QuickBooks Pro 2011

A software review of QuickBooks Pro 2011, a financial solution for businesses no matter how big or small.

More than just a "check book register" QB Pro 2011 allows you to

Last October I decided to make my small fledgling business a LLC (Limited Liability Company) from the old style Sole Proprietorship. My accountant suggested I get Quicken Home and Business for my small enterprise and track my income and expenses.

Well my Wife has Quicken Home and Business already so I tried to import the different 'formats' that my bank, pay processors, affiliate programs, and some vendors use in to Quicken.

After struggling for a couple of days with converting formats to plain text, delimited text, tab delimited and other weird things I called Intuit.com and explained my frustrations.

QuickBooks Pro 2011, four years later and no complaints, well one ...

The support person was sympatric and offered a solution: QB Pro 2011.

For under $200 I decided this could potentially save me thousands of dollars in fees that my accountant would charge me to manually input the data vs. me importing it from the different institutions and business I deal with.

Note: At this time you can not order Intuit.com products digitally, maybe in the future.

The install went pretty smooth, about fifteen minutes and once the updater was setup for my firewall/proxy the update only took five minutes.

As with any data base program I had to learn how different features and functions worked.

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After I finished the initial setup of my bank, savings, and a few investments assigned to the business I proceeded to download statements from various places like my pay processors for my products and the credit card I use for the business account.

Once I had gathered all my documents I proceeded to import them in to my profile. Most came in with out modification. There are a few that required conversion with a utility provided by Intuit.com, the main one was the credit card, although in a text file it would not put the debt and credits in the correct columns. After reading the help file and talking to Intuit.com support I had the conversion program.

For the first time in a long time I had all my information ready before the end of the year, making my Misses and the accountant happy.

I rate this program at a 8 of 10, the support was in a word "fantastic" but the ease of use of the program even after learning the nuances of the operation is a little awkward and will place data where you don't want it causing problems in other areas.

Over all I am satisfied with this program and would suggest anyone with a business look at all the features and functions before buying it or another similar program.

Note: April 15, 2012 has come and gone (Tax day in the USA) and once again QuickBooks Pro 2011 helped me over the hump. After the taxes were gone over my accountant told me that most of my problems stems from PAY PAL not QB Pro 2011.

Seems the file format I download from Pay Pal is not what it should be and does double or triple entries because when some one purchases an item from my business or I use Pay Pal to do a purchase if the payment isn't done right away it goes in to a "pending" status while the payment is approved.

This causes the problem with the QuickBooks Pro 2011 file format because the "pending" entry is listed but then it is changed to either paid or debit but never removed from the ledger at Pay Pal.

Away around this is to download the Pay Pal history in text format, you have to edit the text file in a spreadsheet program and remove the excess columns but the import of the spreadsheet doesn't have the double or triple entries. A few extra steps but still worth the effort to your bottom line.

02/15/14 - PayPal.com has fixed their problems with the .iif files and you can now download your PayPal history and import it into your program. Now all I have to do is my taxes... Happy, Happy - Joy, Joy ... :(