Chazz wrote:
Our last bookkeeper said the stuff from peachtree was much higer quality but not as "standard" or common.
Not sure about 'quality'. But, Peachtree was/is honest double-entry bookkeeping on the surface and underneath. Their UI has sucked terribly, with pop-up windows that don't resize, lack of fast quickfill features ('lookups' instead - extra clicks), etc. Believe it or not, the ancient Peachtree for DOS was better/faster than the Windows version (which was written by a different team/company and just 'labeled' Peachtree Accounting).
QB Pro is also double-entry underneath, but hides it on the surface to make it easy for 'normal' people. Generally, this means that bookkeepers who were trained with double-entry methods get frustrated because they can't see what is going on immediately...they want to make those double entries and not have the system make the second entry for them. All of it is there to see if one opens the 'registers' (journals), which do include a general journal. (The accounting types usually give up before finding the general journal and other features - which really are not needed often, as even common journal entries can be made automatically behind the scenes.)
Bookkeeper types get all concerned about QuickBooks not 'closing' periods like standard accounting software, thus fearing that old entries might be modified and invalidate reports. Yet, all transactions prior to a specific date can be password protected, in effect closing (locking) them.
The benefit of QB over standard 'closed' methods is that indeed you CAN modify older transations when someone wise enough to know what they are doing needs to do so in order to generate proper reports without hundreds of adjustment entries. There is an 'audit trail' feature that can be enabled to log all of these changes - thus providing full accountability, but cleaner reports.
Moreover, by not 'closing' in the traditional sense (which aggregates transactions) - every single transaction is still available for drilling down into from the (interactive) reports. AFAIK, Intuit was the first company to provide this kind of drill-down reporting in consumer software nearly 20 years ago.
Bookkeeper types used to prefer Peachtree, too, because they had to number all of their accounts - and so many of them were trained in school to use numbers and not names. Later versions of Peachtree allowed both. QB names can be anything, so the number-retentive can have their way there, too - but for no reason I can fathom as hiearchically named account names are much easier to understand. (Exceptions are school systems, etc., who are mandated by the State to use certain account numbers/codes.)
My greatest complaint is about how QB handles invoicing. If you have transfered time and materials to an invoice and then cancel or clear before saving it, those time and materials entries are still billable. If instead you save the invoice and then stupidly delete it - QB is not smart enough to mark them billable again if the invoice was not paid. They can be manually made billable again...if you have a printout to help find them all. (So, as usual, backups are a good thing.)
My other big complaint about QB is Intuit themselves - year after year ignoring things on the wish list that would improve reports and more. Ignoring basic functionality and instead going for what they think will sell. (Sound familar?)
Still, I'm generally satisfied with the product. It is networkable with access-rights restrictions, and employees/contractors can also use a small standalone time-recording application to log their billable hours by job for import into the database.
Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier • macOS Sonoma 14.7.1, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
