Quickbooks Premier 2004 - 5 Users Multi-Version

Rating:
Summary: No Job Costing Capability
Review: On their QuickBooks web site, Intuit advertises that the program can do job cost tracking. I own a small engineering firm, so we used the Professional Services Edition. For a company like mine, 95% of the cost of any job is labor -- people who are billing time to a client. Unfortunately, QuickBooks doesn't record that on the job cost. So for a job where I bill ten thousand dollars for my engineers' time, with no reimbursables, the job cost is zero. That would be nice, but it is totally worthless as far as knowing which jobs are profitable. If I buy a valve and charge it to the client, that cost will show up though.

It seems to me that a program advertising itself as a Professional Services Edition that does job costing would track the cost of labor. But it doesn't.

QuickBooks also tries to force you to use their payroll service. If you use someone else's service, you can use it with QuickBooks only if you buy an add-on package that works with Excel. So instead of having things work seamlessly, you have to export your payroll information to a new program and work with it there.

These problems made the program absolutely worthless for my use. The one thing I will say for Intuit is they have a 60-day return policy, of which I am taking full advantage.