuickBooks, but it's an admirable piece of software.The complaints regarding having to pay a fee for payroll, while somewhat understandable given that Intuit is not as upfront as they could be, are largely unjustified, as all accounting programs charge for this service. The Intuit fees are signifcantly less than what one would normally have to pay for third-party payroll service.
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