quickbooks sucks for the mac
May 21st, 2005 by Dylan
Not that I did not know this already, but QuickBooks is amazingly bad. And amazingly it is even worse for the Mac than it was for Windows.
I wanted to upgrade our old Windows version to the new Mac Pro version. So I bought and installed it. As usual on the Mac, the installation process itself was easy. And then the fun began.
First of all, I tried to import our old QuickBooks company data from a Windows version into the Mac version. This apparently, according to the fine print, is only possible if your copy of QuickBooks is from 2004 or newer.
The option of spending another $200 to buy an upgrade for the Windows version did not seem viable just for the need to import data from their own app into this app. So we found a less than legit version of a newer version of QuickBooks for Windows, installed it on a quarantined virtual machine instance in Virtual PC, imported the data, and then re-exported the data. This worked, allowing us to import QuickBooks data into the Mac version of QuickBooks.
At this point, things looked great and I thought the pain had subsided. But the fun had just begun. I then proceeded to try and enter a payroll item. It seem that the Mac version of QuickBooks does not come with integrated payroll, also found in another fine print item. Instead they bundle it with this really crappy app called Aatrix Top Play. The version that was installed automatically was a demo version, presumably part of the lame QuickBooks demo that comes with the PowerBook.
I find and install a separate version of this payroll app that appparently the QuickBooks installer is not intelligent enough to include automatically. Then I try to launch it. I get an error message. I go to their lame web site and find out that you have to disable File Vault in order to use their application. Their instructions imply that this is normal and acceptable. WTF? This is not a reasonable requirement to installing any app, much less one that I now do not trust. What a horrible piece of coding to not be able to work with one of the more important feature of Mac OS X. Of the more than 200 Mac apps I have installed, this is the first one to fail in this manner.
So my solution… create another user on the machine and install this awful app as that user. What a waste of time and effort. And not really a very cool solution at all. And companies wonder why Open Source software is getting such solid market traction. I thought I was paying to not have problems like this?
i had the same problem. how do you export back from mac to microsoft.
File -> Back Up to QuickBooks for Windows…
Actually, it gets even worse. I moved to QB Mac 2007 because I was so incredibly tired of the lame-o QB on the PC. HA HA HA! Gotcha! Where shall I start? With the fact that the new version doesn’t recognize bills I’ve just put in? Or maybe the fact that it arbitrarily pulls up bills that were paid up to 5 years ago and lists those payments as credits! Maybe you’ll find it entertaining to have to print your checks one by one (with 4 mouse clicks or return keystrokes to confirm each one) instead of batch printing. Or how about the inability to adjust the check to fit a standard window envelope? Granted this shouldn’t be necessary, but gosh, the post office gets kind of picky if they can’t see the address.
Speaking of check printing, isn’t it cool the way that the minimal and arbitrary information that used to print on the lower portion of the check (one to a page) isn’t there any more? Possibly my favorite is the way that it aligns on my HP 1200 printer so that the first digit of the check amount prints right on top of the dollar sign. Saves me TONS of money! Those clever programmers are just such Nice Guys!
Oh well, my time is free, of course, so it will be no problem to re-enter all of my transactions on the POS Windoze version. Even if I _could_ export this back to the PC, I don’t trust it enough to do so. Granted, the 2007 version for the PC is no Belle of the Ball, but at least it isn’t totally broken!
This was a breathtaking experience for my company as well. I have to admit, perhaps we marched forward despite all the signs pointing back, but we gave up on aatrix software to even call us back to use their payroll software. We tried Checkpark’s payroll as well, only to be severely let down by the quickbooks “integration”. The generated iif files didn’t mark the exported transactions as payroll items, so they showed up as regular split transactions in Quickbooks. Print *crashed quickbooks pro* reliably. We could not generate a paycheck by hand, even if we calculated the numbers by hand!
If anyone take jgnash or any one of the other open source java accounting solutions and wants to step up to the plate to give commercial small business payroll a run for their money, I’m in.
It wouldn’t be difficult to keep up with annual payroll updates for the open source community.
I hate the program, it makes wrong calculations and it changes numbers i enter.
I have a great idea… lets come up with some accounting software that barely works on a PC and is not Mac friendly at all, is not intuitive, and costs $200 a year to upgrade. We’ll promote and hype the crap out of it as if no one can live without it…. we’ll make milions!!!
Oh wait… someone already did that…. It’s called QuickBooks!
Please, there must be a better way!!!
so my desktop was wiped out. i was suppose to take a vacation. i was looking forward to a great holiday season. then quickbooks happened.
quickbooks crapped on my parade, wiped out my desktop, vacation and great holiday season.
my accountant says there is a better way. MYOB. I purchased the software and have been talking to a teck in this country!!!
imagine.. one or two if not three time zones away!…. no banjoes or cymbals in the back ground with funny hats and jewels! America I love it!!!
being from New Orleans lots of things suck…. the Corps of Engineers, our high capacity drainage pumps, whores, and quickbooks. drainage pumps and whores can be a good thing… the other two…. terrorists!
maybe the mac sucks seems that is the answer to all the ” blank sucks for the mac” questions. DO you people want every software company to stop everything and develop fixes for the mac? Its easy just assume nothing works for the mac and its like a present when something does. gt a pc for business get a mac for um…. photoshop? but that is on the pc too….. oh well
If you’re going to release a product for the Mac, charge money for it, and claims it works, then it should. If it doesn’t, you should be held accountable.
Not that I can’t now run just about every Windows app on a Mac with Parallels, but having to open anything in Windows is just a dreadfully awful user experience.
I would rather just do everything in a spreadsheet than go back to using Windows.
I too am totally fed up with quickbooks. I totally agree, if you are going to charge money for a product, it should work! ive tried quickbooks for the mac (total POS) and bought quickbooks for the PC, and have had nothing but headaches.
Its like they didnt hire an information architect OR interface designer for the development process. not to mention that it does all kinds of bizarre things with the information i enter.
Intuit customer service is horrible too. I pay for thier payroll service, only to be hung up on when they cant figure out what the problem is! ive been hung up on at least twice when their indian call center operator cant figure out what is going on. im not sure if there is a language barrier, or if crappy customer service is just what quickbooks trains its employees to deliver.
has anyone tried MYOB or any other accounting packages for mac (or even windows)?
The good news is that intuit refunded my money for quickbooks on the mac as well as quicken for the mac. The bad news is the time I wasted.
The print on the 2008 QB Pro is too small for easy viewing on the monitor and the print is too small on the invoices. This should be and easy fix; but, with QB obscure directions called “Help” and their off shore telephone support saying they “are not qualified to answer my question,” I’m very frustrated about my little problem.
I have had such a hard time with quick books, I hate it..
QuickBooks sucks, no doubt about it. I never used a Mac but it sounds like its even worse on the Mac.
I have used Quicken for years and love it, then I was forced to using QuickBooks due to Intuit stripping down Quicken to force people to use Quickbooks (They took away ability to import transactions with splits into a checking account).
When I switched to QuickBooks I couldn’t believe how bad it is, you would think its from an entirely different company than Quicken, its like night and day. Intuit must have their retarded developers working on QuickBooks.
I’ll give just one example so nobody can say I’m just just badmouthing QuickBooks for no reason.
If you have online billpay and online access to your account transactions will be marked as cleared when you go online, so far so good, just like it should do. Now you get your paper statement and go to reconcile, transactions that show cleared online are marked as reconciled automatically, you unmark them and do your reconcile then go back to your register, now the transactions that are cleared online are now marked UNCLEARED completely.
Quicken handles reconciling perfectly, never had any problems with it. And thats just one example of 100 I could give, another annoying thing it does; Edit a transaction and click save… it prompts you “Transaction has changed, do you want to save it?” ????? No duh, thats why I clicked “Save”.
I’m looking for alternatives now.