LessAccounting vs. QuickBooks Desktop Pro

If you are an entrepreneur and you want to focus on building your business, start with Less Accounting. It's a full-blown accounting system that has a simple implementation and it can connect to your financial accounts to automate many parts of the business. Our 1st four years of business, we worked without a bookkeeper at all due to the level of automation.

It is not limited in any regard and is not simply for invoicing or tracking hours, it more or less does everything. Perhaps one area that it wouldn't be ideal is for firms that need to have more rigid accounting, with charts of accounts etc for industries that are audited or highly regulated.

Incentivized

What I think the QuickBooks Desktop Pro is well suited: 1) Easy to use and effective to navigate while satisfying our financial and accounting functions' needs 2) We upgraded the version from the QuickBooks Desktop to Desktop Pro for its advanced functions and the ability to track the different projects/programs that are essential to organization.

Incentivized

• Categorize Expenses Automatically
• Profit and loss Statements
• Interfaces with Credit Union

Incentivized

• It is easy to manage and adjust inventory on hand.
• It is easy to make reports and customize them to your needs.
• We also use it to pay our employees directly.
• It is easy to make year-to-year comparisons to see where we can make improvements and the current financial situation.

Incentivized

• With the flexibility comes room for folks not adhering to specific accounts. There is no numeric chart of accounts so at times you will see 2 line items for a single item. We tend to overcome this limitation with extensive tagging.
• Invoices and sales orders don't have an obvious way to assign credit to specific salespeople or consultants. We reached out to LA and they have shown us a different way to do this which we'll try soon.
• The visual interface can use some sprucing up. It's easy to navigate but I believe the navigation can be slightly improved. I do find myself hitting the back button to get into other parts of the app.

Incentivized

• QuickBooks Desktop Pro has been around for a few years and after an update[,] they force you to look at the changes/updates before you can use [them] after updating.
• QuickBooks Desktop Pro does not have 2FA.
• QuickBooks Desktop Pro should offer a way to store backups to a personal cloud without having to map a local network drive.

Incentivized

It works, it keeps our historical data and is easy to use

Incentivized

I'd love to keep using it, and do intend to - though we've not been pleased with price increases over the past several years. In fact, we used to subscribe to the payroll service, but QuickBooks priced themselves out of reach for us, so we discontinued that. Currently, pricing would be the primary reason for NOT renewing, if we didn't.

Incentivized

It is a great software that does everything a small business needs it to do, but there are just a few bugs and quirks that make additional software necessary. The slowness of the software occasionally might eventually be overshadowed by the quickness of cloud-based software though.

Incentivized

I haven't experienced a time when QuickBooks Pro was unavailable when I needed it in the entire 20 years of using the software

Incentivized

They are awful. Intuit doesn't spend real money on support. They appear to have typically said, first-level script readers who are sending messages to the senior people for anything even a little bit difficult. Many of them don't speak particularly good English. Considering that they recently doubled (or, if you are paying annually, tripled) their pricing, and touted as one of the benefits that it includes [..] support, it's a real ripoff. However, we have to use the product because it is ubiquitous. I look forward to the day a competitor comes up with something good enough, which has excellent support, that matches all the features QuickBooks Desktop Pro currently has [...] or at least gives us a way to have all the functionality we currently have without excessive sacrifice [...] so that we can switch. I was very satisfied with QuickBooks for many years. This latest [rise] in price, and their sheer gall at touting the benefit of the 100 to 200% increase as being [the] inclusion of support, is what turned me so far against them.

Incentivized

Best thing I ever did was to attend a two day training seminar on QuickBooks, I learned an immense amount in a short time with hands on training by experts. I strongly recommend such training for anyone using any part of the software. It will pay for itself in the first month.

We implemented the software ourselves. The training we received on the software was done by taking a community course teaching us how to use QuickBooks. It allowed me to get started with some basics of how to use the program and have not needed much assistance since completing the course work.

Incentivized

I had been with QuickBooks for a few years (unwillingly) at the behest of accountants. It took me a while to realize there were other options out there and I needed to begin a hunt to find them. I found LessAccounting. While it's not the most appealing software, it sure helped me see the breakdown of things and allowed me to reconcile my books without feeling like I needed a degree in Accounting.

Incentivized

Zoho had great end-user support and it was almost as simple to learn and was as easy to use. But its reports were not as [customizable] as QuickBooks Desktop Pro, and its job cost and department accounting [were] more cumbersome than QuickBooks Desktop Pro was. In addition, while I like an underdog (Zoho) the fact is that it is easier to find staff that [is] comfortable with QuickBooks Desktop Pro than anything else on the market.

Incentivized

• + Less time worrying about my accounting
• + actually reconciling my books at the end of each month or quarter
• + being able to access my P+L anytime!

Incentivized

• QuickBooks Desktop Pro is a no hassle accounting solution that ticks a lot of boxes. It almost never disappoints and organizations will usually keep using it for many years. If anything, the only time I've seen an organization migrate away from it is if they have specific accounting needs, or if the organization has grown to the point that they need a more robust accounting solution. Even then, QuickBooks can usually be maintained within another accounting software system for specific functions, like A/R & A/P for example.

Incentivized