Customer Reviews

QuickBooks Basic 2002

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This program not only requires you to subscribe to their Payroll services to fully use the program - rather costly for a small operation - but when I downloaded an "upgrade", it removed the ability to print out W-2 and W-3 forms. It will not even compute and preview. The only way to print out the forms is to subscribe to their Payroll Services.

In order to use payroll past a certain time limit, you must subscribe to Intuit's tax table service and pay them... each year. They do NOT allow you to edit the tax tables yourself. The program is way too complicated for the average small business user. It includes lots of pretty icons that are probably meant to distract you from the fact that it takes a week to learn how to write checks and post bills. You will not use or need 90% of what this program can do. And God forbid you want to post to a journal other than cash receipts or disbursements. If you make a mistake, your accountant will charge you by the hour to find it and fix it.

Intuit: one of the worst customer service companies on the planet. I have had serious problems with my tech support plan, which I paid a lot of money for, over the past 6 months. It took hours of phone calls over months to finally get someone to do something. You know what they did after all that? Gave me one month of tech support for free! How wonderful! What an insult! 6 months of down time on their eSupport, I have purchased their products every year for 15 years, I spent endless hours trying to get this resolved, and they give me 1 month!

Also, when they say that with the Premier tech support plan that they GUARANTEE that you won't be on hold for more than 10 minutes, I was on hold for 45 minutes and finally had to hang up. I never did reach a tech support person. When I talked to them about it later, you know what I found out? "Guarantee" means nothing whatsoever. They wouldn't do anything for me.

So do I think you should buy this product? Not on your life! Seek a software company that cares at least a little bit about the people who are keeping them in business (their customers).

I used QB 99 for years and decided to upgrade to this mainly because we got a new computer. All I can say is trying to set up your company is a guaranteed headache. It's very complicated, and 75% of the time it won't let you do what you need to do. 90% of the "features" I would never use. I'm canning this and definitely going to search for a simpler accounting software. Did I mention the fees? Yes, Intuit will charge you fees for just about everything under the sun, including tax tables (essential for doing payroll), tech support, and all of their other "services".

I bought a version of Quickbooks back in 1996 that I thought worked pretty well. Sure it flashed a warning every time that said my tax tables were out of date but at least it still let me use them. I bought the new version and found it to be way more than I needed. In fact it slowed down my computer so much I upgraded that too. When I called to get the key code to transfer it over to the new computer there was no problem. When I went to do payroll I found out that none of the information had transferred over. I called customer service and was told I was only allowed one free download. I would have to pay [more money] to get the payroll information download. I felt that was unfair and the rep on the phone got pretty rude. This will be the last time I purchase any Intuit product. It is not user friendly by any means.

The customer service for any quickbooks or intuit program is terrible. If you do not buy a 5 or 10 incident support program for $199 or $299 you have to pay $65 per incident or more depending on the product.They also have the right to limit calls to 1 hour per incident and will only answer one question for that call.

The e-mailing invoices feature Does not work it causes the program to stop responding.I find I am not the only one with this problem...

Plus if you are planning to do payroll with this program I would think twice it could cost you between $200 and $400 per year.

I've been a software developer for 40 years, and I wrote a General Ledger program for the PC 15 years ago. So then, why did I buy QuickBooks? Because I wanted to accept credit card payments, and QuickBooks is a LOT cheaper than one of those dumb credit card terminals. However, QuickBooks was written by the "be reasonable - do it our way" school of software development; the program is NOT intuitive (no pun intended), so the learning curve is significant. The program starts out in "interview mode" and asks you questions without telling you the impact of your answers. Once you get your company and chart of accounts set up, the program is quite flexible. I found the program's "Help" facility one of the best I've seen in PC software.

So, after reading all these negative reviews here, I decided to get a copy of Peachtree Accounting 2003 and compare it.

1. QuickBooks offers subaccounts (very useful); Peachtree doesn't.

2. QuickBooks doesn't require account numbers; Peachtree does. This makes QuickBooks much easier to use, and easier for non-accounting types to learn.

3. Working with the Chart of Accounts is much easier in QuickBooks than Peachtree.

4. Reports seem easier to set up in QuickBooks than Peachtree, although that could just be my experience.

5. Peachtree offers a brief accounting tutorial; QuickBooks doesn't.

6. Peachtree installation is easy and straight-forward, but it won't install common files on a Samba-based network drive, and downloaded updates are only stored on the local drive. QuickBooks works fine with Samba-based network drives, and makes a point of putting downloaded updates on a sharable drive.

7. Reinstalling QuickBooks after you've updated the program is a pain, as your company data file cannot then be read by the freshly reinstalled QuickBooks. Unfortunately, the only way to re-update the software is to load a company file. So, you've got to load one of the sample files, upgrade, and then load your company file. Confusing and DUMB.

I'm not at all impressed with Intuit as a company (especially TurboTax), but this program is significantly better than Peachtree (the only other program out there I know of that can process credit card payments online).

We tried it back in 1999. The sample CD came in and we figured that the full version just had to be better. We were wrong. It is not user friendly and the support is user hostile, but we had already entered our entire inventory into it (actually we had to do it twice), so we figured we'd stick it out.

Our computer crashed in a terminal way about a month ago, and the replacement wouldn't accept the 99 demo disk because it wasn't compatible with the version of Windows on our new computer.

I called to find out how to get Quick Books back and the answer is that I must buy Quick Books 2002 upgrade and then talk Intuit into giving me a special key code that will permit us to run it.

Forget it, Quick Books Basic doesn't even interface with other common software we use.

This is the first time I have used the software. I have not read the documentation or any books associated with quickbooks. I do know a little bit about accounting and the double entry concept. I was able to set up a trial company with vendors, customers and employees with all associated income, expense and equity accounts. I took a Friday evening and a Saturday morning to explore most of the menu items. I even tried the online version and will sign up and use it once it has most of the features I need for the startup company I am forming.
In a nutshell, I found it extremely easy to use. I like the merchant account, payroll service and credit card options that go along with the software and will sign up for them. I do not find the fees excessive and certainly reasonable for the time they save. I plan to come back and add another review in 3 months after it has been battle tested. The software has passed my initial testing with flying colors.

What? No option for no stars or negative stars?? I have used QuickBooks for several years at the request of the accountants I work with. The updated 2002 version (I used QB99) is, if possible, even more difficult to navigate. "Support" for the product is at additional cost. Online banking is three times what I pay for online banking with the major banks I use for that service and download into Quick Books is not supported by those same banks. This necessitates a great deal of additional input!!! Also, I cannot email statements or files without the Online Banking at the additional cost.