QuickBooks Desktop Premier vs. QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Premier is not well suited to manufacturing industries, as it cannot handle the complicated inventory requirements of raw materials, work in process, and finished goods. Retailers and Wholesalers can use QuickBooks Premier as long as they have an add-on inventory tracking program or Point of Sale system that integrates with QuickBooks. Likewise, restaurants would need specialized restaurant software that integrates with QuickBooks Premier. Non-profits can use QuickBooks Premier non-profit edition, but if they use fund accounting, it will require some complicated work-arounds. QuickBooks Premier is well-suited to most construction trades, personal and professional services providers, small retailers, and rental property owners.

QuickBooks has long been a standard when it's come to small business accounting. Their tools work, the user interface is fairly intuitive to navigate, and it has suited the needs of our small business (11-20 employees) for the past 10 years. However, as we continue to grow and come into a greater need to control our branding, we find that QuickBooks Online often limits us in customization and branding. Plus, it just has some odds quirks in the coding of how the invoices are setup up that often requires us to "fight against the system" in order to accomplish what we want in our invoice structure.

• The program is easy to learn and use. We can train our clients' personnel how to use the program with out difficulty.
• It is easy for clients to generate bills and manage accounts receivable.
• It is easy to manage accounts payable and allows clients to pay their bills electronically.
• Transactions can be imported electronically for credit card and banking transactions.
• It is easy to reconcile bank and credit card accounts.
• We can import data generated by QuickBooks into our tax and accounting software.

• It enables me to do a P&L for each specific program as requested by the county for the grant money that they give us.
• It enables me to do [an] organizational budget as well as a budget for each specific program
• It enables the accountant and the auditor access at any time for transparency

• I would like to be able to choose how i want to view accounts receivable aging. I would like some flexibility to sort and choose how to present the data.
• For a seasoned accountant, I would like to see some of the restrictive controls that are in place for novices to be able to be relaxed so that I can easily make some entries and adjust some balances that ordinarily a regular user would not be able to do.
• I would like to see an easy way to clear old outstanding checks that need to be reversed without affecting prior balances/history.

• The budgets feature leaves a lot be desired - difficult and clunky to populate and maintain.
• Reporting for Budget vs Actual is available but the ability to reforecast based on updated data is not.
• The rules function to default common types of expenses isn't perfect and will get confused if like amounts or a number of similar items present.

Because we have been extremely happy with the product and our organization tends to be creatures of habit. We rarely leave a product that works this well for the latest and greatest. Typically we follow the "if it's not broken, don't fix it rule". While QB does make changes we typically just roll with it. If we do find something we don't like we work through it until we fully understand its functionality.

It like the product 'right out of the box' and I trust Intuit will continually improve it over the years based on my experience with their desktop products. The large providers of Apps makes customizing the entire package relatively easy and seamless for a wide variety of business types.

QuickBooks is an amazing tool that provides all of the necessary features needed to run the finances of a company. I would like for QuickBooks to provide better resources for training. There are many features that go unused because of lack of knowledge. Procore offers chatting and calls on their platform and they make it easy and accessible to get answers and solutions.

Do NOT use their premium payroll. It's expensive and [I feel like] their customer service is horrible. I spent almost 4 hours trying to get an answer to a simple question about a 941 form they filed. They kept transferring me around to various people and every single time they couldn't find the 941 form I had a question on. I had to do a screenshare to show them where it was! I got disconnected three times and they never called back. They also told me that I would have to talk to the IRS at one point. I refused and told them that they were filing these forms on our behalf, they were doing the calculations so they should be able to answer my questions. I asked several times to talk to a supervisor and they wouldn't transfer me to one. They just said that they could put in a request for a supervisor to call me back in 24-48 hours! It was just unbelievable how horrible it was.

This is very reliable software, the desktop version is fast. If there is a problem, it is most likely on your own hardware!

We have rarely had outages in the last 10 years. I can only recall 2 times in the last 10 years where we were not able to access our client files.

It takes forever to load.

There are tab issues. When I tab the field doesn't highlight and I have to backspace or delete what is in the field. Happens on the memo field and sometimes other fields. Very time consuming.

This is an awesome product and the support team is very knowledgeable. The product is mature, so there are not a lot of bugs and the support team really solves problems quickly. Usually it is a user error issue, but the support desk helps me out. I love the fact that it is US based support.

Support is great, all incidents been resolved. Quickbooks Online forum is very well organized and helpful. I like the fact that they let the community contribute in resolving issues. Most or many of your answers can be found online. You can also get help on YouTube, but the easiest way to get assistance is through their chat system.

It is important to do your research. There are tutorial videos online that could help new user of this accounting system. These tutorials are straightforward and easily understandable.

The person in charge of QB needs to be very accurate with record keeping and is recommended to stay on top of tasks. The biggest issue we have is reconciliation, and those issues occur only when too much time has occurred between reconciliations

QuickBooks Premier handles most of my business functions efficiently in one package. It is not my "everything." I use Replicon for time rather than QuickBooks. I don't want my WIP data interfering with my accounting. I use PaySimple for it's web interface and back office processing. I don't have security issues since I don't have any credit card data in my possession. With today's identity theft environment, I have to protect myself as much as I can. Not having credit card data in my accounting software lets me sleep much better at night. Quicken will do basic accounting but does not have all the double entry accounting systems contained in QuickBooks. QuickBooks Online does much of the basic business functions but I don't like the pricing structure. As a professional accountant, that is very important to me. Bill.com provided a good service but the ability of QuickBooks to add bills and receipts to transactions makes it redundant.

I have used Wave Accounting for another business. I selected QuickBooks Online over Wave because of the features available from QuickBooks. Wave is great since it is free, but I feel that paying for QuickBooks Online is worth it for the features. In addition there is such a robust support network and training available for QuickBooks.

They're getting better. Still room for improvement.

As we have grown along our professional path, we have also expanded our use of QB. The scalability is easy and features seem to be waiting for you until you need them. We have increased profits by over 10x from our first year in business to the current and have yet to find a reason to look elsewhere

• Since our financials are kept very up to date, it helps us compare our financial results to prior years and it is used for our internal goal setting.
• Due to the accountant copy function, we are able to provide better service since our clients are not waiting on us to fix historical data. They can continue their operations uninterrupted.
• The import feature certainly speeds up the process of accounting for our payroll. As previously mentioned, it takes about a minute to do our entries for payroll and check them.

• Overall, QuickBooks Online is a great investment for the company of our size (small software startup).
• QuickBooks Online supports all the key functions of our company's accounting team.
• QuickBooks Online definitely made the life of our accounting team much easier which let us focus on more important issues outside of bookkeeping.