[ale] OT: not quickbooks

[walter Sams]

While quickbooks is very easy to use, as an accounting tool it has one
Major drawback.  You can change any transaction in any time period
without leaving any trail of what you did.  So, you do your taxes and
keep on using the same data file to do next years books.  You need to
review something in the prior year and for what ever reason, intended or
unintended, you change a receivable from 10000.00 to 1000.00. The
program will ask you if you want to change this posted transaction, you
tell it yes and as far as anyone knows the transaction was 1000.00.  But
then you do next years taxes. the ending balance of the books for the
prior year do not agree with the beginning balance of this years books.
oops.   Now your accountant, the bank and the IRS have no confidence in
the accuracy of your books. 

If you have someone help you with your data entry, its easy for them to
cook the books without you knowing it, or make honest errors that are
hard to find.  If your wife gets really pissed, imagine what she could
bring upon you at tax time.  

The main purpose of accounting packages is to allow you to present
accurate data to yourself, banks, investors, vendors and the IRS.

For a small company or a single person LLC the data file size might not
be a problem, but for my company, 14 employees, we noticed that half way
through the year the program was slowing down, reports took longer and
longer to generate, transactions took longer to post.  I looked into
this and found that the data file for quickbooks is a single file, one,
uno ... This means that as you move through the accounting year the data
file can get quite large and each time the program posts or queries it
has to look through the entire file.

If you want to archive the data file, the way quickbooks does it is to
take all completed transactions and store them in an archive, then in
the current data file all completed transactions are converted to a
couple of journal entries and all the detail is deleted.  Now when you
look at prior year activity it is nothing but a journal entry that makes
no sense. you have to reopen the archive in a new location in order to
find the data. Most formal accounting programs have seperate files for
all the various activities and are able to actually close time periods
so that the transactions cannot be altered in prior periods.  The detail
is still accessable without going into an archive file. 

Quickbooks cannot be customized, you can buy 3rd party programs which
can give added utility to the program, but if you need to add a feature
to the program, it is not possible. I had to locate a 3rd party program
for estimating and doing certified payroll. This added over 1000.00 to
the cost of my software and required updating as well.

Quickbooks requires internet explorer to be loaded on the computer just
to install and run,  Quickbooks requires a quarterly update online to
keep the payroll feature working. The update is not free, it is a yearly
fee which increases every year. If you do not get the update on time,
your payroll will not calculate the taxes.  This actually happened to
me, the internet went down during a payroll session, we had passed the
update date and could not process payroll.  It was Friday and 14
construction workers were headed to the shop to get paid..............
major problimo.

I predict that there will come a time in the near future that Quickbooks
will be strickly an online accounting package, ie, your data will be
stored in your computer but the program is in the quickbooks server in
anytown USA.  So what happens on Friday, your crews are coming in to get
paid, and the internet doesn't work.........

When M$ launched windowsXP, guess what, yep, I had to upgrade
quickbooks, but then I had to upgrade my other packages as well.  

At this point, I installed linux in all computers and got new accounting
software.(I refused to go the xp and upgrade route for M$)  

That is my 2 cents worth (we used quickbooks for 7years)

Walter Sams



On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 17:59, Preston Boyington wrote:
> > Since you are using the ALE list quickbooks is out, so there 
> > is no need to bother you with why the irs doesnt like that program (
> or me either
> > for that matter)
> > 
> 
> would you mind elaborating on this?  i am trying to convience a friend
> to do away with quickbooks and any information you could share would
> be appreciated.
> 
> also it seems that SQL-Ledger is a popular choice, but what are others
> using as a replacement for quickbooks?
> 
> Preston
> 
> 
> 
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