Q:

Subject: quickbooks 2005

 

Hi, I'd like to first say thank you very, very much for the information you post to your website.

If you have time to answer a question I've got, please reply.

 

As a student, I have the option of buying QB 2004 pro or 2005 pro for $99.

I am in an introductory accounting class at the Austin Community College, and we're using 2004 pro.

In one page of your website, you recommended that a reader choose 2004 over 2005 due to importability issues you were having with 2005 (if I recall correctly).

However, in your version section, you suggest buying QB 2005, just not the simple start or online version.

 

Since buying 2005 would give me an extra year of support for the same price, I normally would default to that.

 

But since I am learning 2004 in class, and you at one time recommended staying away from '05, I'm undecided.

 

Can you advise on this? Has 2005 been updated to the point that it is a better program than '04, or is '04 still the better program?

 

Thank you!

 A:

 There are a couple of issues to consider.  If you are going to be using the same data files on both your own and the college's computers, you must be using the same version of QB.  QB 2004 files can be converted to run on QB 2005; but that is a one-way conversion.  You would not be able to run QB 2005 format data files on QB 2004.

If you won't be sharing data files and just want a QB program for your own use, getting the 2005 version will give you another year of support from Intuit because it will be orphaned a whole year later than they will be dumping the 2004 program.

It was true that for the first several months after the 2005 program was released that I had a lot of problems keeping it functioning on my main computer.  I had to uninstall and reinstall the program every three or four weeks.  It seemed to be caused by conflicts with one or more of the other versions of QB that I have installed on this computer, because I didn't have the same kinds of problems on any of our other computers where only QB 2005 was installed.  One of the QB service maintenance releases must have taken care of the conflict problems because I have had QB 2005 running on my main computer, along with seven other versions, without any problems for the past three months. 

Good luck.  I hope this helps you decide.

Kerry Kerstetter

 

- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 3/09/2006 12:25:00 PM Send this post: