The Problem with Quickbooks 2006

The problem with Quickbooks 2006 is that it was released for public consumption. There I've said it. This version of Quickbooks is the equivalent of Windows ME. It's a disaster. The first 3 revisions crashed servers. Lots of dead bodies. By March they were up to revision 5. Now Intuit says that anyone running payroll through Quickbooks has to upgrade. We've spent way too much time trying to get 2005 data to convert into 2006 data. It fails, it fails, oh look it worked this time....Very Frustrating.

What happened? Intuit made a complete start from scratch redo of the data structure. If you want to share Quickbooks data, then the application now has to be installed on the server and a database is created to manage the shared access of the data. In theory this should allow Intuit to grow the Quickbooks line into companies that want to share data with more than 5 users. They haven't expanded this limitation yet, but I expect it to happen pretty soon. Essentially they have taken the first giant step into making Quickbooks a client/server application like MAS 200 or Great Plains. Looks like they bit off more than they could chew and rather than delaying the release pushed the newly redesigned Quickbooks out the door on schedule but untested.

Revision 5 works with minor issues but you can't get it on any CD. You've got to download it from Intuit. Do not load Quickbooks 2006 from the CD. Doing so could be a network disaster. Today Intuit released revision 6 of Quickbooks 2006. Maybe this one will work. They say that they've corrected an additional 25 error conditions.

Amy Babinchak
Harbor Computer Services