QuickBooks
Encyclopedia
QuickBooks is a line of business accounting software
developed and marketed by Intuit.
and Tom Proulx
in Mountain View, California
, USA
. After the success of Quicken
for individual financial management, the company developed a similar solution for small business owners.
, as well as non-conformity with traditional accounting standards.
capabilities, double-entry accounting functions and increased functions. By 2000, Intuit had developed Basic and Pro versions of the software and, in 2003, started offering industry-specific versions, with workflow processes and reports designed for each of these business types along with terminology associated with the trades.
Options now include versions for manufacturers, wholesalers, professional service firms, contractors, non-profit entities and retailers, in addition to one specifically designed for professional accounting firms who service multiple small business clients. In May 2002 Intuit launched QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions for medium-sized businesses.
In September 2005 QuickBooks had 74% of the market. A June 19, 2008 Intuit Press Release said that as of March 2008, QuickBooks' share of retail units in the business accounting category reached 94.2 percent, according to NPD Group. It also says that more than 50,000 accountants, CPAs and independent business consultants are members of the QuickBooks ProAdvisor program. By then Brad Smith was the new CEO, though former CEO Steve Bennett had nearly tripled Intuit revenue and quadrupled earnings in eight years. QuickBooks has become so dominant that there are now several QuickBooks wikis.
and U.K. divisions offer versions of QuickBooks that support the unique needs of each region, such as Canada's GST
, HST
or PST sales tax and European VAT
for the UK edition. Reckon Ltd, under licence from Intuit, publishes versions for the Australian, New Zealand and Singapore markets. Support for Irish and South African VAT is available in the Quickbooks UK edition.
The Mac version is only available in the US.
, marketing options through Google
, and improved e-mail functionality through Microsoft Outlook
and Outlook Express
. For the 2008 version, the company has also added import from Excel
spreadsheets, additional employee time tracking options, pre-authorization of electronic funds and new Help functions. In June 2007, Intuit announced that QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions would run on Linux servers, whereas previously it required a Windows server to run.
Until recently, the only browser supported by QuickBooks Online was Internet Explorer
. However, Mozilla Firefox
is now supported on PCs and Safari
is now supported on the Mac platform. One may also access QuickBooks Online via an iPhone
, a BlackBerry
web app, and an Android.
QuickBooks Online does not offer all of the features of the desktop versions of QuickBooks, and has many features that work differently than they do in desktop versions.
Starting from 2011, Intuit has offered a UK-specific QBOE version that addresses the specific VAT
and European tax system.
Since 2009, Reckon Ltd has offered an online version for Australian customers, known as QuickBooks Hosted by Reckon Online. Unlike other online products, the Australian offering is a full-featured version of the QuickBooks software.
Intuit's Lacerte and ProLine tax preparation software for professional accountant
s who prepare tax returns for a living integrates with QuickBooks in this way. Microsoft Office also integrates with QuickBooks.
Compared to other versions of QuickBooks, fewer third-party add-ons integrate with QuickBooks Online Edition.
In addition to add-on products and an online edition, Intuit recently incepted a Commercial Hosting Program, allowing commercial service providers to offer hosted versions of QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise. Further, the QuickBooks Commercial Hosting Program allows the commercial service providers to offer rental licensing for the Pro and Premier QuickBooks editions. Hosting allows businesses to use all features of the desktop version of QuickBooks, but to run it as an Internet-accessed solution with anytime, anywhere capability and full security and management.
In April 2006, Intuit disabled functionality of add-on services for QuickBooks 2003 in the areas of Bill Pay, Credit Card Download, Do-It-Yourself Payroll, Employee Organizer, Merchant Service, Online Banking, Online Billing, and Support Plans and Services. Since then, Intuit has disabled equivalent functions for all QuickBooks versions approximately 30 months after it has stopped selling them. In 2009 Intuit also prohibited QuickBooks hosting companies from hosting older QuickBooks versions.
On 15 December 2007, the company released a version of its automatic updater for Mac OS X
with a serious program error. The company fixed the updater on 17 December, but by then it had caused substantial data loss for a number of users.
With Quickbooks 2007, the company introduced the Quickbooks Database Server Manager program, which must reside on the computer hosting the data files and which many users have experienced problems with.
QuickBooks Online suffered an extended outage on February 2, 2009, and again due to power failures on June 16–17, 2010. Many customers complained on the company's forum, and threatened to leave the service for a competitor such as Sage
. Brad Smith, Intuit CEO, apologized for the series of outages, totaling around 60 hours, which affected most Intuit online products and tech support. A later July 14 outage resulted in a second Intuit CEO apology. This letter refers to Intuit's "new online products", "designed for 24/7 availability" and to "aggressively migrating" to two new data centers. This suggests that millions of users previously had not been using such programs or data centers, though replicated data centers were industry standard practice by 2004.
A QuickBooks 2009 online banking module had major problems, which resulted in hundreds of comments in several threads on the Intuit Community discussion forum. The QuickBooks product manager used these as an official thread to discuss problems, which were resolved in March 2009.
When in 2011 Intuit started to offer a specific European QBOE version that addressed the specific VAT and European tax system, users without a UK credit card were unable to enroll for the trial period, nor were they able to buy the service.
Accounting software
Accounting software is application software that records and processes accounting transactions within functional modules such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and trial balance. It functions as an accounting information system...
developed and marketed by Intuit.
History
Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott CookScott Cook
Scott David Cook is a founder of Intuit, has been a director of Intuit since March 1983 and is currently Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board. Cook also serves on the boards of directors of eBay Inc., and The Procter & Gamble Company....
and Tom Proulx
Tom Proulx
Tom Proulx is an American computer programmer and company founder. He was a co-founder of Intuit and a pioneer of usability testing in the 1980s...
in Mountain View, California
Mountain View, California
-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...
, USA
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. After the success of Quicken
Quicken
Quicken is a personal finance management tool developed by Intuit, Inc.Quicken runs on Windows and Macintosh systems. Previous versions ran on DOS. An online version is also available. The last version of Quicken for Macintosh computers was Quicken Essentials for Mac released in February 2010...
for individual financial management, the company developed a similar solution for small business owners.
Initial release
The software was popular among small business owners who had no formal accounting training. As such, the software soon claimed up to 85 percent of the small business accounting software market. It continues to command the vast majority of this market. Professional accountants, however, were not satisfied with early versions of the system, citing poor security controls such as no audit trailAudit trail
Audit trail is a sequence of steps supported by proof documenting the real processing of a transaction flow through an organization, a process or a system.....
, as well as non-conformity with traditional accounting standards.
Subsequent releases
Intuit sought to bridge the gap with these accounting professionals, eventually providing full audit trailAudit trail
Audit trail is a sequence of steps supported by proof documenting the real processing of a transaction flow through an organization, a process or a system.....
capabilities, double-entry accounting functions and increased functions. By 2000, Intuit had developed Basic and Pro versions of the software and, in 2003, started offering industry-specific versions, with workflow processes and reports designed for each of these business types along with terminology associated with the trades.
Options now include versions for manufacturers, wholesalers, professional service firms, contractors, non-profit entities and retailers, in addition to one specifically designed for professional accounting firms who service multiple small business clients. In May 2002 Intuit launched QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions for medium-sized businesses.
In September 2005 QuickBooks had 74% of the market. A June 19, 2008 Intuit Press Release said that as of March 2008, QuickBooks' share of retail units in the business accounting category reached 94.2 percent, according to NPD Group. It also says that more than 50,000 accountants, CPAs and independent business consultants are members of the QuickBooks ProAdvisor program. By then Brad Smith was the new CEO, though former CEO Steve Bennett had nearly tripled Intuit revenue and quadrupled earnings in eight years. QuickBooks has become so dominant that there are now several QuickBooks wikis.
International versions
Versions of this product are available in many different markets. Intuit's CanadianIntuit Canada
Intuit Canada is a developer of financial management and tax preparation solutions for personal finance and small business accounting. Services are delivered on a variety of platforms including application software, software connected to services, software as a service, platform as a service and...
and U.K. divisions offer versions of QuickBooks that support the unique needs of each region, such as Canada's GST
Value added tax
A value added tax or value-added tax is a form of consumption tax. From the perspective of the buyer, it is a tax on the purchase price. From that of the seller, it is a tax only on the "value added" to a product, material or service, from an accounting point of view, by this stage of its...
, HST
Harmonized Sales Tax
The Harmonized Sales Tax is the name used in Canada to describe the combination of the federal Goods and Services Tax and the regional Provincial Sales Tax into a single value added sales tax in five of the ten Canadian provinces: Ontario, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, British...
or PST sales tax and European VAT
Value added tax
A value added tax or value-added tax is a form of consumption tax. From the perspective of the buyer, it is a tax on the purchase price. From that of the seller, it is a tax only on the "value added" to a product, material or service, from an accounting point of view, by this stage of its...
for the UK edition. Reckon Ltd, under licence from Intuit, publishes versions for the Australian, New Zealand and Singapore markets. Support for Irish and South African VAT is available in the Quickbooks UK edition.
The Mac version is only available in the US.
Features
Intuit has integrated several web-based features into QuickBooks, including remote access capabilities, remote payroll assistance and outsourcing, electronic payment functions, online banking and reconciliation, mapping features through integration with Google MapsGoogle Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...
, marketing options through Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
, and improved e-mail functionality through Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office suite...
and Outlook Express
Outlook Express
Outlook Express is an email and news client that is included with Internet Explorer versions 4.0 through 6.0. As such, it is also bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003, and is available for Windows 3.x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95 and Mac OS 9...
. For the 2008 version, the company has also added import from Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
spreadsheets, additional employee time tracking options, pre-authorization of electronic funds and new Help functions. In June 2007, Intuit announced that QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions would run on Linux servers, whereas previously it required a Windows server to run.
QuickBooks Online Edition
Intuit also offers a hosted solution called QuickBooks Online Edition (QBOE). The user pays a monthly subscription fee rather than an upfront fee and accesses the software exclusively through a secure logon via a web browser. Intuit hosts all of the user's data, provides patches, and regularly upgrades the software automatically.Until recently, the only browser supported by QuickBooks Online was Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
. However, Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
is now supported on PCs and Safari
Safari (web browser)
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...
is now supported on the Mac platform. One may also access QuickBooks Online via an iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
, a BlackBerry
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...
web app, and an Android.
QuickBooks Online does not offer all of the features of the desktop versions of QuickBooks, and has many features that work differently than they do in desktop versions.
Starting from 2011, Intuit has offered a UK-specific QBOE version that addresses the specific VAT
Value added tax
A value added tax or value-added tax is a form of consumption tax. From the perspective of the buyer, it is a tax on the purchase price. From that of the seller, it is a tax only on the "value added" to a product, material or service, from an accounting point of view, by this stage of its...
and European tax system.
Since 2009, Reckon Ltd has offered an online version for Australian customers, known as QuickBooks Hosted by Reckon Online. Unlike other online products, the Australian offering is a full-featured version of the QuickBooks software.
QuickBooks Point of Sale
QuickBooks Point of Sale is software that replaces a retailer's cash register, tracks its inventory, sales, and customer information, and provides reports for managing its business and serving its customers.Add-on programs
Through the Solutions Marketplace, Intuit encouraged third-party software developers to create programs that fill niche areas for specific industries and integrate with QuickBooks. The Intuit Developer Network provides marketing and technical resources, including SDKs for EDI.Intuit's Lacerte and ProLine tax preparation software for professional accountant
Accountant
An accountant is a practitioner of accountancy or accounting , which is the measurement, disclosure or provision of assurance about financial information that helps managers, investors, tax authorities and others make decisions about allocating resources.The Big Four auditors are the largest...
s who prepare tax returns for a living integrates with QuickBooks in this way. Microsoft Office also integrates with QuickBooks.
Compared to other versions of QuickBooks, fewer third-party add-ons integrate with QuickBooks Online Edition.
In addition to add-on products and an online edition, Intuit recently incepted a Commercial Hosting Program, allowing commercial service providers to offer hosted versions of QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise. Further, the QuickBooks Commercial Hosting Program allows the commercial service providers to offer rental licensing for the Pro and Premier QuickBooks editions. Hosting allows businesses to use all features of the desktop version of QuickBooks, but to run it as an Internet-accessed solution with anytime, anywhere capability and full security and management.
Criticisms
The 1999 version of QuickBooks forced users to pay an additional fee for payroll table updates. The 2000 version of QuickBooks tried to force users to pay an additional fee for payroll tax updates for each company file. After a boycott, this fee was changed to one charge per copy of QuickBooks.In April 2006, Intuit disabled functionality of add-on services for QuickBooks 2003 in the areas of Bill Pay, Credit Card Download, Do-It-Yourself Payroll, Employee Organizer, Merchant Service, Online Banking, Online Billing, and Support Plans and Services. Since then, Intuit has disabled equivalent functions for all QuickBooks versions approximately 30 months after it has stopped selling them. In 2009 Intuit also prohibited QuickBooks hosting companies from hosting older QuickBooks versions.
On 15 December 2007, the company released a version of its automatic updater for Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
with a serious program error. The company fixed the updater on 17 December, but by then it had caused substantial data loss for a number of users.
With Quickbooks 2007, the company introduced the Quickbooks Database Server Manager program, which must reside on the computer hosting the data files and which many users have experienced problems with.
QuickBooks Online suffered an extended outage on February 2, 2009, and again due to power failures on June 16–17, 2010. Many customers complained on the company's forum, and threatened to leave the service for a competitor such as Sage
Sage Group
The Sage Group plc , commonly known as Sage, is a global enterprise software company headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. It is the world's third-largest supplier of enterprise resource planning software , the largest supplier to small businesses, and has 6.1 million customers...
. Brad Smith, Intuit CEO, apologized for the series of outages, totaling around 60 hours, which affected most Intuit online products and tech support. A later July 14 outage resulted in a second Intuit CEO apology. This letter refers to Intuit's "new online products", "designed for 24/7 availability" and to "aggressively migrating" to two new data centers. This suggests that millions of users previously had not been using such programs or data centers, though replicated data centers were industry standard practice by 2004.
A QuickBooks 2009 online banking module had major problems, which resulted in hundreds of comments in several threads on the Intuit Community discussion forum. The QuickBooks product manager used these as an official thread to discuss problems, which were resolved in March 2009.
When in 2011 Intuit started to offer a specific European QBOE version that addressed the specific VAT and European tax system, users without a UK credit card were unable to enroll for the trial period, nor were they able to buy the service.