Moving From Quicken To QuickBooks

In our push to get all of our clients using QuickBooks for all of their business and personal bookkeeping, we have had some resistance from people who are already using Quicken for their personal books. The only really good reason to stick with Quicken is if you are using its ability to check market values of your stock portfolio, a feature that QuickBooks doesn't have. If the benefits of that feature offset the more cumbersome file backup and sharing capabilities inherent in Quicken, and the clients are comfortable with the zipping needed to send me their data files, I've agreed to let them stay on Quicken.

An argument that I've received from a couple of different clients is that switching from Quicken to QuickBooks will cost them more money. While the QuickBooks program does have a slightly higher purchase price than Quicken, all of these clients who expressed that complaint were already using QuickBooks for their corporations' bookkeeping. My guess is that they were under the impression that they had to buy a new copy of QuickBooks for each company they were setting up books for. That is not true. With the same copy of QuickBooks (or Quicken), you can set up an unlimited number of different companies. I use my single copy of QuickBooks to work on literally hundreds of different company files. Normally, it's just a matter of setting up a company file for the 1040 info (Smith1040) and another one for the corporation's (Smith1120). Switching back and forth between them is very easy. I always add an "Open Company" button to the icon bar to make it a one click process.

Another possible reason for the worry over cost might be the perceived need to spend a lot of time reentering info into the new QuickBooks file that had already been input into Quicken. Again, this is an erroneous concern. QuickBooks is able to import every bit of information from a Quicken data file, with nothing lost in the transition. I have done it hundreds of times. The only limitation is that the version of QuickBooks you are using must be at least as new as the version of Quicken you had been using. For example, you can import Quicken 2002 data into QuickBooks 2002; but you can't import Quicken 2003 data into QuickBooks 2002. You would have to use QuickBooks 2003.

KMK
- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 1/06/2003 02:59:00 PM Send this post: