QuickBooks vs. Peachtree, QuickBooks add-ons

David Chermak did a good QuickBooks vs. Peachtree review. I appreciate his effort, as he has much more balanced expert QuickBooks vs. Peachtree experience than I now have.

I once used Peachtree exclusively and still occasionally suggest it, mainly for serialized inventory at low cost. However, there are good reasons that QuickBooks now has 94% of the small business accounting program market. These reasons were so dominant that Microsoft dropped Microsoft Money (leaving Quicken almost no competition) and should soon drop Microsoft Accounting. This leaves the once dominant Peachtree number two, in a crowded field of QuickBooks vs. Peachtree.

The reasons for the overwhelming dominance of QuickBooks vs. Peachtree partly relate to the perspective of those who, unlike Mr. Chermak, did not know accounting, much less IT, before learning Peachtree. Many now learn QuickBooks as they learn bookkeeping or accounting. One of the first few QuickBooks Learning Center video tutorials should be mandatory for every business student and businessperson, not simply for accountants and bookkeepers. You might start every bookkeeping or accounting course with it, as I have known many older graduate accountants who never really “got it.”

You should mention the QuickBooks market share in any QuickBooks vs. Peachtree review, as it results in far more extensive pre-release QuickBooks testing. The QuickBooks vs. Peachtree market share also results in abundant low-cost local staff and professional support, compared to other programs. It even relates to maximum savings in exchanging data with accountants, for taxes and financial statements. This can save far more than the annual cost of any QuickBooks except Enterprise. The differences in QuickBooks vs. Peachtree tech and web support mirrors the overwhelming QuickBooks market share. The QuickBooks Wikis and tech-support-backed user-to-user help (which I helped create) won an international award.

Any QuickBooks vs. Peachtree review that leaves out add-on programs also does its readers a disservice. QuickBooks add-ons blow away all QuickBooks vs. Peachtree feature comparisons. These QuickBooks add-ons are the fastest, easiest low-cost way to make QuickBooks far more powerful and feature rich, for far more users, than even most big company programs. These QuickBooks add-ons avoid many separate error-prone databases, with overlapping information, while drastically cutting related time and training needed. Peachtree was once way ahead in this area. It even had a single-user open database version, which excited many of us. Then came the disastrous Sage acquisition. Sage justified the cost by saying, in SEC filed documents, that it would switch many Peachtree users to its higher priced products. It soon dropped the near ready multi-user Peachtree database version. One developer sued over this, since he had done so much in reliance on earlier statements. The biggest blow, however, was that Sage increased the cost of Peachtree add-on listings from $1,000 to $10,000, which NO developer would pay. Today there are almost no Peachtree add-ons. Many that exist are QuickBooks add-on conversions.

By contrast, QuickBooks provided a free Software Development Kit for linking programs to QuickBooks. There were 25,000 SDK downloads the first few days. In 7 years, no upgrade to this SDK or QuickBooks ever broke a working QuickBooks SDK add-on. One QuickBooks keyboard macro add-on failed due to a QuickBooks upgrade. The program did state unemployment tax reports before QuickBooks did, so it effectively competed with QuickBooks when it failed. It also failed the week before Christmas, when Intuit is busy with QuickBooks and tax table upgrades, installs and bug fixes. Despite this, I notified the amazing Brad Smith, now QuickBooks CEO, at the request of a developer that I never met. Two days later Brad’s team had a tentative fix for testing. Three days after that QuickBooks distributed the fix to everyone. That approach is why there were soon thousands of QuickBooks add-ons at QuickBooks-add-ons.com. Six hundred of the best QuickBooks add-ons are tested, reviewed and rated at Marketplace.intuit.com.

Intuit is now extending these QuickBooks add-ons to the web cloud as Intuit Federated Applications. Soon this will give any web developer the fastest, easiest and least expensive way to link any web application and database to QuickBooks. There are now five million QuickBooks companies with 25 million employees. It seems likely that Intuit will soon add the 25+ million users of Quicken, TurboTax and its other programs to this. This should create an international network of immense value. At that point Peachtree and Sage’s larger company programs may find that the best way to get the add-ons their users want will be to link to the Intuit QuickBooks cloud. That will make many QuickBooks vs. Peachtree comparisons meaningless. Therefore, the big question is whether you want to benefit from QuickBooks vs. Peachtree sooner or much later.