Customer Reviews

QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

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

 

 

Full disclosure: I'm the editor of this book, so the fact that I think it's an extraordinarily useful guide should come as no surprise. I am, however, in a good position to comment on the inaccuracies of RH's review, posted on March 8, 2005. First, although the reviewer says s/he bought "QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual," returned it and then bought "QuickBooks 2005 The Official Guide," in fact, s/he had posted a positive review of "The Official Guide" three months earlier. More important for other potential readers, the reviewer's comments about sales tax are plain wrong: pages 298 to 301 of "QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual" are devoted to setting up sales tax payments, with step-by-step instructions, and additional discussions are sprinkled throughout the book--and all cross-referenced, where relevant. Finally, the book is jammed with tips and advice about QuickBooks,and how to use it to make good financial and business decisions--all things you can't find in either the Help files or other books on the subject. We hope this Missing Manual is truly helpful to many readers!

This book is clear, concise and detailed. It tells you what you need to know to get the most from the software as quickly as possible.

I took over my company accounts a few months ago, and none of the available books were much help - until this was published.

Buy it - it's exactly what you hope it is.

Ms. Biafore has taken a subject which can certainly be incomprehensible, and created a manual that is not only readable, but understandable as well. My company has nothing to do with financial information, but I certainly wouldn't be able to function without Quickbooks, and now, Ms. Biafore has given me the ability to work quickly through the items requiring my attention, check things that might bite me later, and move on to my primary function, finding ways to make money for the company. Thanks!

I was new to quickbooks and this book really helped me get going and give me confidence using QB- it answered a lot of the detailed questions I had and helped round out my understanding of QB. Now I don't just put entries into QB and then have blind faith that it will do what I want. Rather, the book helped me understand more of the intracies of what QB is doing with the data, and it also helped alert me to some of the "gotchas".
It works great as a reference guide too- I don't read the whole thing but rather just read a section when I need to know how to do that one thing; for example setup QB for employees.

Biafore puts before you a rather detailed helper for QuickBooks. While she concentrates on the Pro version, the text helpfully describes differences with the entry level Basic version, that is strictly for a single user. And she also compares what the Pro lacks vis-a-vis the more expansive (and expensive) Premier and Enterprise level solutions.

If you have used other Missing Manual books, you might discern that this text seems to have more intricacy than most of those. In part, this could reflect the subject at hand - your accounting. By its very nature detailed and quantitative. Those who need this product tend to be highly motivated to knuckle down and spend the necessary time to read all the details. Other texts on other products might describe consumer level products that are recreational. A book like this, you read because you have to.

In the text, I found the most interesting remarks were about the optional Merchant Services offered by Intuit. Where you can get a merchant account through them, that lets you accept credit card payments from your customers. You'll have to evaluate the cost-benefit details compared to going to a bank. But potentially it's a great time saver, that lets you outsource a lot of the hassle of handling credit cards. If that is probably not a core competence of yours, it's worth considering Merchant Services.

better than official books but does not teach a lot of tricks or about unusual transactions we encounter in bookkeeping, but was worth the price

This book does not teach you anything about Quickbooks you couldn't find in the Help Files. There are no tips or special tricks to help you set up and use Quickbooks efficiently. I returned it, and for the same price, bought the Quickbooks Official Guide by Ivens. Just as one example of its failure, I couldn't figure out how to set up sales tax payments for my business and the Missing Manual had no information about this complicated subject (in my state, businesses have to report on a county-by-county basis, with different rates for many counties). The Official Guide walked me through all the steps, very clearly, making it very easy.

Many readers may already be familiar with the QuickBooks software, or its personal, home finance management software Quicken, both from the Intuit company. Intuit is well known for their superb financial management software, and when you purchase the QuickBooks 2005 software, you will receive additional startup documentation to help you with the software.

However, as is the case today with most all software, companies just cannot any longer afford to produce extensive paper based user manuals, as this cost just can no longer be considered essential, mainly because this would add further cost to the software. In today's highly competitive software market, vendors are always looking for ways to add value to their program, while not necessarily adding cost to the product. Thus, in most all software programs today, the user's manual, or the help on using the software is electronic and built into the software instead of being printed on paper based books included with the program in its retail box.

While this is understandable, this has also opened a market for third-party, add-on paper books from the computer book publishing industry, which is best exemplified by this large, impressive title by Bonnie Biafore from Pogue Press/O'Reilly. As is always the case with any O'Reilly title, you can depend on the material to be of high quality, well written by professionals known to be experts in their field, and of great value to readers.

In the case of the QuickBooks software, Pogue Press/O'Reilly has provided an important title that will likely sell very well because of the hundreds of thousands of customers who are working with or seriously considering Intuit's QuickBooks software to help them manage their company's finances.