QuickBooks Pro 4.0 for Macintosh

Though not as extensive as MYOB AccountEdge, QuickBooks Pro 4.0 has a lot of the essentials for small business owners. With it, you can create estimates for client jobs; enter and track sales and purchases; create bank registers and print checks, timesheets, and worker payroll forms; run reports to assess the fiscal health of your business; and export data to programs like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word.

QuickBooks Pro 4.0 includes improvements in your ability to handle post-2000 dates; print 1099, W-2, and W-3 forms; create customer-contact records and to-do lists; and track invoices, payments, and billing by customer. Those who sell items in kits or tied together through promotional offerings will find the new grouping function makes it easier to take inventory.

A word of caution for those who may be adding to their business's software licenses: this latest maintenance release creates files not usable by Windows QuickBooks or earlier versions of QuickBooks Pro 4.0 for the Macintosh. --Elizabeth Aoki

Amazon.com Product Description
QuickBooks accounting and business management features are easy to learn and use, customizable to your business, and provide instant access to your important business information with more than one hundred reports and graphs. The software lets you track checking accounts, accounts payable/accounts receivable, inventory, and purchase orders. It also allows you to customize and print invoices and to calculate payroll and print paychecks. QuickBooks Pro's tight integration with Microsoft Word and Excel offers additional flexibility. You can send data from QuickBooks to Word documents and can produce reports in Excel. QuickBooks Pro is best for any small business with 1 to 20 employees needing all the features in QuickBooks plus multi-user capabilities, time and billing functions, and job costing and estimating.

When I bought and installed QuickBooks Pro 4.0, I very quickly learned why Apple is failing.

The Windows 95/98 version of QuickBooks Pro 99 can do anything. I have been using Intuit products since 1990, and have been spoiled by the way such a simple program can handle complicated transactions along with daily business. (When I worked for an SAP consulting firm, the managing partner said he was afraid to make us implement SAP R/3, because QuickBooks performed circles around that million dollar software!)

But when you install QuickBooks on your Mac, you return to the stone ages. QuickBooks for DOS systems could do more.

I called Intuit's customer support (where I tend to get excellent treatment, because I've used the product for so long -- one of my solutions is posted to their techie's help manual) to complain. The techie was very nice and very frank. I should not expect an upgrade of QuickBooks for the Mac any time soon, because the market was not strong enough.

And while Microsoft enables you to transfer QuickBooks data from the Mac platform to Windows 98, the Mac OS will not permit a transfer in this direction. I therefore spent a week of very valuable time re-entering data and setting up the company file.

A shame that Mac-only users will never get to know how good this software really is.


Still Lacking   October 2, 2000
Podi Constantiner (TX)
79 out of 80 found this review helpful

I wanted software to run my business that would be simple to use without an accounting background, as I understood this to be. I was totally misled when I found that conversion from later versions of Quicken were impossible and had to manually enter every transaction. Not only did I have to hire an accountant to assist with Quickbooks Pro 4.0 set-up, but even she had trouble classifying information. There are still some unresolved issues in the set-up procedure. I have listed my personal opinion on the following:

Negatives:

1. Sorting reports can not be done by "Memo".

2. When printing checks, you must manually count how many you are about to print and they still can't be sorted alphabetically. This is crazy!

3. Customer support leaves you on hold forever.

4. Customizing invoices is ridiculously limited.

5. No calendar window.

Positives:

1. Report formatting is effortless.

2. Entering data is as easy as in Quicken.

3. "Find" is more extensive and one of its better features.

4. Being able to print business forms is wonderful.

5. Memorized transactions function is efficient and very useful.

I have tried 3 business accounting programs and I do think that this could be one of the better programs for small businesses even though it falls short in improving on the simplest enigmas. Intuit claims this to be easy to use, which I tend to disagree with. If Intuit would improve their customer support lines and email feedback and also correct the basic problems listed above, I feel they would have a superlative accounting software program.