QB 2002 vs QB 2005

What is the debate? Just to update or do you have some needs that 2002 isn't meeting? 2006 will be out at the end of the year and if you're not having payroll update issues I'd wait for that. I'm on 04 and will do the same when the 06 comes out. So far between 02 & 04 there were small improvements not worth the money I paid in the pro version. So I've decided to wait for every 2nd or 3rd year and see how that works.

Are there any big changes from QB 2002 Basic to QB 2005 Basic? I don't have Payroll cause I am a Ma and Pa shop. Small print shop in the downtown Kingston, Canada.

Lets face it, you know you want the latest and greatest. Go ahead and do it. You deserve it. Are you thinking about moving up the food chain to the Pro or Premium versions of 2005?

Thinking about upgrading to QB 2005 Basic.

The are people at Intuit that spent a great deal of time and effort placing this type of comparative information up on the Quickbooks web site. Why don't you check out the site for yourself.

You should also note that there numerous small impovements what get incorporated with each new version that are not mentioned in the literature but are there for the user's benefit none the less.

As I stated in my original reply there were very small changes between

02 & 04 and between 04 - 05 Basic again small if any improvement. Order the trial version and check it out.

Mark:

You may also want to look at BillQuick 2005. It integrates with QuickBooks and can handle Time Billing functionality real well.

Shafat

I still have 2003 Pro UK but I've seen comments on other users' groups that there have been significant changes between 2002 and 2005.

If you use QB a lot, all the small changes made tend to add up and make an upgrade every three years sensible.

Having said this, I am frustrated by Intuit's failure to eliminate the numerous small, irritating issues in QB, despite their having been pointed out to Intuit on more than one occasion. These changes could probably be effected in a few hours by a competent programmer and would save users collectively millions of unnecessary keystrokes every month but Intuit show no interest.

I could give numerous examples but I'll take the QuickReport (Account/Customer/Supplier) as a representative example. It has the following irritating, needless and time-wasting deficiencies, which I understand have not been eliminated in even the latest versions (or any of the several versions that have appeared since they were first reported to QB):

1. It opens for the period QB decides in its wisdom is the one users will most often want. It does not remember if you change it to a different period ten times in a row. It does not learn, ie in IT-speak it is not intuitive. You cannot even set a default period for which you want it to open.

1. It does not fit onto the screen, spilling off to the right. This is because of all the columns, of which I only use some. If I could just hide the other columns in the default report I would not have to move the columns every time I open an Account QuickReport. But one cannot change the default layout of reports, and in the case of the QuickReport a memorised report is not available as it will relate to that specific account and not the QuickReport generally.

2. The report has the inane heading Account QuickReport in about 20 point type instead of the name of the account concerned. For the details of the account concerned you have to go to the righthand top or the bottom of the body of the report where you'll find it in ordinary type - quite a nuisance if you're in the middle of the report. Even in the Navigator Bar the name Account/Customer/Supplier QuickReport appears - 10 times if you have 10 open. Not much use, I'm afraid, when you want to revert to one already open.

1. Pages are not numbered so one cannot print part of the report except by changing the dates.

2. QB chops and changes between using positive numbers for debits and negative numbers for credits and vice versa. So the polarity of an amount does not tell one whether it is a debit or credit. This reaches the height of absurdity in Suppliers' QuickReports where both debits and credits are shown as negative numbers. If you have any doubt about the difficulties this can cause, call up an Account QuickReport for Retained Earnings and try to work out whether the negative amount shown is the net profit credited to the account or a debit in respect of the transfers out of the account.

1. Some Reports fail to populate certain fields, eg the name of the payer of an amount deposited to the bank account, on the QuickReport for the bank account.

Somehow I think Microsoft will do better on most of these issues in its forthcoming small business accounting package. But it remains to be seen whether it merely has its own bunch of irritations.

Ken