Does QuickBooks for Mac suck less than Quicken?

September 9, 2008 3:53 PM

Does QuickBooks for Mac suck less than Quicken?

I am using Quicken 2007 for Mac and [insert violent rant against sucky SUCKY PIECE OF CRAP software that causes me HOURS of wasted time doing the very thing I HATE to do most in the world]. I do not need the fancy features of QuickBooks and I hate to switch over because I have a system that works when it works which lately is not very often in Quicken, but if you say QuickBooks for Mac sucks less, I will buy it.

I am aware of this previous question on personal finance software for Macs but at this point my question is not "What is good personal finance software for Macs?" but "Will QuickBooks make my life less miserable than Quicken does?"

Thank you.

posted by HotToddy to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You might want to outline what you want to do with this software. Quickbooks is designed for business accounting, not personal finance.
posted by jon1270 at 4:01 PM on September 9, 2008

I am actually using it for small business accounting. QuickBooks would theoretically suit my needs better, but I have a system worked out in Quicken. My issues are not related to specific features, but rather to simple matters like Quicken repeatedly, as in over and over again, losing my checkbook entries. If it would actually work, it would be fine for my purposes. I don't want to go to the trouble of switching to QuickBooks if I'm going to have the same problems.
posted by HotToddy at 4:13 PM on September 9, 2008

I've never experienced the types of problems you are talking about-- not that I don't believe you!

Can you describe in more detail HOW Quicken loses your entires?
posted by gregvr at 4:57 PM on September 9, 2008

No, Quickbooks for mac sucks worse and on top of that it's designed for business and not home use, which means you'll have to work around the accounting principles and tasks that it's designed to emulate, most of which are unnecessary in a personal finance situation.

Intuit is a layer of scum upon the computing world. I would stay away from any of their products.
posted by SpecialK at 5:02 PM on September 9, 2008

Can you describe in more detail HOW Quicken loses your entires?

Ah! I sense an invitation to rant about how Quicken loses my entries! Well, take today for instance. I go to reconcile my account against my statement. The statement contains bazillions of checks that inexplicably are not in my Quicken register. I go to my bank's web site to look at the check images, and sure enough they are checks that I printed out with Quicken. The only way they could have been printed is by being entered in Quicken first. It would seem impossible for the entries to be missing from the register. And yet they are. EVERY FREAKING MONTH. I have to spend hours going into my bank's sucky online check image system (oh how I miss canceled paper checks!) and finding what each check was for and entering it back into Quicken, hoping it will stick this time.
posted by HotToddy at 7:15 PM on September 9, 2008

Agreeing w SpecialK: I've been running a business with Quickbook for Mac for like 15 years (because our accountants, whom we love long time, only do Quickbooks) and it fucking sucks in every little way. Please, find a way to use something else, so that I can believe that humanity has a better future.
posted by nicwolff at 11:43 PM on September 9, 2008

Are you validating your Quicken file? If you are validating, are you also super-validating? This is the mechanism that Intuit provides for resolving corruption issues in QDF files. (Although I would e the first to note that it cannot solve all such issues. Sometimes you have to ditch the file and start over.)

QuickBooks, as it seems to have a different parentage (they bought it?), uses a different file format and because of the single-entry accounting features appears to be different internally.
posted by dhartung at 3:31 PM on September 10, 2008

For what it's worth, if you try to create a mutual fund in Quicken 2007, the program just crashes, causing you to lose at least your past few edits. This has been a problem since the software was released, and it doesn't look like they've even bothered trying to fix it.
posted by oaf at 9:26 PM on September 10, 2008