Since I'm in the computer consulting business I always get asked which accounting software to use and overall I get great feedback on QuickBooks pro 2000.

Everyone I recommended QuickBooks learned it in their own, most people even tell me that they didn’t even need the manual for their day to day work.

Some of the features;
Estimates – you can create a quote for your customer and you can even write in the quote how much it’ll cost you that particular item and how much your charge for the customer is and QuickBooks will tell you how much your profit total is but would only print out the customers price, another great feature is that with one click you can convert an estimate to an invoice.

Purchase orders – you can create a purchase order every time and then just with the click of the mouse you can create a bill from the purchase order.

Payroll – They have 2 options for payroll 1) basic 2) deluxe, I don’t know anyone having their deluxe option so I’ll only say about the basic option, they charge $6.00 monthly and you have to be connected to the internet to get the tax table updates but the beauty of it is that you don’t have to do anything extra on your part it all gets done automatically, once every month when you go to the payroll feature it’ll tell you to that its ready to download the newer tax table.

Write Letters – while it has some predefined letter like a collection letter etc. you can write your own letter and then merge your customers information into the letter but you’ll have to have Microsoft Word installed on your computer.

Reports – I’m not going to count them all because they are too many to count but one of their new features is that you can export your report to Microsoft Excel.

Online Banking – this is also a new feature and if your bank is on their list you can consolidate your account automatically but their list is much shorter then the one they have for Quicken 2000.


Some of the things you should consider before buying QuickBooks;
Pending orders - if you regularly have partial pending orders then QuickBooks is not for you, they don’t support it in this version, I’ve seen MYOB does have this feature but overall MYOB doesn’t even compare to QuickBooks.

System requirements – regardless of their requirements you should have a computer that is fairly up to date especially with this version since they install Internet Explorer 5.0 and some of their features work with IE is has slowed down considerably.

Year end – QuickBooks doesn’t have a feature to close the year and for this reason if you do a lot of invoicing running reports might become very slow, the only solution I’ve found so far is to open a new company file and to import all your lists but the problem is that they don’t include the balances.

Overall I would say that this is the best on the market and you should really consider this one first.



Recommended: Yes