Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Another upgrade to a very good product
Intuit has issued another annual installment in its QuickBooks series. The changes from 2002 are mostly cosmetic for most small business users. The program comes in five versions Basic, Pro, Premier, Contractor, and Accountants Edition. If you are a contractor it is time to step up to the new Contractor edition.Simplicity and ease of use are the mainstays of QuickBooks. People who have come to QuickBooks, for the pure ease of use will not be disappointed. If you purchase the additional services such as Merchant Card Processing, Payroll and Online Banking which integrate directly into the program you will save considerably on your routine accounting work. However, you need to be prepared to pay rates that are sometimes considerably higher than the lowest cost provider, as only a few select providers are directly integrated into the program. As with the last couple of years, you can not run payroll out of the box, you need to subscribe to one of Intuits "Payroll Services" The additional fees for Payroll range from tax and form updates at $169 (annually) to fully outsourced payroll services including printing of payroll checks for considerably more. The ability to maintain your own tax tables have long been a feature of many competitor products.. Who should be buying one of these programs? Companies who are in the retail, contractor and service businesses who are willing to pay slightly higher prices for some services, to gain the ease of use. Or people who are willing to forego the integration to use QuickBooks many other easy to use features, such as invoicing and accounts receivable, Billing and accounts payable, and overall accounting. People who use existing versions of QuickBooks will not be disappointed in 2003. Intuit has done little to satisfy the existing critics of the program. Indeed, QuickBooks is even more tightly integrated to outside suppliers than in the last several versions. While these vendors are all top of the line, it makes it difficult to use a lower cost provider.
Small manufacturers and other companies that build assemblies from inventory parts are once again disappointed as support for manufacturing inventory is once again omitted.
Rating:  - The worst version of QB ever
I am a former QB advisor but quit when they wanted $1000 a year from me to maintain advisor standing. Every time you blink on this software there is a charge. I manage this software for a number of clients in all aspects of its applications and was forced to QB2003 for payroll updates. Gouging at its worst. This new version is the slowest it has ever been, crashes frequently and even when I email them with lists of complaints and bugs from the many upgrades I have done, they do not respond and downright lie to me. I would switch to an alternative accounting application in a heartbeat. Contempt for their customers seems to be the company mission statement of Intuit and I am actively pursuing an alternative to these parasitic incompetents.
Rating: - Agreed: great program, strange company
(preface: i do NOT have QB2003, i'm a user of 2001 pro, but was thinking of upgrading then after reading this, i changed my mind... too bad, anyways i'll talk about 2001)...i love this program, learned the ins and outs of it on my own... like anything once you get used to it, for a small business, its relatively easy. i've never used another program and am currently using pro 2001. i don't use the payroll features because frankly they frighten me, i can understand the payroll service fees but their support is so bad that i won't go near it every time i really want too make the change over. The other thing that bugs me is they can sit around and think of great ways to improve the program to make themselves more money, but a simple thing like adding a 'cut, copy & paste' feature to the Notepad and To Do list, seems like it will never happen. seems like they should be concentrating more about putting out a good product and decent support system and keeping a good name for themselves for many years to come rather than nickle & diming it right now. man i hate greed. still would recommend quickbooks to a small business person like myself tho, especially if you were like me a few years ago and still doing everything by hand. i guess we'll see how long the recommendation with this product will last though.
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