Quickbooks Desktop for Mac is an accounting software designed for Mac users. It is designed to integrate with Apple iCloud. It provides core accounting features in line with the rest of the Quickbooks Desktop product line.
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Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.
If you're a freelancer or running a very small business where you do your own bookkeeping I think this is a great option, especially if you're familiar with accounting and bookkeeping in general. If you're not so familiar with bookkeeping, I would say that the learning curve is too steep and you might want to look elsewhere for a more intuitive solution
Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.
It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
The #1 complaint is that setting it up right is a challenge. People waste time trying to figure it out only to realize that they don't know accounting so of course they don't know how an accounting program should be set up. Like any time you are in over your head, reach out to your network and find someone who can log onto your computer and walk you through it.
If you need to track the cost of wages to jobs you can't do it with the online payroll, but check for yourself because it's a function that landscaping companies and construction businesses usually need, so maybe they have added it by now. That would really help!
It's premise-based software and that means you take on the role of hardware admin, and it's a lot of work for what is increasingly becoming a smaller gap in the functionality between QuickBooks for Mac and QuickBooks Online.
QuickBooks for Mac 2015 has been updated consistently over the last 3 years and continues to provide for the bookkeeping needs of small companies using Macs in their offices. However, it has limited job costing functionality. It is similar in functionality to the 2010 version of QuickBooksPro which runs on Windows.
Intuit Accounting Professionals Trainer/Writer specializing in QuickBooks for Mac, Meetup Groups Organizer/Founder, Adjunct Instructor at Bellevue College
Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.
I haven't spent that much time with the newer versions of QuickBooks for Mac, but I think I'm seeing it make the much-needed improvements. For example, something as simple as undoing the previous reconciliation was a terrible chore, and I'm glad that feature has been included in the newer versions of QuickBooks for Mac
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
The Mac version is OK overall. I find the Windows versions to be much more robust but Mac is quite good for Mac users. Though I think die hard Mac users should consider QuickBooks Online instead as there is a new QB for Mac app that makes using QBO much better!
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
I've been using the QuickBooks online version for a little over 6 months now (upgraded from Mac desktop) and I haven't had any access issues. There have been times when it was down for service/upgrade however there is always plenty of notification time given by the Quick Books Online Support team. These upgrade maintenance time frames are always over night hours and on the weekends so everything can be worked around very easily.
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
I love using Quickbooks compared to other software we've tried. QuickBooks Online and TSheets interface. Customer service and problem resolution are generally excellent, with well-trained and proficient agents taking calls or on chat. Ease of use and accessibility via the mobile app. Great courses were available to help with learning the basics and some advanced accounting background. I love learning! Online accessibility - it can work anywhere with an internet connection. Linking to bank and credit card accounts is handy.
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
Adaptive Insights has had a positive impact on organizational expansion. With our break-even analysis we have created, what would once take place in a notebook or Excel, we have created templates and can run a conservative estimate on revenue and costs quite quickly. We have cut back on research and time on expansion by months this way, to mere hours.
One negative impact is the costs with implementing connections between our other ERP systems with Adaptive Insights. Currently, we would like to have near real-time data, but cannot due to the costs. Currently, I am tasked with uploading from multiple systems and this can be time consuming, especially during a close.
Overall, positively we have had an excellent experience. The ease of the functionality and the easy learning curve have enabled everyone on my team to have an enjoyable experience.
