What are some of the limitations of QuickBooks?
Close the period. Many accountants like to have a hard close of the books at the end of a period. What does that mean? It means that when the results for a month, quarter or year have been finalized, you cannot go back and make any changes. You simply roll any adjustments into the subsequent period. That is what accountants love. They want a finality to each period. With QuickBooks there is no established procedure to finalize a period. However, you can protect a period from any changes by simply going to the preferences tab for accounting and setting a date prior to which no changes will be allowed unless a password is entered by the administrator of the file.
Inventory Inventory tracking is not a strong feature of QuickBooks. It will only do average costing [no LIFO or FIFO] and it will not track inventory in more than one location. There are many add-on programs that will make up for this shortcoming [ Fishbowl Inventory, Velocity Inventory, etc..] In addition, for retailers QuickBooks has a Point of Sale program for tracking inventory for many stores which integrates well with the Financial QuickBooks program.
Memorized Transactions You can memorize a transaction in QuickBooks such as invoices. However, if anything needs to change [except for the billing date] on those memorized transactions such as description changes for items the customer is being billed for, then the memorized transactions do not work since changes to items do not carry-forward into memorized transactions. There are a few add-on programs that will create new memorized transactions outside of QuickBooks en mass which you can then import into QuickBooks for processing.
It is too easy to make copies of your QuickBooks Files. We have many clients that have ten different copies of their QuickBooks file and they do not know which one is the current one. They have some transactions on one version and other transactions on other versions. How does this happen? These people do not pay attention to which file they are currently using when they are in QuickBooks. That can be easily done by just pressing the "F2" button on your keyboard. Also, some people are so accustomed to using programs such as Microsoft's Outlook -- programs which will automatically integrate and update entries from many different sources, such as your cell phone, your laptop and desktop computers, that they are amazed that their QuickBooks files do not have that same functionality. There are however third party software packages which will allow you to update transactions from one QuickBooks file into another.
