QuickBooks Desktop for Mac is not the greatest - but if you already know how to do bookkeeping it's a pretty good option.
February 18, 2020
QuickBooks Desktop for Mac is not the greatest - but if you already know how to do bookkeeping it's a pretty good option.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Desktop for Mac
I currently use QuickBooks Desktop for Mac for both of my companies. I would be lying if I said I love it. But let me clarify a little - I am NOT a numbers person. I have never had any training at all in accounting or bookkeeping. Like many people, I had to learn how to do things because I decided to start a business and suddenly realized that everything needed to be tracked, saved, etc and did not have the resources to hire bookkeeper. So I learned on the fly. And I'm still learning. It's not the most intuitive software but at this point I'm familiar enough with it that it gets the job done of keeping our books and generating the reports I need come tax time and, more regularly, to see how the business is doing.
- Adding customers, vendors, employees, etc. is pretty simple and quick.
- The reports you can generate are excellent and in credibly helpful - get as birdseye view or detailed as you like.
- On the support side - there has always been discrepancies between QB Desktop for Mac vs. Windows and there's just a lot more out there for Windows Desktop. Plus, Intuit has not been shy in making clear that they'd rather everyone migrate over to QuickBooks Online (which I tried and is terrible), and so the support for Desktop seems to be getting minimized or put by the wayside.
- In the most recent version (2020) the program crashes WAY too much. I've never had this problem before and I'm hoping that they release updates to fix it.
- It has allowed me to do a god job of keeping track of our income and expenses the way it should be done. That has great value in my book.
- The reports give excellent insight into the numbers of the company which allow us to take a deep dive into where we are and where we want to go (forecasting).
I tried switching to QBO (QuickBooks Online) a couple of times. And in both cases it was disastrous. The software is buggy and the workflow is not at all like what I was used to in Desktop and so I felt like there was a brand new learning curve. You would think that they would make their online option as close to their Desktop option so that migrating customers would have an easy time. The worst part is that if you have inventory that you need to track, when you migrate from Desktop for Mac, it does NOT bring in your inventory accurately in any way. This was a dealbreaker for me. Be very careful about migrating if you track inventory. So for all the shortcomings of Desktop, I still prefer it over QBO.