QuickBooks SimpleStart 2012, 1 User (PC)

My wife is a self-employed pet-carer. Until now, she has been using Excel to manager her accounts, and Word to print her invoices, which is more time-consuming than it ought to be. Quickbooks is designed to make the tasks of a very small business much easier. SimpleStart 2012 theoretically has everything she needs to run her business, but it also has some needlessly annoying features, and the ability to create quotes and to email invoices are either absent or don't work.

Installation is easy, but lengthy, and you can virtually go away and make a cup of tea while Quickbook starts up on a modest office computer. Thankfully, it runs quite quickly once it has started up. You need to type in some basic company information when you start it up for the first time, but you can go back and edit this later if you need to.

The Home screen is a flowchart, showing money coming in on the left, your business in the middle, and money going out on the right. Money coming in consists of sales receipts (where the customer paid at the time of sale) and invoices/receive payments for work you invoice in arrears. Both flows can turn into "Deposits" if you pay them into your bank account. There's an option to accept credit cards: this requires that you sign up with RBS WorldPay, which incurs a monthly fee and a per-transaction payment.

The ability to customise invoices is very useful, and it's extremely flexible. The default invoice has Item, Quantity, Rate and Amount on each line, but my wife wanted to list a date for each item, and to hide the quentity (which for her is always 1). It was quite easy to achieve this using the "Customise" dropdown. Usefully, you don't need to create customers or products in advance: you can create them both "on the fly" as you type in an invoice. This is just as well, because there's no way to import customer or product information from Excel.

You can print invoices. Theoretically, you can also email them as PDFs; however, there doesn't appear to be a way to set Quickbooks up to use your email client. When you first try to email an invoice, you get taken to a preferences page that has no information about how to set up email (the online help shows a completely different version of the Preferences screen).

On the "money out" side, you can write cheques, record expenses or issue refunds. In each case, you can print cheques if you buy Quickbooks cheques (optional stationery). I'm not entirely ssure why you need a separate "write cheques" option - presumably expenses and refunds together cover all options? If you issue a refund, you can either record it as paid, offset it against an invoice or hold it for later payment. If you're recording deposits and cheque payments accurately, you'll also be able to show your current bank balance.

There's no ability to manage stock or pay any employees; however, there are icons on the Home screen for both. If you click on them, you are prompted to upgrade to Quickbooks Pro: an upselling opportunity for the software company.

If the package could email invoices as advertised, this package would be ideal for a self-employed person. If you don't have the need to email invoices, it could save you a lot of valuable time.

Note: I couldn't find how to create estimates until someone from Intuit helped me out. That's because I had clicked the wrong option when I first started the program: if you say you don't create estimates then the "Estimates" icon vanishes from the Home screen. You can turn it back on through the File => Preferences dialogue, and the icon magically reappears.

This is a straightforward introduction to keeping your account. The simplestart version is the next step up from paper acocunts and would ideally be suited to the small home business. Perhaps one starting out. If you have employee's or indeed need a more advanced stock control function I would suggest looking at the pro version or higher but this is indeed an excellent starter package with which to setup shop!

It is easy to install and use and Intuit have excellent online support. I found no negative impact on ym system but I am running an overclocked i5 with 8gb and an ssd for an os drive. I also like that Nathan from Intuit has taken the time to respond to and offer support to any issues highlighted in the reviews.

All in all a nice introduction to book keeping, though I feel it would all too easily be outgrown and maybe the pro version is perhaps best suited to anyone other than the lone home business user?

If you are starting out in business this product is ideal. It's not sophisticated and I got started pretty quickly and found the set up easy to use - just follow the guide. There is also a straightforward "how to" with the CD.

Do you need to send quotes and invoices via email on a PDF attachment? Yes - then this is ideal for you. I've only used if for invoicing. Nothing else, but I can't wait to use the SimpleStart 2012 Pro.

If there has to be a down side, it's a one licence product but you can buy more licences if you need to.