Quickbooks is the industry standard for financial management. Even if
you don't use Quickbooks, your accountant probably does and you'll
find the widest range of support and services when you use Quickbooks
to run your business. It is, as they say, the 800-pound gorilla you
have to deal with in the financial world. When people are considering
making the switch from PC to Mac, being able to transfer their
Quickbooks information is a key concern. Every year, Intuit promises
more compatibility with the Windows version of Quickbooks and promises
to bring more of the Windows features to the Mac platform.

Unfortunately, Intuit woefully under-delivers on their promise. The
last time I considered using Quickbooks on the Mac was 2006. Back
then it wasn't compatible with my bank or my credit card company, yet
the Windows counterpart was. Like many other Mac users, I run
Quickbooks on my Mac via a Windows virtual machine. Not having to
boot up Windows every time I want to enter invoices would be a welcome
change. All said and done, I'm still going to have to keep Windows on
my Mac...sigh.

According to Intuit, the key "new" feature of 2010 compared to
previous versions is the ability to accept credit cards directly from
within Quickbooks using Intuit's merchant services solution. If you
already do this on the PC, then the switch will be easy. Otherwise,
you need to setup an account with Intuit, which may have higher rates
then you get from your bank. Another new feature is a setup guide
and wizard, but most people would probably use an accountant or
bookkeeper for such things, so this feature is of limited value.

The good news for Quickbooks 2010 is that it accurately talks with my
credit card company to download information. Additionally, while it
did import the raw data correctly from my PC Quickbooks 2008, it did
not important my custom reports nor my custom invoices that I paid my
accountant to create. In spite of the claimed "improved"
compatibility with the Windows counterpart Quickbooks for the Mac
failed to deliver. To be fair, Intuit claims that I should be running
Quickbooks 2010 for Windows and I would have seen more reports
transfer over. On a practical level, if you already paid for
Quickbooks 2010 for the PC, you are much less likely to switch to a
Mac.

Additionally, contact syncing with the address book simply didn't work
at all. Tech support was most unhelpful, but did seem to indicate
that if you already have contacts in your address book, Quickbooks
isn't smart enough to figure out to merge the contact info. This is
important because most people using Quickbooks likely already have
their customers as contacts in their Mac address book.

Typical of Quickbooks is the inclusion of a variety of glitches,
crashes and anomalies Mac users have come to expect from an Intuit
product. I waited to do the review hoping that each new update to the
program would fix some of these problems. With each update, some bugs
were fixed while others were introduced. I've always been wary of
Quickbooks updates since the famous debacle in December of 2007 where
an update destroyed the desktop files of unsuspecting Mac users.

if you are starting as a new business, the wizards will help get you
off to a good start. New users won't have to worry about importing
from Windows and won't encounter the transfer problems with older
versions Existing Mac or Windows Quickbooks users will find little
value in upgrading to this newer version and should save their money
for something else.

Pros: The most Mac compatible version of Quickbooks to date
Cons: Not reliable and inconsistent compatibility and feature parity
with PC version.

"Originally published and written for the Lawrence
Apple Users' Group 2.0 http:// www.laugks.org/news and published by
the author at http://www.clickheretech.com"
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