Item: QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise
Rating: 7
Author: Abe Degnan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

All accounting in our company runs through QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise. We use it for our payroll system as well as accounting reports and job costing.

Pros and Cons

Payroll
Balance sheet, Profit & Loss, and other financial reports
Invoicing clients
Job costing, usually.

There have been problems with job costing reports providing inconsistent results.
Memorized job costing reports mysteriously change settings.
The specific reports "Job Estimates to Actual" and "Job Profitability Detail" display inconsistent results to each other! The "actual cost" on each of them should be identical!
QuickBooks premium support is included with the plan, but reaching them has become much harder, and the quality of the individual technician has been inconsistent. We've spent hours upon hours, over multiple days, trying to solve some of these problems.

Return on Investment

Seems to be a good value for the money
Probably works for many small to mid-sized companies.
The basics of it are very intuitive to learn.

Scaling with Desktop Enterprise

We've been using QuickBooks Desktop since 2001 and grew to use Enterprise in the last several years. The transition through the various forms (pro, premiere, enterprise) has worked for us. The payroll system has been fantastic. We've never had to hire an outside payroll service for any of our work. The problem that has somehow developed for us is in job costing for construction work. We have always used the "Job Estimate vs Actual Report" to see whether our budget is on track for both costs and revenue. However, something broke a few months after we started using Enterprise where by common sense we were able to see that all of our job costs were not showing up. (A category for which we had time in payroll, or for which we had a vendor bill, was still at zero or was way too low.) We looked and discovered these were not reporting. They were inconsistent. We've worked countless hours with various support techs who have given us workarounds that seem to be working, but we need to run extra reports, every time, to verify whether we have accurate data or not. This is frustrating and extra work.

Implementation

Easy, and intuitive--I had no accounting experience when I first started using QuickBooks and am self-taught.

Innovative Uses

Alternatives Considered

We picked QuickBooks because others in my industry use it.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need to do payroll, QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is an excellent solution. If you need to do standard accounting reports like P&L, BS, AP, AR, it's excellent. Not being able to trust the Job Costing Reports has cost us much time and misery. We now need to run multiple reports on the same job every time, to ensure consistent data, before we can trust the numbers. (IT WAS NOT LIKE THIS BEFORE! Something changed about 2 years ago to cause this problem.)

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise Review

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise