Customer Reviews

QuickBooks Cash Register Plus 2010

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

Let me first state that I reviewed and bought this product, set up a merchant account through Intuit, and purchased the hardware they recommend. I am returning everything. Here is what happened and why I ditched this pile of product and services:

- you are mandated to buy any hardware directly from Intuit. Intuit does not indicate the make and model of the required hardware and if you do happen to find out the make and model and shop around for pricing you can forget it. Intuit will not provide any support if you don't purchase directly from them, thereby dictating where you purchase your hardware. If they want to do that and gurantee the lowest price then fine, but they do not.

- the product does NOT work on Windows 7 on a 64-bit computer, which is mostly what is sold if you buy a computer these days. I asked customer support what options I had and was sent in circles. Finally a sales rep called and the best recommendation was do purchase the Point of Sale product for about $700.00 versus the $99.00 I paid for Cash Register plus.

- Intuit tries to sell the product for $199.99. With a little looking you can find it for $99.99. It's insulting to customers to be so out of line with market prices and makes one very suspicious of why Intuit insists that you purchase hardware from them.

- Most credit card merchant services companies give you breaks and deals on the rates and hardware. Intuit charged me just under $300 for a credit card reader with a pin pad. I found a merchant service provider who is providing lower rates, providing a card reader and pin pad at no cost, and is sending someone over to install and test it all. Intuit has higher rates, charges for hardware through their dictated sales channel, and the you get to install it and test it all. Are we having fun yet?

- When talking to Intuit sales on the phone they said the product "is really a glorified cash register". Oh really? I liked being able to provide customers itemized receipts and have all my data ready to export to our accountants Quickbooks file.

- each customer service rep from Intuit was not interested in receiving my customer feedback. The last one that called didn't even advise I could return the product, which I can, but clearly wanted to run from the situation.

- if you do choose to self-inflict this product and service upon yourself you will be held hostage to the credit card processing service chosen by Intuit (there is just one). If you find better service or rates elsewhere you are out of luck. You cannot configure Cash Register Plus to use another service. The norm is to be able to reprogram a terminal to use whatever service you want or configure your software to do the same.

All one can conclude is that Intuit just does not understand this business and customers as well, does not manage pricing and sales channels so we customers have choices, and worse yet their customer support is uninterested in solving customer challenges.

I had hoped that this product would be in the league of Quickbooks, but it has nothing in common in terms of quality.

The Pros
You can download the free (limited capabilities) version at Intuit's website to try before you buy - you absolutely should do this to see how well it fits what you want to do.
Good, if not great, flexibilty with most of the tools necessary for a decent cash register and the bonus benefits of PC based software for ease of set up, configuration, use, reports, etc.
If you want to see the real benefits of this sofware sytem over a standard electronic cash register, download a manual for a cash register & read through it to see how much fun it is setting one up with just a little display to view & no QWERTY keyboard to input data with! Though there are models that you can hook your PC up to for set up, I'd rather have it all sofware based to begin with.
I actually bought this package for my wife's start-up hairdressing salon, which is perhaps not the perfect application, but it has now been functional in the real world for 3 weeks to great effect. Well priced for what it does & comes from a reputable company that constantly improves their products.
The Cons
I like part numbering systems but this is driven by the product description.
I'm thinking there's an accounting or regulatory reason for this but you cannot delete an erroneous transaction. In a larger environment with many employees, I can see that this would be essential but in a little owner based business environment, it's nice to be able to clean up when you mess up by simply deleting & starting over!
The addition of an extra field or two might help the broader application for the product so that a single cashier can select the person to attribute the sale to for commission purposes, etc. In our environment, for example, we are bending the product a bit to suit our needs. We have a single cashier with 3 stylists which required that we set up each stylist as a different department so that our cashier can enter a cut & blow dry for stylist 1 or stylist 2, etc. Then we can use the reports to see total sales for stylist 1, etc. by looking at the 'Sales by Dept' report. The problem with this is that we have to enter each product, e.g. a cut & blow dry, against each department or, in this case, against each stylist so it triples the number of items that must be added to the system & they're all duplicates. With a part number field & a sales person or stylist field, this would all become much easier across a broader spectrum of small business environments.
We were doing this on the cheap so buying the linked cash drawer, receipt printer, etc. wasn't going to happen! It's a lot cheaper to buy a standard printer & to print receipts on large letter sized paper than the little dedicated receipt printers but the software seems to be have limited flexibilty in tailoring the output with standard printers.
The final problem I had was unique to my location - Canada! Intuit Canada does not offer this product to Canadian customers & if you call them, they'll direct you to their 3rd party affiliates & good luck with all that! Complex, pricey, etc. Is it just me or is there something a bit whacky about directing potential customers to 3rd parties instead of the parent company in the US?
When you buy from the US you will need to provide a US address when registering to activate the software - must be done within 30 days. It doesn't matter what address you provide, just so long as it has a US Zip Code, our Post Codes just don't compute! I know we're just a tiny fraction of US sales but I'm constantly surprised at just how few US based software systems accomodate this simple data entry capability. If for no other reason than accuracy of data collection. Anyway, if you buy this software from the Great Frozen North & you don't want to bother friends or family in the US, just look up the address of a Mall or a hotel if you're really stuck!
The other unfortunate thing is that the banking integration available in the US is not available in Canada. This would be a real plus for small business as those bank credit & debit charge machines are not cheap up here! C'mon Intuit Canada, get this product Canadianised & please don't double the price when you do!
I'm really not complaining too much though, we are fortunate that Amazon has the cross border stuff down pat & that Intuit in the US is our neighbour too!

Intuit no longer produces this product. There are some retail copies out there in the distribution channel, but support is limited, and it is not warranted to work with Windows 7.

Beware!

This software is a really really bad joke. First it would not work with an out of box hardware solution that was touted as a turnkey solution. We had to return HP printer for Epson to get reciepts to work. Their support is terrible. No one will answer questions on their help forum. The software is Java based so printer drivers are hard coded so can't use standard HW drivers. If you started out with an earlier version and want to upgrade to version 5 they make you upgrade v2, v3, v4 before you can install v5. After 2 weeks was finally able to get it to work as advertised, albeit very slow. Now, after 1 year, it has slowed down to the point that it takes almost 5 minutes to log in new users during shift changes. Again, no help at all on the forums after leaving a post there for 2 weeks.