Should I Settle for QuickBooks Pro Over Premier?

Question: My accountant says that I should switch to QuickBooks for my accounting system. She said that QuickBooks Pro should work just fine for my business. Is that what I should use?

Answer: I agree with the “QuickBooks” half of her answer, but suggest “Premier” be the other half.

Using QuickBooks, because it is the No. 1 accounting software for small- to medium-sized businesses, makes it easier to find CPA’s and bookkeepers who know the software. It’s helpful.

Premier, because it has sales orders, which are pivotal in managing an ad specialty order, is the best for our industry. Once you create a sales order or order acknowledgement in Premier, you can create a supplier purchase order with the click of a button. All the line items from the sales order will auto-populate into the supplier purchase order, waiting only for you to add the net prices. Once the order is complete and you have adjusted the sales order and supplier purchase orders with information from the supplier invoice, a customer invoice can be created with a click of the mouse from the sales order.

QuickBooks Pro does not have this sales order function, which requires data to be re-entered, repeatedly—costing time and creating opportunities for error.

Your accountant is like others who suggest QuickBooks Pro or QuickBooks Online because these versions work just fine for their current clients. But ours is a complex business to account for. Ours is neither common nor typical. Even the QuickBooks help desk will suggest Pro or Online. They too do not know the details involved in an Ad Specialty order.

I recommend QuickBooks Premier for 90 percent of ad specialty distributors and for very large distributors, there is Enterprise, Premier’s big brother.

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