Why QuickBooks?

Your friend is full of crap.

Because "free" or "open source" are the opposite of capitalism and most businesses don't like to promote communism. A better example is Linux. Linux has 0.86% market share on the desktop (Microsoft has something like 92%).

What's "a lot?" A dozen? A hundred-thousand? Even a hundred thousand is just "noise" compared to 65 million (or how many ever QB users there are).

Could be. His accountant probably uses the Accountant's Edition which takes a QB file and does whatever accountants do. When using another system, the accountant will have to do it the old-fashioned way: by hand. That costs more. It's the difference between spray-painting your car and using a brush (or roller).

You presume to speak for all people who put a shingle out that says accountant?

In the world there is surly someone fool enough to try that.

So IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Redhat, and Novell, are all run by commies? I had no idea. Doesn't Intuit give some software away for free?

The shingle actually says "CPA" and I don't think he is the only accountant with a policy like that.

It's 2008. Accountants use special software for handling interim and year end engagements. These programs are used to make adjusting journal entries, generate financial statments and export to their tax software. All that is needed is a copy of the client's trial balance and GL. I havn't performed year end work by hand in 20 years.

They targeted the small business years ago, almost giving the program away. The Accountants had to follow suit. Vicious cycle in place. Good business model, not so good software. Too many intentional handicaps. I'd recommend the stock however, they seem to be quite the vultures when it comes to sales and promotions.

Most IT people hate it, but they have to install what people want.

To put it briefly, you have to do things to make QB work in a business network that should not be necessary with a well-designed program. Some of those things compromise the reliability of other programs and the OS itself. Starting with QB 2007 it alegedly is not necessary to take those measures any more, but I only started with 2007 recently so I'm not sure yet. Anyway, it took them way too long to fix the problems.

I think qb is average at best, I use it because i know how to and because we use payroll which seems to work ok versus the alternative...that is...paying someone else to learn it. I'd be suprised if open source suported payroll in any capacity but perhaps it does.

Quickbooks is not easy, it's a pain in the butt, especially with payroll, b/c you're forced to upgrade. I remember a couple years ago, we were 'forced' to upgrade from I beilve 2003 to 2006 b/c of payroll...so we get the 5 user upgrade and load it on the computers, then some crazy message comes up that says something like, if your using a server you must have ONE COPY OF QBPRO ON YOUR SERVER. well I dont know what your servers are like but no one uses our server, its the server it isnt a 'pc' that an employee would use, so we really only had a 4 pack and sure enough about 8 months later we get the 2007 upgrade disk.

THEN we get 2008 mandatory upgrade due to payroll, no big deal b/c it's 'free upgrade' for payroll users, but guess what??? Intuit now only offers 3 pack, well we have 5 computers that use qbpro, so I call them and their response? We only have 3 pack, you'll have to use that and buy 2 individual users...I'm afraid to upgrade to be honest but we'll have to eventually.

Getting back to easy, it's easy for me because I took a lot of time to learn it and perhaps also b/c i have an mba and some general understanting of accounting, but it is a difficult system, maybe it's easy relative to other accounting packages i'm not sure.

Grading it out, qb pro - c+, quickbooks online - F is sux

So, it appears you have been using QB since 2003 and are quite unhappy with the product. How many years are you going to continuing using it or does crying in my beer make up for the programs deficiencies?

Mac and linux users are not crazy about Intuit. A lot of the reviews on amazon are less than enthusiastic. But, in spite of the gripes, I guess most SMBs still consider QB to be the most suitable solution.

Intuit seems to be more aggressive in their pricing of quickbooks. I am guessing that might have to do with competition from msft.