Review by SanjeevP

I have been a QuickBooks user since 1992 and it was a nifty product, relatively inexpensive at about $59 and served my purpose well. However, every time I upgraded the product after 1999, I ran into serious problems-like not being able to open the data file, download the transactions from the bank or get the payroll to work. And getting technical support from QuickBooks is almost impossible. But QuickBooks always found a way to force the upgrade and I had to upgrade from QuickBooks Pro 2006 to QuickBooks Pro 2009 because they stopped downloading the bank transactions. As a user you got the impression that company that produced nifty products has been suddenly taken over by crooks who fleeced the users of their products. So I adopted a policy, never to upgrade QuickBooks, unless I have to. But I got QuickBooks Premier through the Amazon Vine program and I decided to try to upgrade.

I must say, this is the 1st time since 1999, that the QuickBooks upgrade went flawlessly. Everything worked this time. QuickBooks Premier 2012, upgraded my QuickBooks Pro 2009 file to work with the new version. There was no problem doing the data conversion. The bank transactions downloaded in the new version, the payroll worked, and the only problem I am encountering is that every time I try to back up the QuickBooks file, it wants to rebuild the data file. I find QuickBooks Premier 2012 to be faster than QuickBooks Pro 2009. Finally, Intuit managed to produce less buggy, but not bug-free Quickbooks!nnQuickBooks 2012 comes in 3 versions: Plus-which is online, Pro and Premier. On Intuit website, there is a table which compares the features of 3 versions. For most people, QuickBooks 2012 Pro version should be good enough and most cost effective, it works with QuickBooks payroll. Features of Premier version like creating business plan, consolidating reports from multiple company files, finding and locating inventory tasks etc. are not useful and worth extra money to me.

When it comes to business accounting software with the ability to do payroll, QuickBooks is pretty much the only game in town. Unfortunately QuickBooks Mac version is not as robust and lacks many of the features of Windows version.

For most people, QuickBooks Pro version should work and provide most buck for the bang. And Quickbooks 2012 is not as buggy, as some of the previous versions have been. The reasons for three stars are lack of technical support and the program still has minor bugs.