| I am not locked in to Intuit nor justifying their cost increases because it hits all users (wholesale/retail) but their eco-system when taken as a whole makes accounting and payroll generally simple for the small business owner. Of course this is a generic statement and there are outliers that don't fit into their model for reason X or Y. This does not come without a cost, they are definitely moving into the premium offering sphere and away from "DIY" users. There will be user pushback and they will lose users, but I'm sure they have an army of financial analysts that have run the numbers and say they will make more with less users under this model. I have experience working with QB (many variations), Freshbooks, Xero, various Sage products and some specialized vendor software in the Construction and Wholesale space and probably a few others I am forgetting. Freshbooks is mediocre, overall their integrations are poor and without proper setup you end up with poor results, they dont offer payroll and require you to use third party services. This is fine, but just leads to more setup/sync problems which many users are not capable of doing and don't know if the answer is wrong. (PS not all users are tech saavy or know what the end result should be) Ignorance is bliss, I suppose. Xero is alright, I wouldn't say it's significantly better or worse than QB except they have less scale and throw their weight around less (for now) than Intuit does. Sage products have a steep learning curve but have a ton of functionality depending upon which one you land with. Many proprietary industry specific Accounting packages have great modules but from my experience, their core accounting system is not the best (putting it lightly) Most of these seem to have built their success around an industry specific pain and then realized they needed accounting on top to make the package sellable. All that said, an accounting package should be useful for recording, categorizing and utilizing your financial data. That means different things to different people and there is no one size fits all approach - no matter what Intuit or other vendors tell you. If your professional works best with product X, that may be in your best interest to use product X if you value your professional's input to your business not just from a tax reporting but also financial reporting perspective. If you don't, don't use product X. It's really that simple. Sure all these open source products are great for IT nerds and people who love doing accounting (even CPAs!) but if one person (you) is the only one who knows what the software says and the output does not make sense to third parties then it is easily deemed unreliable. You will have a whole host of more complex problems than dealing with Intuit if your financial data is unreliable, let's start with audit or bank problems and expand from there. Source: Am a small biz CPA, have seen (almost) it all including the napkin accounting method. |