QuickBooks Basic 2005 review:1 stars (Automated Payroll Processing Is Now an Add-on Charge) - As the treasurer for a church with six employees, I have used QuickBooks for the accounting and payroll for the church for more than a decade.
I just upgraded the software used by the church to QuickBooks Basic 2005 this year and found that we can not use QuickBooks to compute the payroll tax withholdings unless we subscribe to one of Intuit's payroll services. This is a change in the way payroll is handled by the software from previous additions of QuickBooks Basic.
This additional subscription makes the cost of upgrading to QuickBooks Basic 2005 more than triple the published software price (...) because the least expensive of the subscriptions is $199 per year.
In response, I have developed a an Excel spreadsheet that can do the computations for our organization and I will not be subscribing to Intuit's payroll service.
The rest of the package seems to work as intended. 5 stars (Context is everything) - I used QuickBooks, happily, for years -- until they stopped supporting tax tables for the Mac, about 1999. They migrated us to Aatrix TopPay -- a nightmare -- but at the time, the only company making payroll software for the Mac. I stayed with them, though their UI was ghastly, forms didn't work, customer support poor -- feeling it was better than going to a PC. Finally this year, my experience with their version 15 was so terrible that I gave up entirely -- bought QuickBooks -- and set it up on my PC. What ease of use! What intuitive, easy navigation! What joy! It took me very little time to set up my company, calculate payroll, and be on my way.
So -- compared to what I've had to deal with for the past 5 years -- this is magnificent.1 stars (I would have given it a 0 star if I could.) - Just do one thing. Try to create an invoice with British Sterling Pound symbol or Japanese Yen symbol.
It doesn't take many problems for a software to be obsolete. Just one problem that cannot be fixed.
If you have a global dream for your small business, this software isn't it.
