Quickbooks Alternatives

[Atownsend]

Its looking like its about time to make a change. Currently using QBO for just about everything. About 65-70% of our sales are contract, the remainder being retail / wholesale. Some taxable transactions in there which we do pay tax on.

Lucky for me the state decided to send us a sales tax auditor and park him in our office this week. Turns out, our sales tax liability reports aren't tracking correctly. Quickbooks says its a known product issue and their engineers are going to contact me in 24-48 hours to try to resolve the problem. How can such a basic function be broken. If I compare the sales by product/service detail report and include taxable / non taxable lines I get totally different numbers for taxable / gross sales than what is reported on the sales tax liability report. We've always based our returns off of the sales tax liability report. Hard to say when things stopped tracking properly, but I've pretty much lost faith in the platform after spending the last 48 hours on the phone & doing screen sharing with their support team.

If y'all are running QBO, you might want to do a comparison before the auditor pops in and its too late. Apparently this is a known problem and there are dozens of complaints online about sales tax liability reports not tracking properly. I guess at the end of the day its my fault for not noticing the discrepancy... but when you run a basic accounting report through software which millions of people use you kind of just expect the number to line up properly.

So.... after this im probably going to be looking at alternatives. Anyone use sage or the other accounting platforms out there? Need payroll / accounting / all in one solution. Quickbooks is seriously sticky, but this is the last straw.

[Sbrem]

We used Sage a number of years ago, at the recommendation of our accountant, and the year end reports were totally wrong, 2 years running. Back to QB desktop...

Steve

[Admiral]

We use Taxjar in addition to QB.  Has some integrations that help our webstores compliance.

[GoWestRob]

Quickbooks has some very annoying bugs, however this goes way beyond just 'annoying'.  Do you know if this is only related to QBO?  We use QB desktop enterprise and everything seems to add up perfectly for us.

[ebscreen]

Last year we started receiving quarterly refunds back from the state for (I think) payroll tax.

Looked into it and it's a known issue with QB (desktop in our case) bunch of complaints on forums, Intuit says "good luck".
I'm glad it's an error in us paying too much and not the other way around, but eff that. Some of the complaints
we read from other states weren't so lucky.

Structurally speaking QB is the software equivalent of a coal fired steam driven jalopy held together with duct tape and bailing wire.
And it's a monopoly.

[Atownsend]

Last year we started receiving quarterly refunds back from the state for (I think) payroll tax.

Looked into it and it's a known issue with QB (desktop in our case) bunch of complaints on forums, Intuit says "good luck".
I'm glad it's an error in us paying too much and not the other way around, but eff that. Some of the complaints
we read from other states weren't so lucky.

Structurally speaking QB is the software equivalent of a coal fired steam driven jalopy held together with duct tape and bailing wire.
And it's a monopoly.

Wow thats crazy! I just kin of expect the numbers to be  right... ESP payroll damn.

Quickbooks has some very annoying bugs, however this goes way beyond just 'annoying'.  Do you know if this is only related to QBO?  We use QB desktop enterprise and everything seems to add up perfectly for us.

I'm working with a new accounting firm, and they recommend switching to their enterprise system. They say the the online version is a lot buggier than their enterprise / desktop systems and have seen similar issues in the online version.

They say that they will cross reference the STLR with other reports & root out discrepancies before filing, and as a bonus if I get audited again the auditor goes to their office rather than mine. They'll also handle account reconciliation. I haven't seen any issues with payroll, so I was planning on handling that through t sheets / QB payroll still. The audit still blows, but at least we've identified some weaknesses in our accounting systems that will leave us stronger once its all over.

I just still cant wrap my head around how their numbers dont add up. Computers + math are supposed to be right.

[ZooCity]

No accounting app should behave that way but payroll tax errors are a massive no-no.   Our payroll service goofed up one year and had us over paying on the wrong schedule.  The IRS fined us over 7k...for overpaying....due to an error a separate service admitted to causing, that all parties acknowledge was entirely outside our control or knowledge. 

We were early adopters of cloud/web apps and have continued to use Xero for over a decade now.  Bookkeeper likes it, CPA can integrate it to his other apps, seems to tick the boxes.  I'm not the biggest fan of the reporting in it but I often want to see reports in unique formats.   Couldn't say how it does w. sales tax bc we have none in MT.

We use Gusto for payroll/HR, also like it.