What is it with Accounting/Book Keeping software that makes it so unappealing? Oh yea! The butt ugly interface that Intuit is known to produce. That's the ticket!
I don't really care if the UI is pretty. Is that really a criteria for this type of software? Are you looking at the UI or at your numbers? Hm, maybe that's why the economy is in the mess it's in. Everyone obsessed with pretty accounting software instead of keeping an eye on their numbers.
Look what happened to Quicken. Intuit spent all their time making it look slick and didn't bother to put any real functionality in it. Sure, make it pretty if you have the extra time to do so. But make it work first!
Ha Ha! Well I know a little. I know enough to tell my accountant to send over the Windows QB file to our CPA. Fortunately, I don't need to know any more than that so I can concentrate on making and spending money.
Once again, you've managed to prove that you don't understand business finances, accounting, or taxes.
Oh, and BTW, people who intend to make money understand their business and don't simply dump it all in an accountant's lap without any understanding of what's going on with the business finances.
If they keep making a mac product for small businesses, is there any surprise that their mac customers will be mainly small businesses?
Great point, I agree! Let's build a new Quickbooks for Mac that targets the needs of the existing user base, and ignore the fact that no one with accounting needs beyond a Quicken checkbook register uses Quickbooks for Mac because it sucks so badly! What a great way to run a business!!
when i started my business, one-write and peach tree were the best choices. Peachtree has grown, and its not great but it gets the job done. Most people don't change lightly, its not like changing your favorite spreadsheet app. I run my business on a mac, but have to use virtualization for peach tree. Quickbooks was NEVER up to running a small business, and on a mac was much worse, and its so recent. Hence there are so few business running QB with any employees on a mac.
I work with a lot of other business owners - peachtree is most common - and if intuit offered a QB alternative, many would switch - if only because of peachtree performance.
Hmm wife works for an accounting firm...99% of SMB use Quickbooks on Windows. They have had a few customers try moving to the current Mac version only to go back to the Windows version in Parrallels.
If I use that for my new signature do I have to give you credit?
Seriously though it takes more than Intel chips to make it cross platform. To program for Windows you use Visual Studio and for Mac, XCode. Unless you do some porting thing like Adobe and Apple do, but that never turns out so well.
True, the Intel chip really has no bearing on making it cross platform, but there is still little excuse for the hugh difference in features between Mac and Windows versions (this applies to the consumer Quicken as well). It's not like the financial formulas change. They aren't doing anything magical in the UI that should have huge depenancies on unique OS services. And it's not as if they need to optimize the code like you do for gaming to squeeze out the maximum framerates.
It's like another poster suggested, Intuit's crappy Mac sales are due to their crappy Mac software. They keep setting the bar lower and then can't figure out why their Mac sales shrink while the Mac's marketshare continues to rise.
After so many sensible comments, mine is probably redundant but I have to say it!
Talk about putting the cart before the horse - the effect as the cause! Are Intuit REALLY so dumb as to believe that the Mac version only needs to support simple accounting because that's all the users use???!!!
Can they REALLY not see that the only users are small businesses because the programme doesn't support any other kind of user. I, for one, would be using it if it had all the features of the Windows version. I bought the earlier version but had to abandon it because it lacked not only multi-currency (which is a key requirement for my SMALL business) but many other features as well.
Can they really not see how many more customers they would get if they took the trouble to make their programme cross-platform - like Filemaker does so successfully?
Once again, you've managed to prove that you don't understand business finances, accounting, or taxes.
Oh, and BTW, people who intend to make money understand their business and don't simply dump it all in an accountant's lap without any understanding of what's going on with the business finances.
I guess I'm just lucky then. Seriously, if you just want to toss insults, I'm fine with that, but you know nothing about my business. I can tell you that my department is the most profitable in the entire corporation, and I've been in this same business since 1985. I definitely know how to make money.
QuickBooks for Mac will never, ever, ever, ever hold a candle to the BEST accounting package for the Mac, which is AccountEdge.
absolutely correct! AccountEdge (formerly MYOB) IS the best accounting software for the Mac, bar none. I am using it for our business since 1994. it simply is an astoundingly well developed piece of software: general accounting, payroll, fluid integration with POS system (LightSpeed), etc.
all I hear from QuickBooks users is some form of moaning & groaning...
There are some excellent observations of QBs here but if you really want intuit to listen maybe email them and tell them directly, venting here may feel good but won't bring change.
Doesn't work. I used to beta test for Intuit and armies of beta testers were telling them the same thing - and they simply responded that Mac users didn't need the things we were all requesting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
I guess I'm just lucky then. Seriously, if you just want to toss insults, I'm fine with that, but you know nothing about my business. I can tell you that my department is the most profitable in the entire corporation, and I've been in this same business since 1985. I definitely know how to make money.
I'm glad - but that doesn't show that you know anything about taxes or accounting or finance software.
Your suggestion that one must be using Windows Quickbooks in order to send financial details to an accountant is ludicrous - even for you.
absolutely correct! AccountEdge (formerly MYOB) IS the best accounting software for the Mac, bar none. I am using it for our business since 1994. it simply is an astoundingly well developed piece of software: general accounting, payroll, fluid integration with POS system (LightSpeed), etc.
all I hear from QuickBooks users is some form of moaning & groaning...
I used MYOB for years. Then (in canada) Intuit bought it and quickly discontinued it. Then they dropped mac support pretty much all together.
EDIT: I see there is now a Canadian option for accountEdge
Your suggestion that one must be using Windows Quickbooks in order to send financial details to an accountant is ludicrous - even for you.
You love to twist my words don't you? I suggested no such thing. Since I was unfamiliar with the software I merely asked the question if it was not compatible... But since no one answered the question I went and tracked down the answer for myself and posted an edit to my earlier comment before you even made you first reply to me. Of course you omitted that from your reply so you could belittle my feeble understanding. Thank you oh holy one for sharing your wisdom.
It's like setting up a lemonade stand year after year that sells only lemonade and then claiming "my customers don't want iced tea because they've only ever bought lemonade from me."
That's all that needs to be said. Good luck with that Intuit.
Another random thought regarding Intuit's ineptness... if Intuit is not interested in "feature parity" between platforms, then why have two vastly different products share the same name and roughly the same price points?
Shouldn't this be called something like "Intuit Small Business EZ-Accounting Lite for Mac", or something equally as cheesy and consumerish? And sell for $79?
Another random thought regarding Intuit's ineptness... if Intuit is not interested in "feature parity" between platforms, then why have two vastly different products share the same name and roughly the same price points?
Shouldn't this be called something like "Intuit Small Business EZ-Accounting Lite for Mac", or something equally as cheesy and consumerish? And sell for $79?
Actually, they did that with Quicken. The Mac version is now called "Quicken Essentials". I guess "Quicken stripped of half of the useful features because we're incompetent to make decent Mac software" didn't fit on the box.
If they keep making a mac product for small businesses, is there any surprise that their mac customers will be mainly small businesses?
Amen man.... I was thinking the same thing. Intuit has SCREWED we mac users since day one. When they put out a new OS X version of Quickbooks not long ago it was the same crappy program that they had turned tail on us with when OSX first came out. It's pure shit. Hell, the OS9 version of QB was loads better than everything after it. I half wonder if they're in Microsofts back pocket. The Mac version has always been an incomplete, piece of crap to try and run your businesses with. I've owned two businesses and am currently out of the starting gate with a third. I refuse to waste any more of my precious time dicking with a PC, and I refuse to give QB any more business because of this half ass version of QB for Mac. The PC version is pretty good, but it's no enterprise solution for running a business of any substantial size. or if you have a substantial product line you build yourself... it so SUCKS for that... even the PC version. It's really only good if you're buying product that you resell (retail business) or it's also sufficient for a service business. Either way, they have purposefully put out pure shit when it comes to their mac products. When they first killed off Quickbooks for Mac back in the OS 9 days, I ended up moving over to MYOB. While it wasn't as intuitive as even the old OS9 version of QB.... it's actually a hell of a lot better than even the PC version when it comes to functionality.
For my new business I went into overkill mode. I'm using an open source ERP called Xtuple. If you have a business and want to go all Mac check this program out. http://www.xtuple.com There's a free version called Postbooks that makes QB look like the trash software that it is. It's not up to the quality of NetSuite ($10-15K/year)... but it's close. And you can run the database server on your local machine... or a server (mac/linux or god forbid, a PC). Same deal with the client application... you can run it on anything. There's a kind of steep learning curve but it's worth the effort. Just try to understand the program adds a second step to most anything. Want to make a purchase order? Well it's pretty strait forward, but understand there's the added step for having someone outside of your buyer approve the purchase order. OF course you can give the buyer permission to approve a PO then that's that... but there's the second step. But it does everything.... and I mean anything and everything. CRM, Accounting, Work Orders for manufacturing, Inventory, EVERYTHING....I should be getting paid for this.....LOL.
If you own a small business, look at MYOB, it's tons better than QB.... and if you want something more substantial take a look at Xtuple. You can't beat the price.
What Intuit has done to us is unethical and just flat out stupid. All of these programs are just a client application linked into a database. There's no freaking reason that the Mac version of Quickbooks Pro shouldn't or couldn't be identical to what the PC version has. They're just trying to pigeon hole us into using a substandard POS pile of software. Run from them, they don't deserve our business. The will never see mine again, that's for sure.
Wouldn't all the same criticisms regarding lack of feature parity also apply to Microsoft Office for Mac, especially Outlook? But it seems that for Microsoft's Mac products, Mac users care less about feature parity and more about pretty interfaces. So why does Intuit get criticized for lack of feature parity?
Accounts software companies all seem to share that arrogant Windows user attitude that the ONLY reason why people use Macs is because these users are ONLY interested in things that look pretty and have a pretty interface. It's so patronising.
I'm director of a Consultancy involved in Accountancy for small businesses and although we would prefer to use Macs for everything, we have to use Windows PCs for the accounting software because there is NO accountancy software for Macs that can do multi-currency, multi-client, double-entry - at least not for the Swiss market.
In Europe the market is dominated by Sage which uses an Access database as the underpinnings so clearly it isn't cross platform, nor Mac suitable. That seems to often be the case with these programs. Intuit has very little presence here, but the time I used it on a PC it was a terrible experience. I needed to do a tax return for a self-employed businessman. Legally the business was allowed to file accounts a year in arrears for a business year that began 2.5 years before. Intuit's program simply disallowed entering any information for the first year as it was "too far in the past".
I've never selected anything from Intuit since. I'd paid for a program that was simply designed not to work. No wonder Sage is dominant over here. And no, they don't do ANY Mac software, and buy up all the companies that might.
It's a Mac app that's been ported to Windows and is 100% platform compatible, handles pretty much everything Quicken does, has versions specific to NZ, Australia, UK, US, and other countries in order to cater for their tax and accounting needs and best of all you get an Accountant Copy which can be freely given to your accountant so he works for you not the other way around.
I've been trying to get dad onto this for a while but he doesn't want to because his accountant tells him he needs to use another program because that's the program he uses. That program was designed for farmers not service station owners.
Money Works Gold is a pretty reasonable cost for businesses. You'd generally make the cost back but then I guess small businesses might find it a bit of a push.
Comments
What is it with Accounting/Book Keeping software that makes it so unappealing? Oh yea! The butt ugly interface that Intuit is known to produce. That's the ticket!
I don't really care if the UI is pretty. Is that really a criteria for this type of software? Are you looking at the UI or at your numbers? Hm, maybe that's why the economy is in the mess it's in. Everyone obsessed with pretty accounting software instead of keeping an eye on their numbers.
Look what happened to Quicken. Intuit spent all their time making it look slick and didn't bother to put any real functionality in it. Sure, make it pretty if you have the extra time to do so. But make it work first!
Ha Ha! Well I know a little. I know enough to tell my accountant to send over the Windows QB file to our CPA. Fortunately, I don't need to know any more than that so I can concentrate on making and spending money.
Once again, you've managed to prove that you don't understand business finances, accounting, or taxes.
Oh, and BTW, people who intend to make money understand their business and don't simply dump it all in an accountant's lap without any understanding of what's going on with the business finances.
this is bullshit. and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If they keep making a mac product for small businesses, is there any surprise that their mac customers will be mainly small businesses?
Great point, I agree! Let's build a new Quickbooks for Mac that targets the needs of the existing user base, and ignore the fact that no one with accounting needs beyond a Quicken checkbook register uses Quickbooks for Mac because it sucks so badly! What a great way to run a business!!
+99
when i started my business, one-write and peach tree were the best choices. Peachtree has grown, and its not great but it gets the job done. Most people don't change lightly, its not like changing your favorite spreadsheet app. I run my business on a mac, but have to use virtualization for peach tree. Quickbooks was NEVER up to running a small business, and on a mac was much worse, and its so recent. Hence there are so few business running QB with any employees on a mac.
I work with a lot of other business owners - peachtree is most common - and if intuit offered a QB alternative, many would switch - if only because of peachtree performance.
Hmm wife works for an accounting firm...99% of SMB use Quickbooks on Windows. They have had a few customers try moving to the current Mac version only to go back to the Windows version in Parrallels.
If I use that for my new signature do I have to give you credit?
Seriously though it takes more than Intel chips to make it cross platform. To program for Windows you use Visual Studio and for Mac, XCode. Unless you do some porting thing like Adobe and Apple do, but that never turns out so well.
True, the Intel chip really has no bearing on making it cross platform, but there is still little excuse for the hugh difference in features between Mac and Windows versions (this applies to the consumer Quicken as well). It's not like the financial formulas change. They aren't doing anything magical in the UI that should have huge depenancies on unique OS services. And it's not as if they need to optimize the code like you do for gaming to squeeze out the maximum framerates.
It's like another poster suggested, Intuit's crappy Mac sales are due to their crappy Mac software. They keep setting the bar lower and then can't figure out why their Mac sales shrink while the Mac's marketshare continues to rise.
Talk about putting the cart before the horse - the effect as the cause! Are Intuit REALLY so dumb as to believe that the Mac version only needs to support simple accounting because that's all the users use???!!!
Can they REALLY not see that the only users are small businesses because the programme doesn't support any other kind of user. I, for one, would be using it if it had all the features of the Windows version. I bought the earlier version but had to abandon it because it lacked not only multi-currency (which is a key requirement for my SMALL business) but many other features as well.
Can they really not see how many more customers they would get if they took the trouble to make their programme cross-platform - like Filemaker does so successfully?
Really how dumb can they be?
Once again, you've managed to prove that you don't understand business finances, accounting, or taxes.
Oh, and BTW, people who intend to make money understand their business and don't simply dump it all in an accountant's lap without any understanding of what's going on with the business finances.
I guess I'm just lucky then. Seriously, if you just want to toss insults, I'm fine with that, but you know nothing about my business. I can tell you that my department is the most profitable in the entire corporation, and I've been in this same business since 1985. I definitely know how to make money.
QuickBooks for Mac will never, ever, ever, ever hold a candle to the BEST accounting package for the Mac, which is AccountEdge.
absolutely correct! AccountEdge (formerly MYOB) IS the best accounting software for the Mac, bar none. I am using it for our business since 1994. it simply is an astoundingly well developed piece of software: general accounting, payroll, fluid integration with POS system (LightSpeed), etc.
all I hear from QuickBooks users is some form of moaning & groaning...
There are some excellent observations of QBs here but if you really want intuit to listen maybe email them and tell them directly, venting here may feel good but won't bring change.
Doesn't work. I used to beta test for Intuit and armies of beta testers were telling them the same thing - and they simply responded that Mac users didn't need the things we were all requesting.
I guess I'm just lucky then. Seriously, if you just want to toss insults, I'm fine with that, but you know nothing about my business. I can tell you that my department is the most profitable in the entire corporation, and I've been in this same business since 1985. I definitely know how to make money.
I'm glad - but that doesn't show that you know anything about taxes or accounting or finance software.
Your suggestion that one must be using Windows Quickbooks in order to send financial details to an accountant is ludicrous - even for you.
absolutely correct! AccountEdge (formerly MYOB) IS the best accounting software for the Mac, bar none. I am using it for our business since 1994. it simply is an astoundingly well developed piece of software: general accounting, payroll, fluid integration with POS system (LightSpeed), etc.
all I hear from QuickBooks users is some form of moaning & groaning...
I used MYOB for years. Then (in canada) Intuit bought it and quickly discontinued it. Then they dropped mac support pretty much all together.
EDIT: I see there is now a Canadian option for accountEdge
Your suggestion that one must be using Windows Quickbooks in order to send financial details to an accountant is ludicrous - even for you.
You love to twist my words don't you? I suggested no such thing. Since I was unfamiliar with the software I merely asked the question if it was not compatible... But since no one answered the question I went and tracked down the answer for myself and posted an edit to my earlier comment before you even made you first reply to me. Of course you omitted that from your reply so you could belittle my feeble understanding. Thank you oh holy one for sharing your wisdom.
First, a little story:
It's like setting up a lemonade stand year after year that sells only lemonade and then claiming "my customers don't want iced tea because they've only ever bought lemonade from me."
Shouldn't this be called something like "Intuit Small Business EZ-Accounting Lite for Mac", or something equally as cheesy and consumerish? And sell for $79?
Another random thought regarding Intuit's ineptness... if Intuit is not interested in "feature parity" between platforms, then why have two vastly different products share the same name and roughly the same price points?
Shouldn't this be called something like "Intuit Small Business EZ-Accounting Lite for Mac", or something equally as cheesy and consumerish? And sell for $79?
Actually, they did that with Quicken. The Mac version is now called "Quicken Essentials". I guess "Quicken stripped of half of the useful features because we're incompetent to make decent Mac software" didn't fit on the box.
this is bullshit. and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If they keep making a mac product for small businesses, is there any surprise that their mac customers will be mainly small businesses?
Amen man.... I was thinking the same thing. Intuit has SCREWED we mac users since day one. When they put out a new OS X version of Quickbooks not long ago it was the same crappy program that they had turned tail on us with when OSX first came out. It's pure shit. Hell, the OS9 version of QB was loads better than everything after it. I half wonder if they're in Microsofts back pocket. The Mac version has always been an incomplete, piece of crap to try and run your businesses with. I've owned two businesses and am currently out of the starting gate with a third. I refuse to waste any more of my precious time dicking with a PC, and I refuse to give QB any more business because of this half ass version of QB for Mac. The PC version is pretty good, but it's no enterprise solution for running a business of any substantial size. or if you have a substantial product line you build yourself... it so SUCKS for that... even the PC version. It's really only good if you're buying product that you resell (retail business) or it's also sufficient for a service business. Either way, they have purposefully put out pure shit when it comes to their mac products. When they first killed off Quickbooks for Mac back in the OS 9 days, I ended up moving over to MYOB. While it wasn't as intuitive as even the old OS9 version of QB.... it's actually a hell of a lot better than even the PC version when it comes to functionality.
For my new business I went into overkill mode. I'm using an open source ERP called Xtuple. If you have a business and want to go all Mac check this program out. http://www.xtuple.com There's a free version called Postbooks that makes QB look like the trash software that it is. It's not up to the quality of NetSuite ($10-15K/year)... but it's close. And you can run the database server on your local machine... or a server (mac/linux or god forbid, a PC). Same deal with the client application... you can run it on anything. There's a kind of steep learning curve but it's worth the effort. Just try to understand the program adds a second step to most anything. Want to make a purchase order? Well it's pretty strait forward, but understand there's the added step for having someone outside of your buyer approve the purchase order. OF course you can give the buyer permission to approve a PO then that's that... but there's the second step. But it does everything.... and I mean anything and everything. CRM, Accounting, Work Orders for manufacturing, Inventory, EVERYTHING....I should be getting paid for this.....LOL.
If you own a small business, look at MYOB, it's tons better than QB.... and if you want something more substantial take a look at Xtuple. You can't beat the price.
What Intuit has done to us is unethical and just flat out stupid. All of these programs are just a client application linked into a database. There's no freaking reason that the Mac version of Quickbooks Pro shouldn't or couldn't be identical to what the PC version has. They're just trying to pigeon hole us into using a substandard POS pile of software. Run from them, they don't deserve our business. The will never see mine again, that's for sure.
I'm director of a Consultancy involved in Accountancy for small businesses and although we would prefer to use Macs for everything, we have to use Windows PCs for the accounting software because there is NO accountancy software for Macs that can do multi-currency, multi-client, double-entry - at least not for the Swiss market.
In Europe the market is dominated by Sage which uses an Access database as the underpinnings so clearly it isn't cross platform, nor Mac suitable. That seems to often be the case with these programs. Intuit has very little presence here, but the time I used it on a PC it was a terrible experience. I needed to do a tax return for a self-employed businessman. Legally the business was allowed to file accounts a year in arrears for a business year that began 2.5 years before. Intuit's program simply disallowed entering any information for the first year as it was "too far in the past".
I've never selected anything from Intuit since. I'd paid for a program that was simply designed not to work. No wonder Sage is dominant over here. And no, they don't do ANY Mac software, and buy up all the companies that might.
http://cognito.co.nz/
It's a Mac app that's been ported to Windows and is 100% platform compatible, handles pretty much everything Quicken does, has versions specific to NZ, Australia, UK, US, and other countries in order to cater for their tax and accounting needs and best of all you get an Accountant Copy which can be freely given to your accountant so he works for you not the other way around.
I've been trying to get dad onto this for a while but he doesn't want to because his accountant tells him he needs to use another program because that's the program he uses. That program was designed for farmers not service station owners.
Money Works Gold is a pretty reasonable cost for businesses. You'd generally make the cost back but then I guess small businesses might find it a bit of a push.
I demoed QB and the Money Works stuff and I found AE to be the best IMO.