Item: QuickBooks Desktop Premier
Rating: 6
Author: Debora Darden, MBA

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Premier

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use QuickBooks Premier for AP, AR, asset management, account reconciliations, payroll, and financial reports.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The bank related transactions are good. It's easy to record payments, make deposits, and reconcile the bank accounts. I like the feature that allows you to find the invoice being paid by the number when it's not clear who the correct customer is.
Entering bills and credit card payments are a snap, especially for monthly recurring charges. You can use the repeat transaction function, but I like to use the copy function. Just change the date, invoice number, and amount if needed and it's entered easy peasy.
Paying bills is another good function. Just click those you want to pay. When you are making a partial payment on an invoice, it's simple to adjust the amount to be paid. Voiding or deleting a check is easy when needed, but you need to be very careful when doing those transactions. Once in a while, I will pay a group of bills and issue the checks, and the next time I go to make a check run the last check from the prior group will show on my ledger as the check needs to be printed. So I have to watch that. It's also easy to print checks with the wrong date on them because QB will use the last date you used. So if you are entering AP invoices and they are dated a few days prior, the checks will come out with that date on them.
I have to download a lot of my data from QB to do analysis in Excel. The download process is nice. There are a lot of options for canned reports to select, and you can save your favorites so you don't have to set them up each time.
We create our invoices in QB Premier and it is my least fun function of the month. Last year we started to import the data from a cloud-based system that holds our timesheet data using a 3rd party product to perform the upload. This then translates into our customer invoices. The process is quick and easy, and it has shortened my billing process by 2 days because I no longer have to manually input the timesheet data to create the invoices. It's was a bit intimidating at first, but well worth the effort in the long run.

Cons

Several times a month I need to explort some of my data from QB Premier into Excel to do analysis and there is a limit to the number of columns I can export at a time. When I am working with payroll reports, the columns exceed the limit, so I have to split the report in half and combine them again in Excel. It takes a lot of time, and the further we get into a calendar year the longer it takes. There is lots of room for manual error in this process and payroll data has to be perfect. I'm constantly double checking to make sure I'm staying true.
I would love to have more functionality in setting up the templates. We've had to make some concessions on what we would like to show because of space constraints, there is no way to subtotal an invoice (for example, these are the total professionsl fees and these are the total reimbursable expenses) and if the invoice has multiple pages it does not subtotal the page or allow the customer to easily tell this is a multi-page document. It also took me quite a while to figure out how to get my reimbursable expenses onto the invoices from the import function.
I would like to be able to tell the average days it takes a customer to pay their invoices. QB Premier will give you that data, but it won't allow you to select a specific time period so if you've had a customer for 10 years and they seem to be slowing down the payments, you can't tell because the canned reports will cover the entire 10 year period. I would like to see, for example, how this customer 's payment trends changed over time to help signal when a customer might be getting into a pattern so I can react quicker.

Return on Investment

My focus is to get financial information to my C-Team as quickly and as accurately as possible so they can make informed decisions in a timely manner. QB Premier helps me make that happen.
The price of QB Premier is very reasonable. There are discounts offered a couple times a year so we can upgrade every so often. And when you do upgrade, it's seamless for me. That saves time and money, and I can feel confident my data is safe during the change.

Alternatives Considered

PeopleSoft Financials

I used PeopleSoft in a much larger environment, it would be over kill for this setting.

Based on the size and operations of our firm, QuickBooks Premier is a good product. It feels like we're on the verge of outgrowing it though as we've had some significant growth in the last 2 years. For small companies with 50 people or less and an annual income of under $10MM, I think it's a great product. Also, it depends on the line of business and the scope of work. We would love to be able to run a profit and loss statement by service line, but when the program was set up many years ago that was not a consideration. If you are just starting out, try to envision how you might want the system to function for you in 5 years and not just today. If you are a company that gets audited by anyone, QuickBooks Premier is not going to be the best because you can change transactions and auditors like to see a trail.

QuickBooks Desktop Premier Feature Ratings

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QuickBooks Premier Works Well For Smaller Companies