access qbb file without quickbooks

June 5, 2005 1:13 PM

I have a quickbooks .qbb file that I would like to access. It's from our old accountant. Is there a way to convert it or another program that opens it. I don't want to spend $200 for quickbooks just to open this file.
posted by JohnR to work & money (6 comments total)

Or is quickbooks so good I should use it?
posted by JohnR at 1:39 PM on June 5, 2005

QuickBooks has a virtually mandatory upgrade-every-year-for-$250 treadmill. You don't want to get stuck on it.
posted by nmiell at 1:45 PM on June 5, 2005

If you get really desperate, I can open them for you and convert them to excel files but not knowing what sort of information is in there, you may not want to be sending it to internet strangers.

Incidentally, we've been using Quickbooks and are still using the 2003 edition. We'll have to upgrade next year. So I'm not sure how mandatory those upgrades really are.
posted by undertone at 3:08 PM on June 5, 2005

Thank you undertone. I just may do that!
posted by JohnR at 5:45 PM on June 5, 2005

I second what nmiell says - I would drop Quickbooks in a heartbeat if there was a halfway decent alternative and/or I had the time to convert to something else.

I was fairly happy with Quickbooks 2002 Premier, but then I was forced to upgrade to the 2005 version in order to continue getting payroll table updates. If we wanted to keep using Quickbooks to do payroll, we had to upgrade.

The new version locks up mysteriously, usually in the middle of something important like reconciling my business's checking account. It's also much slower.
posted by JeffL at 6:47 PM on June 5, 2005

Our business partner forced QB on us, and I hate it.
We've got the 2003 Premier and it's started freezing upon opening recently. At least three times a month I've got uninstall and re-install the damn thing, then tell it NO to any upgrade it tries to install because that makes it happen more frequently.
Intuit says we need to upgrade to '05 so, yeah, I think it's an upgrade treadmill.

If we weren't already shutting down that end of the business I'd seriously look into one of the accounting alternatives out there.
posted by Mamapotomus at 11:18 AM on June 6, 2005