Customer Reviews

QuickBooks Pro 2009 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(79)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(34)
1 star:		(147)

 

 

I cannot believe Intuit has completely destroyed this product with the 2009 version.

Downloading transactions and matching into a bank account or credit card account is a waste of time and I do mean waste of actual time. We download sometimes 50-100 banking transactions a day and a similar number of credit card transactions. The ability to automatically match those transactions is extemely old school ( a major regression for QB ) as each one must be done manually one by one. Gone is the "add multiple" to allow QB the ability to matchup payees and aliases. That feature allowed the input of hundreds of transactions in less than 5 seconds. Now hundreds of transactions will take no less than 5 hours.

This is the single biggest change between 2008 and 2009, completely for the worse. Any other changes are strictly smoke and mirrors to sell something new with glitz and glamour. If your business generate more than a few banking transactions a day or week, stay away from version 2009. Your online banking "time" will increase to an amount that it will take away from other tasks.

Aside from rushing Quicken and Quickbooks to market with major bug problems in each of the last few years and also sending support calls to India, removing the "add multiple" feature from online banking is the single biggest blunder Intuit has ever made.

Thankfully, I have a backup of my QB 2008 file. It's time to uninstall 2009 and re-install 2008!!!!

Consider yourself warned...

Intuit is exploitative of the small business market that it has in its thrall. As I type this, I am on hold with tech support.. again... just trying to get the program to work reliably. (15 minutes on hold this time... no answer yet...)

From forcing annual upgrades to random error codes that require reinstallation and laborious validation routines, Intuit makes using QuickBooks a nightmare. Further, every annual "upgrade" makes the interface harder to use and more cluttered with "services" that are simply advertisements for Intuit upgrades.

Aaargh. I'm tired of putting up with Intuit's abusive customer "care". I'm finding a new accounting solution.

Current problem: Quickbooks has stopped launching altogether. It pops up the error "Quickbooks reached the expiration date and will no longer open company files" and leaves you with grayed out menu items for evrything but Help and Exit.

Update: Total On hold time 1 hour-- then Intuit insisted that I pay for a tech support package-- since I had registered the product "almost 30 days ago". I couldn't believe it.

I finally figured out the problem on my own: Go to the Help menu--> Manage My Lisc.--> Reregister the product. Exit. Re-launch. Works.

To solve the problem with THEIR product registration scheme, Intuit wanted to charge me almost $100.

I upgraded to QB2009 Pro from QB2006 Pro. QB2006 provided a means to download and automatically enter bank information. I get several bank deposits from my credit card company every day. Under QB2006, this was automatically entered in about 20 seconds, using the "Add Multiple" button in the Bank Download. Under QB2009, I must manually enter all the data for payee, account and amount. One cannot enter the class, and must exit the download, then select each new transaction and edit it to change the class. This is a horrible HORRIBLE waste of time. The poor software design of this "new" feature overwhelms all the other potential benefits of the new features they implemented in QB2009. Watch out! Intuit's sales blurb claims that QB2009 improves the download automation. That is complete baloney.

Quickbooks User Community says this is the #1 issue on tech support, but Intuit has still not addressed the User Forum to acknowledge the defect or indicate when it might be fixed.

My advice is DO NOT BUY THIS SOFTWARE UNTIL THE BANK TRANSACTION DOWNLOAD AUTOMATION is fixed.

I am returning the software for credit and will end up buying QB2008.

I haven't encountered an upgrade I regretted making as much as I regret my upgrade to QuickBooks Pro 2009 since WordPerfect 6.0. You may recall that was the upgrade that all but killed WordPerfect and gave Microsoft Word the ability to become number one.

I upgraded from QuickBooks 2006, mostly because I needed to upgrade my payroll subscription and the cost to do both differed by only $50. I deeply regret it.

Downloading and reconciling credit card and banking transactions will now take at least twice if not several times longer. The dropdown lists only work if you know the account number (perhaps if you don't have "use account numbers" checked off in preferences, it will work alphabetically, but it should work BOTH WAYS!).

QuickBooks had, since an early update to 2006, stopped sending online transactions through in the same order you entered them. This requires me to log on twice, because if I'm doing a transfer from account A to account B to account C, QuickBooks often tries to send it through from Account B to C and then from A to B and my bank rejects it for insufficient funds. So I have to log onto my bank's server twice to do the A to B and then the B to C. Very annoying and I was sure they would have fixed it by now and they have not.

Heck, these guys even made it harder to back up your file. Now it takes several steps. It used to take one. Sure, now you can create a portable copy or an accountant's copy, but do you need to see those options each time you want to make a backup? I think not.

Nothing I see happening in QuickBooks development has made the program better. In fact, if anything, it's made it harder and more time-consuming to use. Ignore this upgrade until Intuit starts asking customers what they want instead of TELLING them what idiocy they have to put up with.

I just finished installing QuickBooks 2009. I have all kinds of software installed on my computer, some costing as little a few bucks to as much as several thousand and none of them require me to CALL A SERVICE CENTER to register my software! All of the information I provided OVER THE PHONE could have been done on line more accurately. It's a joke to think customers are going to be OK with this; I don't want to take my time to call Intuit to just answer their marketing questions. I really want to find a good alternative to QuickBooks; with all the complaints I read about this program and now this, I'm really motivated to start a search for a better accounting software.

I'm a long-time Quickbooks fan and user, but 2009 is has some MAJOR issues that never should have made it past "beta testing." The online banking functionality is terrible compared to previous versions (I upgraded from 2008).

I would pay $100 cash right now to be able to go back to 2008--the problem is that I've already entered too much data into 2009.

Search the Quickbooks forums and you'll find some posts (including some by myself) about the online banking issues. It's a terribly done interface, very inefficient--not what I've come to expect from Intuit. I'm hoping they'll release a major upgrade to fix this, but judging by their lack of response to questions so far, I'm not holding my breath.

As others have said, this version has ruined the online banking feature. Not only is the Add Multiple Transations missing, the smart dropdown menus are missing, you can't see the register, you can't match a transaction with the correct one if it guesses wrong and online banking needs to close all the windows, but Automatically recall last transaction and Quick Add doesn't work either.

You can't add new vendors and if the vendor isn't in your list, you get a transaction added without the name of the vendor, so I have to go through the register comparing to my online banking to fill in missing vendor names of which I use quite a bit each year.

Recurring charges have to be entered anew each time even though my settings tell QB to autofill the last transaction.

I should have rolled back immediately upon having trouble, but I trusted the Beta engineers saying that fixes were in the works. Now that the live version has been out and it is no better, I will have to roll back to 2006 even if that means re-entering these months of data for the time it will save me daily.

I love QB and have been using it since 6.0 (the version right before QB99). I still think it's great in all other ways and I do like the new snapshot feature, although it could also use a few tweaks.

I simply can't afford the loss of time the online banking issue costs me daily. If you have few or no online transactions, there's no problem with using QB2009 that I've seen, but if you have more than 10 transactions a week, your hair pulling will outweigh any benefit of upgrading to 2009.

I will keep the 2009 on my one business that only uses about 10 online transactions a month and keep an eye on that feature improving, but I keep hearing it will and my time is important to me, so I can't wait for something indefinate.

Intuit would be better off chucking the whole new online banking segment and rolling back to the old version of Online Banking. QB 2006 (and 07 and 08) online banking was AWESOME and it made my life easy and I will be returning to it this week.

Hi, this is Greg Wright and I'm writing to give you all an update. I'm the director of product management at Intuit. (I put in a midpoint 3-star rating because I couldn't submit a response and leave the rating blank. Just wanted everyone to know that I'm not trying to "game" the review ratings.)

As many of you know, we work very closely with customers and accountants as we design the software. When we redesigned online banking, we were hoping to provide an easy to use start-up experience. Unfortunately, we discovered we were not meeting the needs of our existing online banking users, especially those with lots of transactions.

We heard your suggestions and have worked to get the most requested online banking features added. We are happy to share the following updates with you.

Updated 8/30/09: New preference to change to old online banking interface ("register view"), also fixed some bugs in new screens

Automatic updates to QuickBooks are currently available (R8):

1. You can switch between the redesigned QuickBooks 2009 online banking and the online banking from QuickBooks 2008 (register view) as often as you like to help you pick the one that works best for you.

2. Additional fixes for new online banking view: fix for Quick Fill, preference for decimal point placement, better keyboard / tabbing behavior in tables, Ctrl-E pre-fills transaction information in QB forms, ability to select which accounts to download, associated accounts to other names


Updated 2/23/09: More online banking updates will be available late March

Available in an automatic update in late March (R7):

1. You will be able to access other areas of QuickBooks while you have the online banking "Add transactions to QuickBooks" window open
- For example, you can go to other QuickBooks forms to create matching transactions. Then when you return to online banking, the downloaded transaction will be matched.
- If you need to use Items you can go to Write Checks or Record Credit Card Charges to create a matching transaction.
- You can also refer to your register while you have the online banking window open.

2. Faster performance for the Online Banking feature

3. Several other minor changes relating to customer feedback


Here are the previous updates we released in December 2008 (R5):

* "Quick fill" capability. QuickBooks will recognize what you are typing, such as payee and account names, and complete the information for you.

* "Add new." Quickly add new names, accounts and classes within online banking when recording downloaded transactions by selecting "Add new" from a dropdown.

* Manual match. View and select QuickBooks register entries to manually match downloaded transactions.

* Review and add multiple downloaded transactions. QuickBooks will let you easily review, edit, and save downloaded transactions in a batch.

* Bank of America reported they released an update on 12/12, so the direct download in QuickBooks 2009 should now work.

To get the update as soon as it is available, please turn on automatic updates in QuickBooks and you will be prompted when the changes are available. You can do this by going to the Help menu in QuickBooks and selecting "Update QuickBooks." Then, go to the Options tab and select "Yes" for "Automatic Update." Or, when the update is available in late March, you will be able to visit www.quickbooks.com/support to download it manually. We will provide more specifics on timing closer to the release date.

For the latest online banking information, more detail on the features included in this update, and previous releases please visit our Online Banking 2009 page at: http://intuitcommunity.com/onlinebanking2009

We are committed to updating the online banking feature so that it is as efficient and easy to use as previous versions. Thank you for your patience and we will continue to update you with new information.

Greg

The online banking aspect has taken a horrifying step backwards. It is far more time consuming and tedious then 07, and I was hoping for improvements in especially that area.
#1 there is no more, "add multiple"
#2 the "add transactions" window must close all other windows
#3 the "add transactions" window is a hideous flash app with no search or predictive text in the 'account' field
that predictive text/search is probably the single most important time-saving feature of QB to me.
It now takes me longer to add downloaded transactions (that don't automatically match) then it did to manually enter them from my statement.
I desperately hope they fix these issues with updates, otherwise I will have to go back to 07.

No, I will switch to Microsoft, or Peachtree, or anything other than Intuit

I'm a CPA with over 30 years experience, and we've been using QB (generally without issues, although "service" is always a joke) at the $10 million company where I am the CFO for 10 years. We are FAR from novice users, having several CPAs and two highly qualified IT people on staff. We upgraded to the 2009 version several weeks ago when we needed to add a new seat. This was the biggest mistake we have ever made. In the past two weeks, the system has crashed at least once every day, over as basic an item as trying to creat an invoice. Rebuilding files and re-verifying data has consumed two IT people and an accountant for at least 4 hours a day for the past two weeks, as well as idling the rest of the accounting dept, during the busiest time of the year (late January). When we have made it thru the filing of W-2s, year-end local tax forms and 1099s, we will be conducting a thorough review of why this happened, but I regret, as I may NEVER have regretted anything, that I did not read these reviews before upgrading. I do not know at this point if returning to our old version is a possibility; if it is not, I think it is very likely that we will be migrating to a new product. My advice is to avoid this product at all costs, or it may end up costing you more than you will ever know.

On another note, we have had more luck going with service providers that are not employed by Intuit. Since you are paying for the service anyway, you may as well employ someone that 1) will return the corrupted file corrected in 12 hours, instead of 8 business days; 2) answers the phone promptly; 3) speaks English and actually lives in US; and 4) costs the same or less than what Intuit will charge. Good luck.