Customer Reviews

QuickBooks Pro 2007 for Mac (Mac) [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

I originally purchased QuickBooks Pro for Mac (version 4) back in the '90s because I was impressed with the ease and intuitiveness of Quicken and wanted something just as easy (within reason) for my business. After using QB for a year or two, I was very disappointed to hear Intuit had discontinued the QB for Mac product.

Fast forward a few years. After a temporary slump, the Mac is back on top with new and innovative products. I'm in love with my new PowerMac that significantly boosts my productivity. And I'm still stuck with an aging QuickBooks.

Like other "fair weather friends" who abandoned Mac and then returned when it was hot again, Intuit decided to release an all-new QuickBooks for Mac Version 5. This one would run under the new Mac OS X! And... that's about it. While Windows users benefited from several years of upgrades and new features, the "new" Mac version did not.

One of the advantages of using QuickBooks is the ability to bundle up your files and send them to your accountant for review. But not if you were on a Mac. Nope. Unless your accountant also had the Mac version, you were out of luck.

Intuit expected us to be all excited over running QB under OS X and more than willing to pay full price for the privilege. That's right... no upgrade pricing. I couldn't see shelling out a couple hundred bucks for the same tired software with some lipstick slapped on it.

So I stuck it out with QB4 running under Classic OS9 while Intuit released new versions each year. Each one having only a subset of the Windows version features. Each one requiring you to pay full price to upgrade.

I finally broke down and purchased QuickBooks for Mac 2007 for these reasons:

* I decided it was time to upgrade the rest of my
apps to native OS X and stop using Classic.

* QB for Mac 2007 finally added the ability to
fully customize forms.

* QB for Mac 2007 finally had a usable ability
to bundle up and share records with an accountant
using the Windows version.

* My only other alternative was switching to a
competitive application that was more expensive
and more difficult to use.

As much as I wanted to switch to another vendor, I relented and stayed with QuickBooks. And it works OK. The "Layout Designer" is awkward, but at least I can now make my invoices, etc. look as professional as the rest of my business.

But when I decide to expand my business beyond myself, I'll have the problem of how to share QuickBooks with others... it still doesn't allow multiple user access, while the Windows version has for years.

And get this... QB for Mac 2007 still does not have a timer feature so you can accurately time hourly work and add it to your records. I have to time my labor externally and manually add it into QB. The Windows version... you guessed it. Intuit claims there is no demand among Mac users for this feature. Considering how many creative professionals use Macintosh and charge by the hour, I find that hard to believe.

As long as Intuit treats the Mac community like a bad smell from behind a couch, I will be on the lookout for a better product to replace QB. For now... it will do.

You'll have to search for the free download on the Intuit/Quickbooks web site, it's not obvious, but you can download a 30-day trial of QB Pro 7 for Mac and see if it will work better for you or not. There are about 5 steps to actually obtaining a download (log in at Intuit, request a download, wait for an email, click on a link, then seek out the actual download page you want, then download) but at least you don't have to shell out $160. first. (Note that Amazon had the best price for the new version, NOT Intuit, which of course does not offer a reduced upgrade price for prior users, whom they apparently could care less about). I jumped through the hoops and have been using the new version (trial) for about a week in my small business. Although the forms designer is idiotic in some ways, it does, after about 2 hours of fooling with it, allow you to generate forms and other documents that look much more graphically pleasing than Ver. 5 (my previous version, I skipped the previous upgrade). The forms can now include color graphics and photographs (tip: it seemed to me that importing a BMP file looked better than JPEG or TIF. No idea why). As a graphic design-related business, I thought this was worth the purchase price alone, although I stress the "engineers" at Intuit should ask someone from the graphics department for some input.
If they'd actually included some additional "upgrade" beyond the forms designer, I'd have gone to 4 stars, but there isn't much else that is new in this release.
I will say that the upgrade process went smoothly, no hitches. There is a "backup to Windows" option which also seems easier to use than in Ver. 5. It generated a file of over 100 mb. however, so I guess the days of emailing it to my accountant are over. Haven't tested to see if he can open this file on Windows as yet.

I upgraded to this from QB 2006 for one and only reason: the form layout designer. That's a good thing, too, because that's about the only thing they added to this version aside from recompiling for Intel. I could tell from the screenshots that the layout app was kludgy and awful and rushed to market by a bunch of outsourced engineers who have little to no experience in Mac GUI design, but it was still better than the old method of simply typing in column widths numerically and guessing at how the application was going to interpret them. Is it $170 worth of better? Probably not. It's still pretty limiting with what you can do in terms of formatting (tracking or kerning controls would certainly have been nice since there's no way to tell it NOT to draw the label for each field, thusly making it impossible to pick up the slack with an Illustrator or InDesign built PDF background), and it seems to have a fair degree of difficulty in determining the appropriate baseline for OpenType fonts. You also have zero control over how form rows print, just columns. Definitely a step up, but it has so many annoying little quirks that it ends up being nearly as frustrating as the old method was anyway.

Intuit has also seen fit to drop the once formidable printed manual from this release. Instead of a hefty tome full of in-depth knowledge, we now get a 100 page booklet which dedicates over half its space to installation and setup related tasks. Think they made up for it with a PDF version? Think again. The PDF is identical to the printed guide. Apparently Intuit wants you to use their Help content instead of a manual, which I might not mind so much ordinarily, but the Help files are pretty sparse, and searching for "Layout" in an attempt to figure out how I was supposed to re-order columns on my invoices using the new layout designer actually turned up NO results. Nice job.

Since MYOB is pretty much unusable, Intuit knows they have a guaranteed cash flow with every new release regardless of whether or not they put any effort whatsoever into it. This one is no exception. If you don't need to customize your forms, don't bother paying for 2007. It still doesn't have mileage tracking, credit card processing or any of the other myriad features the Windows version has had for years.

UPDATE: When generating an income tax report for 2006 (detail or summary makes no difference) QB 2007 thinks that EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION I HAVE EVER ENTERED PRIOR TO 2006 took place on 03/07/06. These transactions are still recorded correctly in the individual account reports, but the figures it's telling me to enter into my return are obviously way, way, WAY off. This means I have to get out my calculator and go through everything manually--precisely the thing that I purchased accounting software to avoid. Good job, Himanshu.

This is just a throw away for Mac users. Intuit has a long, long, long way to go to make this software functional. 2006 users, my advice: do NOT upgrade - once you do, you cannot go backwards with your data. Their Windows version is much much better, but I do not use windows. To make my point: They have serious problems with Estimates (showing clients your cost instead of your price), the Find dialog is totally unfunctional (has trouble finding clients and the dialog must be scrolled to enter information), printing Estimates and Invoices do not center on the page and they get cut off (even when you use the align feature), Estimates put 0.00 on every line not used for cost, problems with contacts and email addresses - I can go on and on and on.
AND, their phone customer support is ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE . . . did I mention HORRIBLE - they have no clue what is going on, while their web site says that these are KNOWN issues AND they do not get back to you when they say they will. This is the most disappointing version of this product ever and I have no idea how they are going to fix it . . . but I am now stuck in it because I can not back save my data.
Download the trial before you spend your hard earned money and decide for yourself . . . I wish I had!

This is a great program, but it has one EXTREMELY annoying issue that has resulted in my decision never to buy this product again. The issue is that if you get a new hard drive, a new computer, or reformat your hard drive, the program will be virtually unusable and unlockable until you go through a very complicated process that thus far has required me to call tech support (located in India) every single time because it is so complicated that it is impossible to remember. They put into place the most rigorous anti-piracy code I have ever seen in a piece of software. So rigorous that even the legal owner is locked out without a key. If you are a small business owner like me, you update your hard drive (either due to a crash or a new larger upgrade needed for additional storage) or you upgrade your system altogether on a fairly regular basis. How many business people never need to upgrade their hard drive or get a new computer? Well, buyers beware: if you have this program, you will be getting yourself into a nightmare if you decide to upgrade your hard drive or change systems. Out of the over $5,000 worth of software I own, this is the only program that causes me this headache. Time is money to a small business owner, and I just don't have 3 hours to spend on fixing this program every time I upgrade my system just because someone at this company has a bug up their rear end about software piracy. merely uninstalling and reinstalling this program is not sufficient. You have to go into about 5 different obscure folders on your computer and either change or delete esoteric bits of data that you can never find without the help of Indian tech support. Oh--and by the way: you only get a little while of free support. Every time after that it costs you money. next time I go to buy small business accounting software I will buy another program or I will go back to handwritten recordkeeping if there are no other decent programs available for Mac.

Most of the world still runs on PCs and as a Mac owner (and lover), it can be tough to find software for basic stuff like accounting. I'm a guy who makes a living making stuff sound good for radio, TV, video games and so on. As a freelancer, I need something to keep track of my business banking, credit cards, expenses and invoices and this program does just that and very intuitively, just like my Mac.
I used MYOB--a Mac accounting program--but found it to be tricky and didn't end up with the comprehensive reports for my accountant that I expected and wound up going over everything expense by expense and invoice by invoice for hours. It could be that I didn't understand the program well enough, but support is extra everytime you call customer service for help, so no thanks MYOB. In fact, I put off doing most of my 2006 accounting until January 2007 because I dreaded trying to figure out MYOB again.
Then I broke down and bought Quickbooks for Mac. It did everything I needed it to--a year's worth of accounting in a weekend and I never even cracked the manual. It allowed me to save the year as a PC file to hand to my accountant on a CD. A few days later he handed me back a CD with a Mac file of my adjusted accounting and my corp taxes were done and sent.
I can't speak for anyone with really advanced accounting needs because I never got that deep into the program, but for my needs it's right on the money.

This product looks exactly the same as 6.0, 2005, 2006, etc. and does not work any better and for your money you get laughable feature updates. If the version you have works then do not spend $200+ to upgrade. They say it is compatible with the newest version of Mac OSX (Leopard 10.5) but it crashes on my machine significantly more than the previous version did in 10.4. This is an absolutely worthless upgrade.

The one thing that I was hoping for is not even included and they do not tell you when you buy it. You can not do online bill payment like you can on the PC side. Its cross platform compatibility is an absolute joke. When are they going to step into the 21st century and finally make one file format that works across both platforms? We have been able to open .doc and .pdf files for eons without issue.

Their customer support is an absolute joke. No one there has the slightest clue about mac's or about accounting. You are basically on your own. Their online help is laughable. When the software spits out an error code you can not even look it up on their crappy web site. I think that I would be better off doing my accounting on a paper ledger. After the untold hours of crashing, incompatibility, and thousands in extra money that I have spent in accounting fees because of incompatibility I would be better off hiring my own team of accountants in India or China.

I hate to recomend another product from a company as lousy as intuit but I would suggest running parallels or VMware Fusion (to run XP or some other MS OS) and buy a copy of Quickbooks for the PC. It woks better and has better support... well at least for the first 6 months that you own it. Then they will upgrade to 2009 and quit supporting the version you have. All you will have to do is plunk down another $200 for the upgrade that will probably not give you anything more than the last version.

I also hope that you are not a victim of the version of quickbooks that is deleting important information off of customers desktops. If you are good luck with their brain-dead phone support.

In all my 20 years of computing I have NEVER seen a more lousy piece of software than Quickbooks for the Mac nor have I ever seen such shameless upgrade practices as the ones that Intuit makes their money on.

-Matt

I purchased this because my accountant said it is what everybody seems to use. I worked with it for a couple of days and then had had enough. If you started with this and knew nothing else I suppose you would be happy. Problem is I've used MYOB for years and when you go to this product there is a lot missing. It may be popular but then we all know that's not always an indication of what is best for the job. You really might want to check out MYOB. The cost between getting this and keeping it updated and MYOB and keeping it updated is perhaps $50 higher, but then if you are trying to work around limitations, trying to find features that don't exist, that $50 savings fast becomes at your own folly. MYOB allows 5 separate data files with no additonal upgrade, and for me that was where I am, and where I should have stayed. I had tried the QuickBooks trial but never could stick with it long enought before the trial would expire. Buying it did force me all the way thru its paces, it's just it has little to offer. Much of the time I spent in testing it was to try to find options. I'm not sure why most all the operations are menus deep and unintuitive but the time testing it is not in use but in trying to figure it out. Bad software on the surface, bad software in deep. Popular or not, I pass.

I read through a lot of the criticism on this site - and I honestly have to say I don't agree with most of it for my practkce. As an owner of a three-person medical clinic, I have found that this version of QBP for Mac does absolutely everything I would want - the interface looks good and works well -- the ability to customize invoices is wonderful. Granted - we do simple billing with no variable rates, no stock prices as someone listed below, and no changes in product (i.e. therapy or testing). Statements look great, bookkeeping takes just minutes a week, and everything is compatible with my accountant. Download the trial and see for yourself if this is something you will use or not.

I am or was a QB 2004 PC user, FYI Intuit has a 3 year sunset policy that turns off all online features. (check website for a partial list) This includes little things like emailing invoices. Support stated that losing the ability to email was not stated in the sunset policy, but didn't care because it was no longer supported, so even if it was broke they wouldn't fix it. I was told by senior support that ALL products have a 3 year life and will die. - So if you need a long term program, look somewhere else, if you like keeping up to date then its does the job.