QuickBooks 2021 For Dummies. Stephen L. Nelson

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       Forms: QuickBooks produces, or prints, forms such as checks and invoices by using the information you enter in those check windows and invoice windows that I mention earlier. So that’s neat, and a true time-saver. (See Chapter 4.)

       Electronic banking and billing: QuickBooks transmits and retrieves some financial transaction information electronically. It can email your invoices to customers and clients, for example, which can save you both time and money. And QuickBooks can share bank accounting information with most major banks, making it easy to make payments and transfer funds electronically. (See Chapter 13.)

       The desktop version probably becomes significantly more economical over the years you use QuickBooks. I’ve blogged about this topic (not in a bitter, grumpy-old-man way, I hope) at our CPA firm’s website, https://evergreensmallbusiness.com. The problem with these subscription-type pricing models is that you pay — over time — way, way more for an item. And I believe that this is true with QuickBooks.

       At least currently, the desktop version of QuickBooks provides more functionality and a richer feature set. I’m not going to list what’s included in the desktop version and what’s missing in the online version, but I see holes. (I’m happy to stipulate that at some point, Intuit will surely plug these holes. But in the meantime, why pay more for less?)

       Ease of use: QuickBooks historically has been the easiest (or one of the easiest) accounting software programs to use. Why? The whole just-enter-transaction-information-into-windows-that-resemble-forms thing (which I talk about earlier) makes data entry a breeze. Most businesspeople already know how to fill in the blanks in these forms. That means that most people — probably including you — know almost everything they need to know to collect the information that they need to do their books with QuickBooks. Over time, other software programs have tended to become more QuickBooks-like in their ease of use. The folks at Intuit have truly figured out how to make and keep accounting easy. I should tell you, because I’m an accountant, that the ease-of-use quality of QuickBooks isn’t all good. Part of the reason why QuickBooks is easy to use is that it doesn’t possess all the built-in internal control mechanisms that some more traditional accounting systems have. Those internal control mechanisms make your financial data more secure, of course, but they also make the accounting software more complicated to use.

       Expense: QuickBooks, especially compared with the hard-core accounting packages that accountants love, is pretty darn inexpensive. Different versions have different prices, but for a ballpark figure, you can get an excellent accounting software solution for a few hundred bucks. Not to go all grandfatherly on you or anything, but when I was a young CPA, inexpensive accounting software packages often cost several thousand dollars, and it was easy to spend tens of thousands of dollars.

       Ubiquity: The ubiquity issue relates to the ease of use of QuickBooks and the cheap price that Intuit charges for QuickBooks. Oddly enough, the ubiquity of QuickBooks becomes its own benefit, too. You’ll find it very easy to find a bookkeeper who knows QuickBooks, for example. And if you can’t, you can hire someone who doesn’t know QuickBooks and then send that person to a QuickBooks class at the local community college (because that class will be easy to find). You’ll also find it very easy to find a CPA who knows QuickBooks.Now, you might choose to use some other, very good piece of accounting software. Almost assuredly, however, what you’ll discover is that it’s tougher to find people who know the software, tougher to find classes for the software, tougher to find CPAs who know the software, and even tougher to find books about the software.