Review by Trive

I used to use Quickbooks for several years in my small business, then switched to Peachtree when Quickbooks began to start throwing in all kinds of unnecessary software and bloating out their product, and then switched back to Quickbooks with the 2011 release, which I found much more manageable and efficient. I upgraded to 2012 last month, and have been using it daily to evaluate it against the previous year’s release. Since I am familiar with the Quickbooks software, I tried out some of the new features first. I have several different accounts in my file, and 2012 includes the option to assign different accounts different functions. I have found this extremely useful for integrating aspects of my personal account with my business account, and I think it will make things easier at tax time as well. If you have multiple accounts, I think you will definitely enjoy this feature. Unfortunately, that is the only new feature I really could see a use for. I found the others appeared to be thrown in for the sole purpose of being able to release a new version. It seems like all companies are doing that now, and just trying to add in more and more bloat to force users to upgrade. I can pretty much guarantee you there will be a Quickbooks 2013, 2014, 2015, etc. Why not just wait until you have something substantial to add before developing an upgrade? Intuit briefly got away from this several years ago and now it seems like they’re back.

The main problem I had with Quickbooks For Mac 2012 is the difference between it and the 2011 version that I previously used for Windows. I expected the 2012 Mac version to be a mirror image of the Windows version, however there are noticeable differences and features missing. The most important to me, is that my financial institution for my personal accounts does not support it. While this would seemingly be a problem on behalf of the financial institution, when I compared the lists of support for the two systems, I noticed it is fairly significant. Why not have an option for converting the file formats like my genealogy software has? If there is such a thing, I could not find it anywhere. The second thing I noticed is that several of the reports I frequently used in 2011 for Windows are completely missing in the Mac version. I realize that there are many more X86 systems than Mac, but the lack of some of these features make Quickbooks for Mac 2012 seem more like an afterthought than a quality piece of software.

While I do feel that 2012 is a worthy buy if you are using Quickbooks 2010 and prior, I don’t feel it is significant enough to warrant an upgrade, and I definitely won’t be replacing my Windows version with the Mac release.