Friday, March 14, 2008

Quickbooks on the Mac vs. Quickbooks on the PC

I've been using Quickbooks Pro for the PC to do all of my business accounting since 2002. I only use it for writing invoices, and receiving payments. I really don't use it for much, but these two functions are very important for me to keep track of things.

A couple of months ago, I made the switch to Quickbooks Pro 2007 for the Mac.

My assessment so far:
Quickbooks for the Mac totally blows.
(how's that for a professional assessment?)

I just spent about 2 hours sending out invoices. It should have taken me about 45 minutes.

It's amazing to me how different the two iterations of the program are. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I know how these things go: each iteration is written by a completely different group: like Office for the Mac versus the PC.

But really, this is really brain-damaged.

Sending out invoices was always very easy and fast of the PC version. I'd write out the invoices, and send them out in batches. I could even have a standard "email body" that went onto each email, with correct customer name placed in the appropriate field. It was all very fast and simple. After writing the invoices out, sending as a batch took less than a couple of minutes.

Not on the Mac.

I have to send out each invoice individually, and send it as a large monster-sized PDF file. The PDF file is 1.7 MB, versus the size of the PDF files that I sent on the PC, which was 35 K. That's a HUGE difference. If I were a client of mine, I'd be wondering why the file has to be so large. That's ridiculous, and I look like a Lame-O.

There are a bunch of other features that don't exist in the Mac version. There are a bunch of things that just don't "work". There are so many things that I've come across that just take so much more time than they should.

Considering I only use this program to generate and send out invoices, and to record payments, I'm really amazed at how much I'm missing from the PC version. I feel lucky that I don't rely on this program for more. I'm so very unimpressed.

Boo on you, Intuit.

1 comment:

Reyes-Chow said...

Oh. I could have pre-warned you on this one. Quicken is worse than bad on the Mac. Blows is being kind.