Quickbooks Online

Vorteile

The biggest pro of Quickbooks is that your accountant is going to be very familiar with it. The second biggest pro is that it's probably going to be integrated with whatever software you use to manage your business.

Nachteile

The software can be quite "buggy" at times, adjusting options randomly with no explanation. Not only this, but it can be difficult to get certain features to even work. For example, the T-Sheets integrations never exported our employee information over, which defeated the purpose of using T-Sheets versus another time tracker. Neither the Quickbooks nor T-Sheets customer support could ever find out why this was not working. On the subject of Quickbooks customer support, they don't seem to be very well educated in the software itself. The times I've had to contact them, they were not very helpful and didn't seem to have any more knowledge of the product than I had.

Vorteile

The best feature for our company was the bank interface. All our expenses on all bank accounts and credit cards are all downloaded automatically. Even better is you can train this process using rules so that recurring transactions can be classified immediately resulting in little to no work on the user part. Reconciliation is nearly done at the end of the month as any transaction that is entered through the connection to the bank is automatically checked and matched for reconciliation. Tracking vendors for year end 1099 forms is also a great feature we use annually.

Nachteile

Cons are that if you do not the rules of accounting and are a small business owner with a tight budget and cannot an accountant, you really need to do your homework on what and when to do certain processes like turning the year over. Sometimes the software can run a little heavy on our computer, but there is an installable version you can put on your computer to resolve the issue. The help topics have not been much of a help. I usually refer to google searches as opposed to the topic center included in the software.

Vorteile

Seamless integration with other software, electronic billing and payments, banking download and matching

Nachteile

Payroll is a disaster and payroll reports are really bad. I noticed that most reviews on here do not mention payroll and I'm sure that's because many don't have this functionality enabled. I feel that QBO is trying to push users toward their full service payroll service by not focusing their attention on this module. It is an absolute mess. First of all, there is no integration between QBDT and QBO payroll modules. The data does not transfer from one to the other well at all. What does transfer is very incomplete or incorrect data. The manual data entry required is tedious and very bug-filled so it doesn't work correctly and requires chat or call-ins to the support line to complete. The functionality does not allow for customization of the posting of deductions and causes a lot of manual follow-up work from payroll that is completely unnecessary and which didn't exist in QBDT. In addition, they have many more bugs once in "operation" and some are severe and some are minor but annoying. The severe make it so that I have not actually been able to run payroll in QBO yet though we switched on 5/19/17. I had to run two payrolls in QBDT so far and then manually reproduce them in QBO. That is pretty severe in my opinion but still no resolution from their team. I did get them to credit me the fees for the month. Others such as the Total Pay column being nonsensical and not matching the total of the Gross Wages plus other compensation are just really annoying. The fact that you can't customize payroll reports AT ALL is maddening.

In addition to the above, there is an extremely annoying issue for nonprofits. If you select Nonprofit 501c3 as the type, you have to use "Pledges" as your terminology. You can't use "Invoices". I have worked around this by selecting Other/Not Sure as my type but it requires me to change it back whenever I set up a new employee in order to allow designating them as exempt from FUTA. So far, it seems to hold the exemption when switching it back to "Other". However, since I haven't been able to run a real payroll run yet, we will see. Many nonprofits don't utilize pledges and though you can customize the forms to read Invoice in the email, you can't change the language appearing on the Sales module and attached pdf invoices auto-name as Pledge #X when sending to customers.

Vorteile

The integration with banking transactions is what I like the most about QBO. It makes daily entering so easy. The bank feed allows me to add transactions in real time to proper accounts. I don't need to remember to manually create expenses after making payments because I know it will be there tomorrow in QBO for me to add.

Nachteile

What I like least about QBO, is the inability to go back on mistakes the same way I could with the manual desktop version. In Quickbooks Desktop, I could easily change things like payroll or tax transactions if I made a mistake in the original entry. But with QBO, there are a lot of times I have to reach out to support to get them make changes in the back end.

Vorteile

I started using desktop Quickbooks back in 2000 right after I first started the company. As a single-person company at first, I got used to being in the books almost every day. As we grew we added an in-house Bookkeeper. A few years ago I relocated the company to a different area and we kept our Bookkeeper who stayed in the original area. I really missed having direct access to the numbers so last year I switch to Quickbooks Online and I love it. In addition to having direct access to the numbers I need, it has a lot of other functionality and reporting that I really like. It's also great for clients to easily pay the invoices online. It's making a night and day difference. Support has been great as well.

Nachteile

It's definitely very expensive to be paying a pretty high fee every month - especially compared to the desktop version where we bought it and were good for years to come. It's definitely worth it but I'd be more of an evangelist if the pricing was a little easier on the pocket book.