Friday, January 6, 2012

Allays My Worries - Microsoft Small Business Software Review

By Gavis Rogers


Amazon is absolutely my pick to buy anything. Love the selection and prices. I quickly returned it for a refund after reviewing it. My main purpose was to obtain a P & L Statement and Balance Sheet at the end of the year.

But the overall poor experiences over the last several months are totally unacceptable. I'll be looking for other financial management software effective immediately. Recently however Microsoft has decided to discontinue the product and as of January 31st I had to either upgrade or live without the ability to get updates of my financial information through the software (although I could still manually visit each site and download, what a pain). I also have a small home business in which I use Peachtree 2009 which is a horribly complicated piece of software and I never fully got it working how I wanted.

At this point, she says "I call you back in one minute," and hangs up. That was 4 hours ago. However Intuit has figured out a great revenue enhancing scheme whereby they force you to upgrade every 3 years unless you want to lose your ability to receive electronic banking downloads. So I took the plunge knowing I'd be forced to anyway.

I plan on contacting Quicken for a solution. I definitely recommend the software but Quicken could stand to make it more flexible and easier to perform some operations.

I had and old version of quicken that my new computer would not use. I went to an office supply store and they wanted over $100. Personally, I am getting weary of using this product. The upgrade ad said that it would keep track of all expenses, give a bottom line, a forecast for the month(s) ahead. The problem was never fixed. The last customer service upgraded me to Quicken 2011 for Free and to this day I still having difficulty downloading statements from my bank (almost on daily basis).

I also enjoy the categorizing of each expense. Broader choices also mean better record keeping. The navigation completely changed which is OK if it is improved - it is a mess. Single click update often fails on my US Bank accounts and I have to do each one separately and type in my challenge questions about 8 times. Quicken 2011 created some new Category Groups (eg rental income) and my existing category group selections were all skewed to the wrong selections. To make matters worse, the cash flow reports using Category Groups now take 2-3 minutes to update in 2011 versus 2-3 seconds in 2010. Plus, all our accounts are automatically updated, unlike Quick Books which requires manual input. If you don't have employees, Quicken is a small business owner's dream. It seems like Intuit has suffered a major breakdown in software quality. It's time to start looking for alternatives.




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