LessAccounting vs. QuickBooks Desktop Pro

If you are an entrepreneur and you want to focus on building your business, start with Less Accounting. It's a full-blown accounting system that has a simple implementation and it can connect to your financial accounts to automate many parts of the business. Our 1st four years of business, we worked without a bookkeeper at all due to the level of automation.

It is not limited in any regard and is not simply for invoicing or tracking hours, it more or less does everything. Perhaps one area that it wouldn't be ideal is for firms that need to have more rigid accounting, with charts of accounts etc for industries that are audited or highly regulated.

Incentivized

For a small business, QuickBooks Desktop Pro is great! For a larger, more complex business, another system may be more beneficial. We actually run multiple businesses on QuickBooks Desktop Pro, but all are very small. The help feature is sometimes so beneficial, and sometimes it seems like you just can't get the right answer and need to find a workaround - but this is usually for more complex issues.

• Categorize Expenses Automatically
• Profit and loss Statements
• Interfaces with Credit Union

Incentivized

• It is easy to manage and adjust inventory on hand.
• It is easy to make reports and customize them to your needs.
• We also use it to pay our employees directly.
• It is easy to make year-to-year comparisons to see where we can make improvements and the current financial situation.

Incentivized

• With the flexibility comes room for folks not adhering to specific accounts. There is no numeric chart of accounts so at times you will see 2 line items for a single item. We tend to overcome this limitation with extensive tagging.
• Invoices and sales orders don't have an obvious way to assign credit to specific salespeople or consultants. We reached out to LA and they have shown us a different way to do this which we'll try soon.
• The visual interface can use some sprucing up. It's easy to navigate but I believe the navigation can be slightly improved. I do find myself hitting the back button to get into other parts of the app.

Incentivized

• QuickBooks Desktop Pro has been around for a few years and after an update[,] they force you to look at the changes/updates before you can use [them] after updating.
• QuickBooks Desktop Pro does not have 2FA.
• QuickBooks Desktop Pro should offer a way to store backups to a personal cloud without having to map a local network drive.

Incentivized

It works, it keeps our historical data and is easy to use

Incentivized

I'd love to keep using it, and do intend to - though we've not been pleased with price increases over the past several years. In fact, we used to subscribe to the payroll service, but QuickBooks priced themselves out of reach for us, so we discontinued that. Currently, pricing would be the primary reason for NOT renewing, if we didn't.

Incentivized

The set up was quite easy. I took some online training causes, and figured our the rest pretty quickly. The only issue I had during the implementation process was it was very hard to change some of the GL Account name to reflect the needs of a non-profit organization, such as Net Assets. At the end I had to scratch what I did, and used the existing formats that the third-party bookkeeping firm shared. Everything else is simple and easy to manage and implement.

Incentivized

I haven't experienced a time when QuickBooks Pro was unavailable when I needed it in the entire 20 years of using the software

Incentivized

They are awful. Intuit doesn't spend real money on support. They appear to have typically said, first-level script readers who are sending messages to the senior people for anything even a little bit difficult. Many of them don't speak particularly good English. Considering that they recently doubled (or, if you are paying annually, tripled) their pricing, and touted as one of the benefits that it includes [..] support, it's a real ripoff. However, we have to use the product because it is ubiquitous. I look forward to the day a competitor comes up with something good enough, which has excellent support, that matches all the features QuickBooks Desktop Pro currently has [...] or at least gives us a way to have all the functionality we currently have without excessive sacrifice [...] so that we can switch. I was very satisfied with QuickBooks for many years. This latest [rise] in price, and their sheer gall at touting the benefit of the 100 to 200% increase as being [the] inclusion of support, is what turned me so far against them.

Incentivized

Best thing I ever did was to attend a two day training seminar on QuickBooks, I learned an immense amount in a short time with hands on training by experts. I strongly recommend such training for anyone using any part of the software. It will pay for itself in the first month.

We implemented the software ourselves. The training we received on the software was done by taking a community course teaching us how to use QuickBooks. It allowed me to get started with some basics of how to use the program and have not needed much assistance since completing the course work.

Incentivized

I had been with QuickBooks for a few years (unwillingly) at the behest of accountants. It took me a while to realize there were other options out there and I needed to begin a hunt to find them. I found LessAccounting. While it's not the most appealing software, it sure helped me see the breakdown of things and allowed me to reconcile my books without feeling like I needed a degree in Accounting.

Incentivized

We tried switching from QuickBooks Desktop Pro to QuickBooks Online, but there were a lot of issues and bugs so we ultimately decided to stay with Desktop Pro. Unfortunately, we are losing a lot of Online Banking capabilities on 5/31 as we have an older version of QB, but we plan to stick with Desktop Pro. In terms of invoicing, SaaSOptics beats QuickBooks in almost all aspects as it's all automated and takes seconds to create and send invoices. However, SaaSOptics is not really a full ERP program so it wouldn't serve us as a main bookkeeping software like QB.

Incentivized

• + Less time worrying about my accounting
• + actually reconciling my books at the end of each month or quarter
• + being able to access my P+L anytime!

Incentivized

• Training time is low compared to other accounting packages
• It was difficult to adapt to DCAA requirements, [which] required [the] hiring of [a] special consultant for that
• QuickBooks Desktop Pro is a standard for small companies and makes it easy to hire bookkeepers

Incentivized