QuickBooks Online is NOT a comparable product to QuickBooks desktop versions. KNOW the limitations before you switch.

Sales people seem to be VERY poorly trained as it relates to the differences between QB desktop and QB online. These differences need to be CLEARLY iterated, so that people transitioning know what they gain/lose, need to change/do differently, or most importantly, can no longer do at all.

The sales rep failed to mention that our budget would not transition from desktop to online. This was a minor 1-time inconvenience, though a bit time-consuming to re-enter.

The sales rep failed to mention that we would lose all of our custom saved reports. This was a bigger deal for several reasons. First, the time involved in re-creating them all. But the far bigger issue is the fact that QB online (and the associated app) is INCAPABLE, IN ANY WAY, of printing a report that is more than 1 page wide. I spent an hour on the phone with a tech support rep who bent over backward in every conceivable way to deny this was a design flaw/bug. She refused to admit that there is a problem with a software package that can PRODUCE lots of reports that are more than 1 page wide, but is incapable of printing said report. Her solution, export it to Excel, then spend the extra time going through a lot of re-formatting to get it to print with proper headers and footers, proper column headings and row labels, EVERY SINGLE TIME I need to print a report. So, what went from being a 1-click process, is now a 15 minute process, for 40 reports printed each month for management, and quarterly for board meetings. That’s a HUGE commitment to do something manually that used to be done with 1 click. That IS a design flaw/bug, but god forbid someone admit that.

The sales rep failed to mention that while QB online does support classes and sub-classes, it doesn’t work the same way that it does in QB desktop (this would be a critical piece of information to disclose in the pre-sale conversation to a potential customer has asked MANY questions about classes/sub-classes. QB online treats all classes and sub-classes in a FLAT manner (i.e. – they APPEAR to be hierarchical parent/child items, but the logic which made this such a great feature in QB desktop isn’t there, so they simply LOOK hierarchical, but are in fact FLAT). Why is this a problem, you ask? Well, we go back to reporting. In QB desktop, if I wanted a report showing activity for a specific sub-class, I could request that. If I wanted a report on a parent-level class, that would include all sub-class activity broken out under that parent-level class, I simply ran the report on the parent-level class. Simple. One-click, done. Not so with QB online. I can run a report on a sub-class just fine. But if I want a report at the parent-level class, I have to manually select the parent-class, and individually select every single sub-class as well. If your business is like ours, and your sub-classes are fairly dynamic, you can’t just save customized reports to do this, because you have to manually go back in to the filters and select new classes every single time you run the report. It’s maddening, and another huge waste of time, going from a 1-click process to a many-click, time-consuming process. Why would you take a hierarchical class list process and flatten it without telling people? Yes, SEEING it as hierarchical is nice, but far less important than logically PROCESSING it as parent-child.

Oh, did I mention you can’t search your data by dollar amount any more? How does that make sense?