Overall Rating:
VERY GOODCompare with other brands
Features:
I have used Quickbooks for many years and had a love / hate relationship. I have had colleagues tell me that they use Quickbooks for everything, including MICR check drafting, so my first call was to Intuit, the publisher of Quickbooks, to find out how to make my $250 version of Quickbooks Pro 2007 print drafts. After only about 30 seconds holding, they told me I just needed an add on a plug-in software they sold called PrintBoss for $149.
Quickbooks and PrintBoss have features galore, including a full accounting suite that links to all of your online banking, and prints your tax returns. It has customer recall, invoicing, payables, receivables, payroll and with PrintBoss you have the ability to also do checks by phone, fax or online.
The only feature missing was a viable web form solution, although you can import a csv from your own form or shopping cart. PrintBoss also has so many other features allowing for check alignment, special printing, payments, multiple payees, auto-fill, print blank checks, and more. You use the back up system build in to Quickbooks.
Ease of Use
While feature packed, it first requires getting into Quickbooks, then setting up the PrintBoss system to do what you want to do. While robust, it is not for beginners, both have a learning curve and do what they are intended to do without question.
How It Works at the Bank
Intuit has been in this business for years, and won the 2003 Better Business Bureau Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics. Because Quickbooks is sold at retail stores, they require authentication to order PrintBoss and follow all marketplace guidelines. The software is constantly updated to comply with new rules and regulations. I used these drafts in desktop deposit, the self scan ATM and at the teller in the business express line and they were treated like normal checks.
Installation Ease
Because Quickbooks is a full accounting suite and a plug in, it takes up tons of space on an XP machine, you should have about 500MB of hard drive space just for this application. Installation was easy, but took a long time on my XP machine, but not as long on my Windows 7 PC.
Help and Support
Intuit has fantastic support for their product when it is still in fashion. They were right there to tell me about PrintBoss, but also reminded me that they no longer support the 2007 version [5 years old] and I should consider the upgrade for $200 to get support. I was able to get PrintBoss to work with my old version without support.
The Full Picture
QuickBooks is a great accounting package and adding PrintBoss will allow you to take checks by phone, checks by fax or online and keep customer records stored on file for monthly billing and invoicing. I found that because I don't use Quickbooks for customer data storage normally, and I use it for accounting, it mixed up my records. To get a second copy of QuickBooks to dedicate to check by phone, Intuit would charge another $249 or offer a two user version $399 and the three user version is $649.
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