Item: QuickBooks Desktop Pro
Rating: 6
Author: Miriam Lasar, MBA, CAE

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

QuickBooks Desktop Pro is being used by a nonprofit 501c6 as well as a PAC. It is sufficient for an organization that does not have many entities and less than $10 MM in my opinion. It has some limited reporting functions and to use it best, we use a third party software that easily imports/exports Excel data to/from QuickBooks. It is affordable, but customer service is abysmal. For the small business that does not want to spend a lot of money on accounting software, this is probably your best bet, as you can find answers in many online QB forums, but if you are anything complicated, I would look elsewhere.

Pros and Cons

Affordable.
Canned reporting for financial statements.
Multi user access.

Inter-entity reporting/transactions is a pain.
Bad customer service.
Not in the cloud.

Return on Investment

Was good in the beginning since it is so inexpensive.
Switched to a more robust software recently.

Alternatives Considered

Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Online and Xero

Key Insights

Do you think QuickBooks Desktop Pro delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with QuickBooks Desktop Pro's feature set?

Did QuickBooks Desktop Pro live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of QuickBooks Desktop Pro go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy QuickBooks Desktop Pro again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Sage Intacct

Usability

It is easy enough once you get the hang of it, but like every piece of software you use, it has its own business rules and language. The sooner you get the hang of those the easier it is. Luckily QuickBooks has been around a while so the user forums online are pretty robust and tend to be more helpful than their abysmal customer service.

Support Rating

I think their customer support is horrible. It takes forever to reach someone and by the time you do, you realize you could have solved it yourself with a Google query and a helpful QuickBooks user forum. We never had helpful customer service experiences with them. Many times we had to get an outside IT person to assist instead.

Likelihood to Recommend

It really depends on the size and complexity of the organization in question. A budget conscious small business would probably be just fine with using QuickBooks Desktop Pro; however, a bigger place that has multiple entities and wants real time customer service is probably going to be happier using something more robust and something in the cloud.

great for the small business, not great for anyone else

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Desktop Pro