FreeAgent is an cloud-based accounting system designed for small businesses and freelancers. FreeAgent supports many core accounting features and bank reconciliation, payroll, tax management, project level accounting, and multiple currency support. It is mobile-accessible, and integrates with many apps.
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QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise
Score 8.2 out of 10
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QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is a widely-used accounting package designed for small to mid-sized businesses. It is the top of the QuickBooks line. Pricing starts at $3,000 for five users, and goes up depending on the number of additional users. They also offer an Advanced Inventory module for $999 / year.
For micro and small business it is a great solution. The new requirements for MTD for landlords could also be met with this software. Groups and more complex businesses could not use the accounts and tax returns features, however they still could use it for bookkeeping and then export the data to other tax and accounts production software.
When I first started using QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise for my non-profit 7 years ago, there were some struggles, but updates they have made to the product have been great and improved a lot of the functions that were a struggle. It is super helpful for handling specific non-profit needs where the normal QuickBooks, while great, is set up for for-profit businesses. The ability to enter donations and allocate them by classes that I set up is an invaluable tool.
Accounting! As you'd expect. Makes it much simpler andmore cost effective. In-coming and out-goings are recorded and assigned to projects and accounts. My accountant can access my books and reconcile so much more easily than trawling through spreadsheets.
Time billing - time spent on projects/client work is recorded and is ready to be invoiced as required. Saves so much time and prevents inaccuracies.
Invoicing - again, it should do this well and it does. Non payment reminders are automatic and clients have no excuses for not knowing the status of their account.
Account dashboard - gives me an instant overview of the health of the business (am I on track to meet my yearly targets) and my accounts.
Several security measures and double check systems to ensure incorrect entries aren't made. This prevents accidental errors and protects the company from fraud.
Ease of overall use
Reporting can be as detailed or as general as you prefer. Each report allows you to look at the overall picture or access specific details of each aspect of the company financials.
Reporting on financials, time tracking and project status is a little poor. It's adequate for what what we need, but would be great to see more advanced features.
API is quite closed so cannot integrate with our other project management tools.
The software becomes "cranky" more often than I would like. A quick data scan on the server usually helps, but if I am out the staff get pretty stressed.
Record Retention is not working with QuickBooks. Should there be legal action requesting records for 20 years ago the records will be there - not advisable.
Upgrades are quite time consuming as I have to "touch" every computer using the software.
We've been using QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions from when the business started, 11 years ago. I don't see us changing programs any time soon as it is working pretty well for us now. It would be extremely time consuming to start from scratch with a new accounting or inventory management program.
I like the QuickBooks Enterprise edition so much I moved my company to it this year. I like the overall functionality of the program and I am very familiar with the user interface which makes my job easier. One of the things I dislike about the online version it is not modeled after the desktop edition and I have a hard time getting around in the program.
Very rare do I call the Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions support staff and I get a customer service associate quickly. On average, my wait time is near an hour, and at times even longer. After spending the first three minutes discussing my problem, they then begin to poke and prod around, sometimes the questions continue. But 80% of the time, the problem is over their head and they have to escalate the issue. The only problem is this escalation arrives usually after spending forty-five minutes poking and proding around but learning nothing. In short, my experience is rarely all that well, let alone great
It is a very easy system to learn, so with the help it was even easier. QB is a good solid system, but it lacks some of the complexity other systems have. with QB you need to get additional modules to get the same functionality that other systems offer standard
easy to learn system, specially with some kind of support. Just like with any other system, things get lot easier if you have guidance to lead you in your search for answers. having said that, QB is very easy to use and very easy to teach. you wont spend much time memorizing where to click.
If you're loading QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions onto a computer that you're going to directly log into, you should be able to do it yourself. If you are going to connect to a server through a network or remote connection, you should probably have a professional IT person set it up for you.
I have used and tested out many other systems. I was looking at Xero for my accounting system but at the time I chose FreeAgent because of the way it handles the recording of dividends and the inbuilt time recording. The others I trialed were good and many of them cheaper. FreeAgent best suited my requirements at the time.
We have selected this product as it is affordoable in terms of pricing and features too. Our clients is geeting lots of benefits by using this product. By using QuickBooks desktop client also manage the information realted to financials and also get the clear picture for the future by using the accounting information from this product.
It has worked for our small company in every way. We have very little issues with the software and when we have had problems, Intuit has stepped up and resolved in promptly.
Professional and uniform offering providing great confident customer service. My clients love it, whether they use it a little or a lot. It's a great piece of software - while sophisticated, it's straightforward to use.
Time saving and efficient use of my team's time. Being able to easily share and compare work / tasks.
Good value for the price. The initial setup was quick and easy.
When properly set up and processes are followed it's decent at managing inventory which is something we had problems with. Have to have a dedicated employee to builds.
Rolling up costs in multi-level BOM's is a project each time we have to review costs, it's very time consuming to manually update all assemblies.
