Quickbooks Premier. The good, the bad and ugly.
April 29, 2015

Quickbooks Premier. The good, the bad and ugly.

John Coleman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

2015 Accountant

Modules Used

  • All

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Premier

We use the program internally for our financial accounting and we use it for some of our clients to prepare their financials. Other clients also use it and we review their work. Virtually everyone here except our receptionist uses the program. We keep our internal books very up to date so it helps us compare our current and prior year results in real time.
  • I really like the Portable Accountant file. Many of our clients who use this program internally like us to review their work but they can't shut down their financial operations while we are working on the file. The split that the accountant copy generates allows us to work on the historical data while the client can continue with current and future transactions.
  • I like the import feature. We do our payroll through ADP and can export a file from there and import it into QuickBooks. Doing the financials for our internal payroll takes about a minute.
  • The ability to add additional accounts or subaccounts is also a very nice feature for us internally as well as our clients.
  • The program takes a very long time to load. It'd be nice to be able to open it quicker as myself and my staff are somewhat inefficient while waiting for the program to load. Probably one of the longest hold times we have for any software.
  • Our clients are constantly receiving payments when an invoice has not been generated. This results in a negative A/R. QuickBooks needs to alert the user to this so this can be avoided.
  • When a group of checks is deposited and one bounces, you have to undeposit the entire lot and redeposit those that did go through. Should be a way for you to go in and just select the one that did not credit.
  • 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.
Intuit is essentially the industry standard. We upgrade every year since at least one of our clients upgrades as well. So many of our new clients come to us with the program already being utilized and are familiar with it. It has virtually become the default accounting software at this time.

Some of our clients who are small don't use an accounting software because they can reconcile everything on Excel. They also don't have any employees so that QuickBooks is probably not needed for them. The rest of our clients, we recommend QuickBooks. However, some do not use it because they have an industry specific program which has some financial functions. What we've found is that these financial functions, whether it be general ledger capabilities or even payroll; are fairly subpar. So, we recommend that they use this industry specific program for inventory, revenues, etc...and then do the whole financial statement and accounting function in QuickBooks.

So, the questions I ask are:

1) What's your company size and how comfortable are you with excel reconciliations?
2) Do you run payroll?
3) Do you have an industry specific program?

QuickBooks Desktop Premier Feature Ratings

Accounts payable
5
Accounts receivable
5
Cash management
3
Bank reconciliation
10
Expense management
9
Time tracking
Not Rated
Fixed asset management
1
Multi-currency support
Not Rated
Multi-division support
Not Rated
Regulations compliance
Not Rated
Pricing
Not Rated
Order entry
Not Rated
Credit card processing
Not Rated
Cost of goods sold
Not Rated
Pay calculation
3
Direct deposit files
Not Rated
Salary revision and increment management
Not Rated
Reimbursement management
Not Rated
Dashboards
Not Rated
Standard reports
9
Custom reports
8
Not Rated
API for custom integration
Not Rated
Plug-ins
Not Rated
Role-based user permissions
Not Rated
Single sign-on capability
3