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 | May 2008 |
BlockTax QuickBooks Blog
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The Intuit Mac experts, at QuickBooks ProAdvisor Tech Support, told us to dual boot a Mac to Windows for the fastest, easiest, most reliable QuickBooks Windows. Intuit specifically does not want QuickBooks under Parallels or other Mac virtual software. Instead it wants a system to dual boot directly into Windows!!
To better understand how to get the best from your QuickBooks small business accounting software, and how the amazingly responsive Intuit can help you better manage and grow your business, you should learn about Brad Smith, the amazingly responsive Intuit CEO.
Intuit is completely unlike any company I have ever known or read about. Scott Cook created Intuit in 1983, after his wife complained about reconciling bank statements paying bills. Her kitchen bookkeeping table is now in the Smithsonian. Computer experts then took an hour or more to install competing programs and print a check. Scott took yellow-pad notes from talking with and observing more than a thousand novice pre-release Quicken testers. He used his notes each night to direct program changes. Finally, new Quicken novices could install the program and write a check in 10 minutes. They also helped Scott create the first drop-dead-simple accounting software, which could WOW users. This revolutionized accounting and software development.
Scott built on this by having Intuit people visit and talk to users, to see how they used and felt about Quicken, so Intuit grew very fast. 10 years later Intuit shut down for a day so all employees could work on a mission statement and operating values. It took months of refinement to produce 9 pages that begin, “Our Vision of Intuit In The Year 2010” (Inside Intuit book, 291). Its says, “Our Mission is to Revolutionize how people manage their financial lives.” It continues with some very inspiring words. The order of these is critical, as it makes it clear that earlier Values are an essential foundation for later ones. Here is a very short extract.
Operating Values
Wow!
... We don't seek to merely to satisfy customers, we seek to wow them. ... Living by these values creates the type of environment we all desire; an environment in which we exceed the expectations of our customers and those of each other, where we don't just satisfy people, we wow them ...
1. Integrity Without Compromise.
2. Do Right by All Our Customers.
3. It's the People.
4. Seek the Best.
5. Continually Improve Processes.
6. Speak, Listen, and Respond.
7. Teams Work.
8. Customers Define Quality.
9. Think Fast. Move Fast. (changed in 2000 to Think Smart, Move Fast)
10. We care and give back.
13 years later Intuit was a Fortune 500 company and rated one of the 100 best places to work. Intuit products did more than track finances, so I made a suggestion to Scott. He shocked me by using it in a keynote speech, continuing the amazingly responsive Intuit tradition by saying, “Our Mission is to revolutionize how people manage their lives” (not simply their financial lives).
Brad Smith, an amazingly responsive Intuit CEO, began to lead this Do Right by All Our Customers team in 2008. In the continuation of this post I will show you many examples of how and why this amazingly responsive Intuit CEO continues Scott's amazingly responsive Intuit CEO tradition. I also will begin to show you how understanding the amazingly responsive Intuit can help you get more from QuickBooks and better manage and grow your business.
Tags: Speed up QuickBooks
Sorry for the continuation of this blog entry, but there is a limit on the length of entries here.
There are QuickBooks ProAdvisors and Certified QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisors. They are as different as cheap and expensive cars, but price often has little to do with value with QuickBooks ProAdvisors, especially when you want to speed up QuickBooks. .
Hyperthreading or 64 bit processors and operating systems may cut QB2006 and 2007 speed by as much as 90%, but this should not be a speed up QuickBooks 2008 problem. You also may be able to turn off hyperthreading with the bios to test this. You can dramatically speed up QuickBooks and extend it with QuickBooks Enterprise for users. You also can speed up QuickBooks with some of the thousands of QuickBooks add-ons at marketplace[dot]intuit[dot]com. I am sorry for having to write like this, but Intuit revews even my posts for inappropriate web references.
QuickBooks billing add-ons like Fishbowl or QuickBooks report add-ons like Autoreport (print or email all your reports at night) will never give you a SAP or equivalent program, but they can give you a fast, powerful and user friendly system, without the crushing costs of the expensive systems, people, training and data conversion you need for SAP or similar programs. For example, SAP programmers can get $200,000 a year. Instead consider how we can use well-trained Indian assistants to inexpensively do your overflow work, make single-user corrections and back up and optimize your system, to speed up QuickBooks.
Finally, you missed saying happy birthday Brad Smith (Intuit CEO) yesterday. He is an ideal person to help solve many of our problems, as the Intuit revolution continues. This revolution made it rather easy for non-computer and accounting professionals to do much of what these professionals once did. It also helped cut the price of low-end accounting software by more than 90%. Adjusted for inflation, the cut is around 97%, so we cannot expect QuickBooks to be both the most user friendly program and have our best speed up QuickBooks efforts make it the most powerful. Scott Cook began this revolution 25 years ago by taking yellow-pad notes, while sitting next to hundreds of novice and experienced users. He did so until the most novice new user could install Quicken and write a check in 10 minutes. Experienced PC professionals then needed an hour to do this with competing products. These program usability tests revolutionized computer software and still do.
Scott, Intuit Chair Bill Campbell (the hottest top management consultant in Silicon Valley) and Steve Bennett (the ex-CEO, who quadrupled revenue and tripled earnings in 6 years, with few price increases) all remain very active. However, Brad is an ideal person to continue their legacy because he really practices Intuit's very strong continuing emphasis on user directed innovation, where we are always right, teams work and there is integrity without compromise. Google "Careers at Intuit" for all these living values, which belong on every QuickBooks box. Brad has been aggressively reaching out to Intuit lovers and critics alike since he came there, repeatedly answering my emails in minutes. A few years ago he rushed a program fix in 5 days, including the weekend before Christmas, though he knew the ONE QuickBooks add-on vendor affected competed with Intuit. More important, he quickly went from a junior position at Intuit to head the TurboTax and QuickBooks divisions. That is why I told him I thought he would be the next CEO about 2 years before he got the job. It also is why Intuit has long had one of the highest Net Promoter indexes in the software business. This refers to the percentage of users who strongly recommend Intuit products, net of those who strongly do not. It is the single most likely indicator of continued long-term growth.
So keep your good and bad reports coming, knowing lots of help will come from better Quickbooks ProAdvisors and from the outstanding team at Intuit. If you are in the south east Florida area you also can come to the largest free monthly QuickBooks Meetup (see my website or Meetup [dot] com), where 2+ top QB Advisors try to quickly speed up QuickBooks and help you better use it. The best is surely yet to come, including getting these QuickBooks meetings on the web.
Meanwhile, I have to decide whether I shoud send Brad a birthday present or use the money to invest in Intuit stock. I never invested in Intuit because I want to remain independent, but it is apparently very undervalued now. There also is consistent historic evidence of a consistent 25% price increase during this quarter, so you decide. Of course, this is all my personal opinion and I am not a registered (or unregistered) investment advisor. Likewise, Intuit does not pay me for my comments and almost 100% of my income always comes from helping users with QuickBooks and from cutting taxes.
There are QuickBooks ProAdvisors and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors. These QuickBooks ProAdvisors are as different as cheap and expensive cars, except price often has little to do with value. When I was on the first QuickBooks ProAdvisor Advisory Council we heard that user complaints per QuickBooks ProAdvisor were many times higher for non-Certified Advisors. I believe Intuit said almost all their complaints related to these non-Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors, who NEVER PASS A TEST. They wanted to know if we would support having such QuickBooks ProAdvisors phased out. We did so enthusiastically, but somehow they later changed their mind. This might be one source of your problem.
I was responsible for making the QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor test much harder. We once learned which answers we got wrong as soon as we completed the test. We could take it again and and randomly change wrong answers to pass. I helped get a conference call with Brad Smith (now Intuit CEO), the test preparation firm, me and a representative for the national continuing education board for Certified Public Accountants. I said the test course should not qualify for accountant continuing professional education credit if we got a wrong answer list this way and the board rep agreed. Unfortunately, even better tests are not nearly enough to make every Certified ProAdvisor an expert in optimizing QuickBooks for speed.
To speed up QuickBooks, start by making sure the QB Database Manager is running on the server and only there. I often find it not running on the server and running on user systems. To further speed up QuickBooks automatic updates should be off in QB and nothing about QuickBooks should be in user Startup folders. Why waste time having many computers check for updates every time you start a computer or QuickBooks when there is only about an update a month? If one computer upgrades a file everyone knows. Do, however, make sure you have QB2008 upgraded to R5 (see the top line, right side, of the window you get from a ^1 or F2).
Microsoft and Intuit suggest memory that runs programs or runs them reasonably fast alone. Program instructions assume no other programs run at the same time (Hah!). Pop up the Windows task manager, Processes tab, and count the size of all of the programs running. It is now 700m for me without Word, Excel and QuickBooks, which I often run together. That means time consuming swaps to disk even for 1g user systems, so speed up QuickBooks with 1.5 - 2g on user systems. Also speed up QuickBooks get 4g on your server. Use gigabit Ethernet and test the speed of every node. We have seen cards and cables that work ridiculously slowly for a long time.
ProAdvisors or other Enterprise users can LEGALLY give you a copy of the Enterprise database manager for use with QuickBooks Pro or Premier. Intuit designed it to support up to 20 users, so it considerably speeds up QuickBooks. I found this only by pressing a key speaker at an Enterprise conference after his presentation. The database manager is backwards compatible, so you can run speed up QuickBooks 2006 and 2007 using the QBE 8 database manager. You even can run QB 2006 - 2008 with the QBE 7 database manager, but you may often have problems. Finally, consider the Linux database manager, which speeds up QuickBooks more reliably, with less memory.
Look at my old Speed Up QuickBooks article on the Library on this site. Defrag often (preferably with the automatic Diskkeeper), as QuickBooks is very sensitive to disk fragmentation. Some users got dramatic test differences in their speed up QuickBooks efforts from this alone. Then consider some tests showing you can speed up QuickBooks with a server you do not use for other purposes or without some types of Raid. An old PC can be a good Linux server for testing. (continued in next / preceding post).
Tags: QuickBooks Add-ons, QuickBooks Add-on Services
QuickBooks 2008 can give you everything you want. I have been very happy about QuickBooks 2008 since my VIP Beta Test. QuickBooks 2008 is the most revolutionary product from Intuit since the 1983 version of Quicken! The significant changes include how it runs with hyperthreading, Vista and 64 bit and dual processor CPUs. However, the revolution relates to the fastest and easiest way to send an Accountant Copy. Big changes make this Copy far better for CPAs. Clients can keep working in QuickBooks 2008 while CPAs do their work. QuickBooks 2008 then quickly updates user files for our work. This fast, easy and error-free process should let CPAs help clients far more often for less money.
I also now see that QuickBooks 2008 can give you everything you want. The Accountant Copy can let inexpensive report writing programs email or print any combination of QuickBooks reports on any schedule. Other report writers provide far more complex reports than QuickBooks can provide. Some of the thousands of QuickBooks add-ons at http://marketplace.intuit.com/ and my website may be costly or complex for a QuickBooks user. However, they are very cost effective and easy for CPAs like me, who serve many clients.
To complete the picture, our well-trained remote assistants can "work all night" with these add-ons. This is the fastest, easiest and least expensive way for QuickBooks 2008 to give you everything you want.
QuickBooks Support 101: If you are not happy with QuickBooks support ask for a Case Number and ask them to Escalate. That may be enough to get you the best QuickBooks support. If you are a ProAdvisor make support calls during the day, when you should get the best QuickBooks support from the U.S.-based team for QuickBooks ProAdvisors. Call nights and you may get the Indian team for end users. I have 4 full time Indian assistants, so this is not to say there are not terrific Indian QuickBooks people. However, Intuit has some Indian script readers.
If you have serious QuickBooks problem you should get the best QuickBooks support for ProAdvisors. QuickBooks Pro and the tax tables for more than 3 employees are around $525. QuickBooks Premier and the 3 employee tables are also about $525, so add one call to QuickBooks and you have about $575. ProAdvisor memberships, with enhanced payroll for 50 companies and the best QuickBooks support (unlimited), are only $549. You also do not have to pass a test to get this or many excellent training courses.
There is a way to guarantee the absolute best QuickBooks support person on any issue, while you save a fortune of time on hold. Regardless of whether you are a ProAdvisor, use https://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/contactme/. There is a ProAdvisor button for this. It insures that the best QuickBooks support person, who knows everything about your issue and has time to research, will call you at the exact time and place specified. They also can email you if you wish.
You also can try some things the best QuickBooks support people may not always say. These are on my BlockTax Errors pages. Start with a Rebuild. Then do a portable file backup and restore to a new file, preferably to a new system. If it works on a second system you know you have a Windows, Microsoft .Net or QuickBooks install problem. If you recently upgraded, go back to your old version or a good backup.
If you are willing to work then rename the QBwin.log file in the QuickBooks program folder. Then Rebuild. Then look carefully at the new QBwin.log file for the word error (it may be part of a word). See if you can delete the entry with the first error and repeat the process, as this can fix many errors. Files with hidden errors can become useless after an upgrade, or the upgrade can fix them.
If nothing works consider QuickBooks Data Recovery. They usually do not normally charge for fixing files that develop problems after upgrades or when their workload delays them. They get a copy of your file and put you in a que. Once they fix your file they get an updated version and fix it in a day.
All this means that the best QuickBooks support, which is fast, easy and inexpensive, can come from the QuickBooks ProAdvisor support team and you, or it can come from a local or remote ProAdvisor.
Intuit does far more than to simply Solve QuickBooks Problems With Brad
Smith. It has long revolutionized user-friendly accounting
software, software development and our lives. Now Intuit is taking a
big leap forward to further revolutionize our lives, while it continues
to Solve
QuickBooks Problems With Brad Smith. Brad,
as as I told him years ago, will soon be the next outstanding Intuit
CEO.
Aug. 22, 2007 –
Intuit...announced that Steve Bennett, current...chief executive officer, will step
down at the end of December 2007. Intuit's board...appointed Brad Smith,
current senior vice president...of Intuit's Small Business Division, to
succeed him...
Intuit people are not like people in other big companies. Top Intuit executives are the only
people in corporate America
that find me worthy of personal attention. I own a small Fort Lauderdale CPA
firm. My national QuickBooks reputation came from 7,000 newsgroup answers. Most
of these posts Solved
QuickBooks Problems. One good way to solve problems with QuickBooks,
or problems of users with Intuit, is to start with top Intuit executives.
They are all very accessible and helpful. Scott Cook, Intuit founder,
began by watching testers and taking notes to solve pre-release Quicken
problems. He revolutionized software development when this process let novice
users install the program and write a check in 10 minutes. It then took an hour
for experienced users with other programs.
Scott and outgoing
Intuit CEO Steve Bennett champion customer driven innovation. Some at Intuit
were unhappy I successfully led efforts to boycott QuickBooks over separate tax
table fees for each company, not each copy of QuickBooks. I also announced a
boycott of the consumer version of TurboTax over copy protection (when I used
the Pro version, which did not have copy protection). I did this while Solving QuickBooks Problems by serving on a QuickBooks
Advisory Council. The copy protection hurt users, so I felt it would hurt
Intuit. However, it was a surprise when Steve encouraged me by writing "Keep raising hell when Intuit does something wrong." I
still prominently feature this on the home page of my BlockTax web site.
Brad Smith was 39 when he came to Intuit in
February 2003. Within a month he showed his extreme customer focus. His first a
mission: strengthen Intuit’s advocacy and commitment to the
accounting profession and its many professionals. He sent e-mails and made phone
call introductions, to discuss specific ideas. He quickly adopted a BlockTax
suggestion to Solve
QuickBooks Problems with public new feature and bug tracking.
He soon had several executives on a conference call for what became the Accountant Inner Circle
Feedback Center
website. He even paid for my suggestion and time.
Brad Smith then proceeded to repeatedly Solve QuickBooks Problems in many ways. He, or the best
possible person on his team, quickly and personally helped accountants and
QuickBooks end users alike. This sometimes took hours, but Brad has many Intuit
people constantly try hard to provide WOW service and they often do. Many such
users began as big Intuit critics, because I always try hard to find and help
such users. When I cannot help quickly, Brad’s team soon turns critics into
good Intuit friends. I well remember an extreme Intuit basher, who soon decided
to invest his entire IRA in Intuit stock. I am sure he did well already but,
with Brad stepping up, the best is surely yet to come from Intuit.
Some forum posters doubted an insignificant QuickBooks CPA had relationships
with top Intuit execs, so I posted exchanges (with permission). If you spend
time getting to know Intuit people you can soon do this. There were bad
moments. I helped one critic who spoke about Intuit with very foul language. My
response listed unquestionable facts, showing he was wrong and probably making
a user error. I also offered to refer his case to Brad and top QuickBooks
ProAdvisor Tech Support, but only if he apologized to Intuit for his language.
I quickly heard from Brad’s team. They helping the user, but firmly said they
needed no apology and I should not imply they would not help in such cases. The
user, however, saw enough in my first post to apologize and become an Intuit
friend.
One incident occurred when a user asked if he could legally install Quicken on
multiple computers, if he was their primary user. The QuickBooks Software
License Agreement lets you legally do this, but the Quicken license agreement does
not. I referred him to Brad Smith. He reacted extraordinarily
quickly, which is normal for him and all top Intuit executives I know. He
not only told the user it was OK, but sent him a free second copy of Quicken!
The most impossible case involved an upgrade that broke a friend’s third-party
state payroll tax program around Christmas. If such a program is not ready on
January 1 the producer will probably go out of business. Brad Smith did
not worry about the program competing with a state program QuickBooks developed
later. His team worked the weekend, despite the season, to Solve QuickBooks Problems. They
distributed a solution in five days! I was once a programmer and know several
successful programmers and program managers. None off their software companies
would develop and distribute a fix to a program, with millions of users, in
five days. They certainly would not do so it if the fix only affected one user.
This is why Microsoft executives probably know they have much more to fear from
Intuit, which often beats Microsoft badly, than Intuit has to fear from
Microsoft.
I thought we lost Brad Smith when he took over the troubled TurboTax
division, but in 2005 he returned to lead QuickBooks, Quicken and payroll. I
then told him it looked like he would soon be the next Intuit CEO. Despite new
responsibilities, he always helped Solve
QuickBooks Problems in a few minutes or hours, even on
weekends. I have never known anyone who answers emails as quickly and
appropriately as Brad. Throughout this period Brad helped make much more money
for Intuit, while keeping prices low, despite near QuickBooks, Quicken and
TurboTax monopolies. A few months ago Brad called on Saturday, for a half hour.
Much of our conversation must remain confidential, but I told my wife it made
me think he was getting ready to be the new Intuit CEO. Brad now says, in an
Intuit release, “I am thrilled and honored to lead Intuit through the next
chapter in its history." No one is more thrilled about this than this
QuickBooks consultant.
Brad Smith will long be an outstanding leader for an outstanding team of
Intuit employees, users and stockholders. All will benefit from Intuit customer
driven innovation. This does not relate only to product refinements. Intuit
often expands its product line, with little or no risk, when users adapt
products in unexpected ways. For example, Scott Cook created Quicken as a home
checkbook program after his wife complained that paying bills and reconciling
their account made her spend too much time at their kitchen table. Quicken soon
got the table into the Smithsonian. Intuit also soon found that many small
businesses used Quicken, so it brought out QuickBooks. Many larger businesses
then used QuickBooks, so Intuit developed the QuickBooks Premier line and later
gave us QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. Each was a near instant success
because many Intuit users gladly paid more for it.
All this also relates to the barely understood reason why Brad Smith is
sure to help Intuit keep beating so many competitors. Intuit always tries very
hard and very successfully to make the fastest and easiest intuitive products.
It began with a program for those with limited needs. Intuit now has program
managers watch and talk to pre-release program testers, while recording faces, keystrokes
and hands. They do not limit testers or simply read reports about tests. In
addition, before Intuit you had to be a trained bookkeeper or accountant to use
a computer accounting program. Intuit kept making its very inexpensive programs
faster and easier. There are many more non-accountants than there are
accountants, so this revolutionized computer accounting programs and the
accounting industry.
Intuit gradually followed its customers, adding capabilities and new products
as they moved up. This gave it many products with 65% to 90% market share. It
is very easy for users to learn and convert data from Quicken to the basic
versions of QuickBooks. It is just as easy to learn and covert to QuickBooks
intermediate, advanced and Enterprise
versions. Only when users try non-Intuit programs do they have difficult costly
conversions and high staff, training and consulting costs. That is why almost
all small businesses that grow keep using QuickBooks as long as they can. It
also is apparently much harder to simplify a complex program successfully than
it is to add features to a simple one.
Intuit opened its products, so developers of competing and complementary
programs can interface with them. PeachTree, for example, competes with
QuickBooks, but interfaces with TurboTax. However, if you outgrow PeachTree you
must use a completely different program. If you outgrow QuickBooks you can
gradually add first class compatible sales order, inventory, shipping,
electronic transfer, reporting and other programs that work with it. 4 million
QuickBooks users provide a good market for QuickBooks add-ons and Linux
servers. There is every reason to believe Brad Smith will fully exploit
these Intuit advantages.
Brad Smith also should soon also get Intuit big profits from major
efforts already maturing. Custom software for international markets will come
from fast growing teams of international programmers), QuickBooks and Quicken
have long been universal languages. Users in 20 countries had me Solve
QuickBooks Problems. A college roommate had similar experiences during his
career. This universal QuickBooks language is fueling the very fast growth of
International distributed processing. It is one more fast and easy way to save
time and money. However, it also can truly help end world hunger and promote
world peace. That is why my terrible picture will be on the cover of the
September issue of the Accounting Technology magazine.
Quicken Online, like QuickBooks online, should soon have no price competition,
while facilitating better interaction with accountants. Quicken add-ons, like
the Quicken Medical Manager, will provide major revenue for Brad and Intuit,
while making it fast and easy for seniors and care givers to match medical
providers with insurance companies. At the same time the Intuit - Google ad
partnership, which costs Intuit very little, will let it share in an expected
$120 billion of ad revenue.
Brad Smith, Intuit, small businesses and consumers should get the most
benefit from Intuit’s approach to these numbers. In the United States
there are around 4 million QuickBooks users, 13 million Quicken users and 20
million TurboTax users. 22 million businesses still rely on pencils, paper and
spreadsheets, but Intuit bank products serve 7 million U.S. businesses
and 25 of the 43 million users of the consumer bank financial products. Intuit
online accounting software for banks and their customers now lets us manage all
bills and balances in on place, give real balances (not simply cleared
balances) and better account for and manage spending. Taking this international
should provide incomparable benefits for Intuit and users. A United Nations
committee estimated trillions in annual savings from standard forms and the
electronic interchange of data. Many QuickBooks add-ons already do this. Such
add-ons are the fastest, easiest, least expensive way to Solve QuickBooks Problems, save time
and increase accuracy.
Steve Bennett has long been a friend. I well remember the gasps of
QuickBooks Advisory Council members as we read his personal notes to us,
including "Keep raising hell ..." He quickly and very appropriately
responded to suggestions and protests, with
many answers changing my mind. You also should really respect
someone who used and taught Six Sigma to Intuit managers, especially when it
helped him triple revenue and quadruple earnings in only eight years. He seems
to have done this while keeping most Intuit sales prices below the increase in
inflation. You especially respect Steve if you are a CPA - former physics
major, but cannot read a 98 page book called "What is Six Sigma"
or even "Six Sigma for Dummies!" I am now one the many who really
hope Steve and the other former Intuit CEOs remain a force on the Intuit Board
for many years.
Brad Smith, who looks much better than me, will help Intuit
keep revolutionizing our lives. He will have two very successful former Intuit
CEOs, who actively coached Steve for 8 years, plus Steve as a consultant and
Director. Scott, the genius who created Intuit, remains young and active. His
research and continued attention to customer direction often make him seem
psychic. "Coach" Bill Campbell remains as the very active Intuit
Chair and the most widely respected top management consultant in Silicon Valley. He saved Google (which shares
a parking lot with Intuit) and turned it into a powerhouse in his spare
time.
That is why I now, more than ever, tell friends to buy Intuit
stock.
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QuickBooks 2006 and prior QuickBooks accounting software will NEVER run properly with Vista. Intuit developed this QuickBooks accounting software before Vista was available and Vista is not compatible with it.
The Senior VP for QuickBooks, Brad Smith, will soon be the
next outstanding Intuit CEO, wrote about this near the time of the final Vista release. I do not recall if Brad said this QuickBooks
accounting software used register entries to exchange data between
modules, but it does. While contrary to suggested Microsoft XP
practices, this was often done. Vista made it impossible.
Microsoft usually
resolves many bugs with the first Service Pack (bug fix) for new
operating systems. However, it delayed the Vista Service Pack
from August 2007 to early 2008. Until then many fixes will only
cover virus, spyware and hacking fixes. Google once had 53 million web
pages with Vista bugs 2007. There are now ONLY 23 million Vista bugs
2007 pages and ONLY 2.7 million of these Vista bugs 2007 pages had
updates in the last 6 months. It is good to see this, as the numbers
for XP bugs 2007 are 19.5 million and 2.7 million.
QuickBooks 2008 will be out. very soon. You may be sure Intuit
did all it could to make it fully Vista compatible. Therefore, if you
use Vista you should definitely upgrade your QuickBooks accounting
software ASAP. The many new features include some making this
QuickBooks accounting software far faster, easier and less expensive
for you when you work with accountants.
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QuickBooks accounting software
Many new 2008 QuickBooks accounting software features make it far faster, easier, and less expensive, especially if you work with an accountant or Vista. 2008 QuickBooks accounting software now has much more of the technology I needed to get the cover story of this month's Accounting Technology magazine.
In working with accountants, one click lets QuickBooks 2008 Pro, Premier or Enterprise users encrypt and send an Accountant Copy to a secure server. The file size, email program and web service provider do not matter. The Accountant Edition now works with 2007 and 2008 QuickBooks accounting software. Accountants can do bank reconciliations far faster and easier, with custom layouts and a Reconciliation Discrepancies account. They also can merge accounts, drill down on Retained Earnings and troubleshoot prior accountant ending balance differences with new client beginning balances. Users can quickly update their files for accountant changes by opening an updated Accountant Copy.
Intuit did it all it could to design its new 2008 QuickBooks accounting software to be fully Vista compatible, so if you use Vista you should definitely upgrade to 2008 ASAP! I previously advised QuickBooks users to postpone Vista until 2008, after the release of Service Pack 1. Brad Smith, who runs the QuickBooks division and will soon be the new Intuit CEO, said that 2006 and older QuickBooks accounting software will never run properly with Vista.
Outlook and Outlook Express integration makes it easy to email invoices, sales receipts, and other forms from QuickBooks. New Excel conversion templates make it easy to import existing customers, vendors, or product information, and there are very many more important changes.
The new 2008 QuickBooks accounting software will revolutionize accountant/user relations. It will make far more frequent close support faster, easier and less expensive. I am so sure of this that I will give old or new clients credit for part of their QuickBooks 2008 cost against my bills.
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Leading CPAs and QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisors agree that most hard copy records are obsolete time wasters. They are definitely not the fastest, easiest, least expensive safest way to file QuickBooks records and avoid losing them. CPAs and QuickBooks Certified Pro Advisors are known for care and conservatism, but many no longer keep original client records. Some have a line on the floor, near the door, beyond which they do not allow such records. My small CPA and QuickBooks ProAdvisor firm uses the fastest, easiest, least expensive, safest way to file QuickBooks records and avoid losing them.
Tax returns and other computer output prints directly into the Intuit ProSeries (TurboTax) DMS (document management system). Incoming faxes are clearer because they are PDF attachments to emails. We only keep one 31-pocket accordion file per month next to our scanner. Scans for each day go in the corresponding accordion pocket. Almost nothing goes in paper client files, as most paper filed is an obsolete time waster.
Our very low cost Indian assistants use GoToMyPC to move scans and PDF email attachments to applicable QuickBooks folders on mirrored RAID client data drives. Both drives have the same data for backup. We also back up continuously and weekly to an extra external drive. There is a "3 Unknown" folder on the drive when assistants have doubts about where to file. However, filing mistakes do not really matter, because assistants use a free program to convert all PDF image files to PDF image on OCR text files. We then use the special QuickBooks version of the free Google Desktop program. It indexes the full contents of these files, plus emails, Word, Excel, QuickBooks and other files, regardless of location. It quickly updates its comprehensive automatic index of every word in every file. This is fastest, easiest, least expensive, safest way to file QuickBooks records and far better than expensive software requiring manual coding of file contents.
The special QuickBooks version of the Google Desktop program gives us needed record in seconds, anytime and from anywhere. There are many good reasons why we all use Google for around 2/3 of web searches. The same reasoning applies to why our small CPA QuickBooks ProAdvisor firm saves more than $10,000 a year, not counting money once wasted on missing document searches. That is why we say this is definitely the fastest, easiest, least expensive, safest way to file QuickBooks records and avoid losing them.| |
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