I finally had a chance to try out the newest version of QuickBooks, Simple Start. Unfortunately, it turned out to be even worse than I had suspected it would be based on the descriptions of its features.

Here are some of the notes I made as I was testing it, both with the program’s sample data as well as a new company file I set up myself.

There are almost no setup preference options to customize things, which is a crucial feature of QB to allow it to work more efficiently, especially in regard to reports. Supposedly, some of the Preference settings can be changed in the full QB program by us professional accountants and then the file sent back to the client to use in Simple Start. This is just plain stupid.

There is no Accountant’s Review feature; so clients have to stop using their company files while their accountants work on the copy they are given. This is no better than with Quicken.

No Classes, although the P&L screen says that you can show columns by Class. Even Quicken has Classes, which is where I learned how useful they can be.

Can’t show more than one window.

No ShortCuts or Navigators windows.

The only good feature I could find was that the backup is as good as with regular QB; with one compressed QBB file.

Bottom line, this is just a crippled QuickBooks program, with fewer features than even Quicken has. I give it a thumbs down and advise staying away from this program and just using QuickBooks Basic.

Whichever geniuses at Intuit who thought this crappy program was a positive addition to the QuickBooks product line should get their resumes ready.

This is similar to the dart board picks that the Wall Street Journal used to compare with those made by high paid professional advisors. More often than not, the dart board’s picks beat the pros in terms of return on investment.

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