Review by Margaret P.

I haven’t used QuickBooks for Mac in several years so I was eager to see what improvements have been made. QuickBooks has the small business accounting software market almost to itself, although mostly on Windows. Apple’s market share in computing significantly increased during my hiatus and there has been a shift towards the internet, mobile devices and, more recently, the cloud. Whether QuickBooks will fully embrace these changes has yet to be seen. Intuit provides more services to small businesses than it used to and it is even teaming up with Bank of America to integrate software and financial services, although whether that will benefit small business owners, it is also too soon to know.

The basic software seems to be the same with tweaks and incremental improvements rather than a complete rebuild from the ground up. It still doesn’t do everything for everyone but it will allow the majority of small businesses owners to take care of most of the day-to-day bookkeeping and allow an accountant to use the files to submit a tax return, and at a very reasonable cost compared to what this would have cost just a few decades ago.

Some of the newer features are being able to have multiple users with access restricted only to certain functions such as payroll, tracking project time and expenses and billing them to clients, and exporting report data to Microsoft Excel. Incredibly, batched importing of online banking transactions is new for 2012. The overall look and feel has also been improved for Mac users.

Still, the Mac version does not have all the capabilities and features of the Windows version and it doesn’t seem that this will change. Apple computers can now run Windows and Windows-compatible software and the two operating systems have also become more similar. So for most small business owners with Apple computers, the real question is not whether to use QuickBooks but whether to use the Windows or Mac version. Ironically, at a time when Apple operating systems are gaining market share, starting out on or switching over to QuickBooks for Windows is now a much better option for Mac users than it ever has been.