Well QuickBooks 2010 is out, and I have the premier version, should you get it?

First understand that I look at software as a tool, I could care less about the look pretty aspects, or gee-whiz graphics, so keep that in mind while you read this.

New and good:

• The ability to add/edit multiple items has been added, that is one great addition to the software.

• Company snap-shot – Nice canned graphs, but to be really useful QB needs to allow the user to select what accounts are graphed.

New and almost useless IMO:

• The PR tells you that now you can attach a scanned document to a transaction. Yes you can.  As long as you subscribe to Intuits on line data storage (a certain amount of storage is free, then the price structure goes into effect).  You cannot attach a locally stored .pdf file to a transaction which is what is needed.

New and useless:

• Forms Designer – QB now has two seperate forms designers. The same old one (Layout Designer), and a new one that is supposed to be more of a what you see is what you get kind of thing.  The new forms designer will not display a .gif image correctly, the transparent background in a .gif image is black.  Font changes and sizes are very limited and being able to re-position the data elements is almost non-existant.  The designer allows you to use a pre-designed background – looks pretty but in reality are you going to print backgrounds on plain paper?  And when all is said and done you still have to use the old layout designer to get things right, so why bother with the new one.

• Company Report Center – When you open it, if it is not in the carousel display, at the top right is three icons, click the one on the left.  The display is pretty.  When you click on the left to show memorized reports, it does just that, one problem – all the memorized reports do NOT have a name, they are ALL called “Memorized Report” – now how are you supposed to know which one you want?  Useless!

• And when you select the regular reports, the name on the report in the carousel does change, BUT it does not use your data for the display, so that gets confusing.  You can change the date range for the report just below the displayed report, but do not expect anything to change – that just feeds the actual report if you display it, not the fancy carousel display.

• When you open a sales receipt, there is advertising on the left side – everything there is an Intuit pay for it service.  EDIT: With update 5, you now have the ability to close this toolbar as they call it.

• The home screen in the Company area has two new icons, both are advertising for pay for it services and clutter up the display.

• The help system requires Google Desktop to be installed. Even though I selected the option to only install Google search for QB, it installed the Google Desktop anyway – I deleted it – no help for me!

I have no idea:

• When I got 2006 Premier I noticed that at odd times QB tries to access the internet, start up, shut down, or back up – but not always, and in no particular rhythm either.  Repeated questions to Intuit and support have resulted in answers from “strange I have no idea” to “oh don’t worry about it.”  Yet no one has been able to tell me what data is being sent to Intuit.  This is a separate call from the update request. In 2008 it did it, and now in 2010 it still does it.  I refuse the request to access the net and it loads, shuts down, or backs up with no problems.  What data is being transmitted concerns me.

Known bugs:

• 12/16 Found that when you double click on a check in the check register to bring it up in its’ own screen, and then click print – the check number in the print screen is NOT the currently displayed check, it is the last printed check number. Update – 12/24 it started working as it should, I have no idea why!
• I use the Dymo label printer to print mailing labels.  It used to work in sales receipts, it no longer does.  It used to pick up the shipping address from invoices, it no longer does that either.

• Number of copies in back up – You set the number to keep and as long as you do not use the manual back up icon, it works well. As soon as you use the manual back up icon, it stops keeping track of back up copies and you can end up with many copies being kept.  And you need to use the manual back up icon every so often to clear the TLG file. The TLG file is only cleared when you do a manual backup, and it needs to be cleared often or it will grow to an unmanageable size.

• Multi-page invoices are still a problem. It used to be that a multi-page invoice would have the total due on both pages, now they moved it to only on the last page.  Personally I think it should only be on the first page.  Better yet, if the software writers were on the ball they would automatically format multi-page invoices to show a page two sub-total that carries forward to page one.

• If you have two bills to pay, and you are going to pay them with a credit card, pay each one separately!  Other wise QB will add them together and make one bill payment.  Then when your CC statement comes in reconciling will be very hard since the statement will have two charges and QB will not.

• Be careful when paying bills with a credit card, QB resets the credit card in use to the first one on the list each time you click Pay bill.

• QB has once again changed the tab order used to move from entry item to entry item, when using Enter Credit Card charges – sigh.

• If you get a check from a customer that combines two invoices into one total.  QB will list each invoice on the deposit slip rather than the total received even when you tell QB in the receive payments window that only one check was received.  This may only apply to me since I have parent customers who pay the bills for other businesses that I invoice, but watch for it.

• I don’t use the automatic online account download, but people who do are having problems with some credit cards and not others.

No Improvements:

• Inventory – NONE, same old basic freshman programming project.