Quickbooks 2015 Desktop version review: should you upgrade? If you’re using Quickbooks 2014, 2013 or 2012, probably not. If you’re still using Excel for your business books, yes, you need to upgrade.
Insights
First change in QuickBooks 2015 worthy of note. See the picture above. Now on the home page, there is a tab labelled Insights. It provides a quick overview of your business including income, overdue invoices and limited expenses pie chart. The expenses pie chart is less detailed than the one produced in the Company Snapshot feature but is more clear because of the different colours (compare with Company snapshot picture below).
The whole Insights feature is like a dumbed down version of the Company Snapshot introduced earlier in Quickbooks 2013. It’s great Intuit (the makers of Quickbooks) have finally figured out some people need visuals but I think it would have been better if they had focused on improving the visuals in the Company Snapshot.
Improvements to Reports
The Reports feature of QuickBooks has always been the best part of the software. Now they have added a very groovy feature which I can see accountants and bookkeepers using a lot. There is now an option to comment on line items in a report. See picture below.
Great for any of those odd expenses, unexpected numbers, questions you know a client will ask about the books.
Other changes
Other changes are mostly cosmetic. The contrast on menu items is improved on last year’s version. A few changes in where things are entered. Some more items that you can add to the Company Snapshot.
As usual with newer releases of Quickbooks, it is a bit buggy. Entering dates on bills for examples can be a bit laborious. If you try to manual enter a date it doesn’t like it just blanks out the whole date. You have to use the visual calendar to enter dates which makes the data entry a bit slower.
If you’re still using Excel
Seriously, you need Quickbooks. This software makes it much easier to track income, best clients, best selling products, who owes you money, where you’re spending the most money at a glance with the Company Snapshot. Not only will your accountant love you for getting it, your business coach will too.