Quickbooks Point of Sale

Buena experiencia, preocupada por la imagen del producto.

I've used QuickBooks Pro in my retail liquor store for about fourteen months. I don't like it, for four main reasons:

First, if I'm making a sale and I notice the price of the product or the on-hand quantity is wrong the software won't allow me to make corrections from the "Make a Sale" screen. It will allow me to change the price, but the change will show up on the receipt as a "discount," and the price will remain wrong in the database. To change the price or the on-hand quantity in the database requires exiting from the "Make a Sale" function and then entering the "Item List" function. This is impractical to do when a customer is waiting to pay and get on his way. It is also inconvenient and cumbersome to switch back and forth when we are checking in replacement inventory items during business hours and we have to get out of the “Item List” and go to the “Make a Sale” function. When we had Microsoft Point of Sale we could do both functions from the same screen.

Second, QuickBooks Pro will not produce a simple report showing what products were sold and how many were sold during a previous period of time, plus how many remain in inventory. I need to know this information so I can decide what items to replace in inventory. QuickBooks Pro will report all the sales during any chosen period, but obviously the same products are often sold multiple times during a day, so when I'm ordering I have to look at every transaction and consider whether to re-buy the same items multiple times, and then look at another report showing how many were sold during the past months. If you were in a business like mine you’d appreciate the difference between looking at several hundred individual transactions and looking at a single list that summarizes what was sold, how many remain in stock, and how many were sold in the past three months. I think a good POS system should be able to produce a list of what was sold in one column alongside another column showing how many remain in inventory, and a third column showing how many were sold during the previous three months or whatever time period the user would choose as a guide to decide how many of each to re-buy for stock. QuickBooks Pro will not do this. Also, QuickBooks will not let you copy the name of an item in a report, which would make reordering easier. Instead, I have to type the name of what I want when I go to the suppliers’ ordering systems.

Third, it won’t handle some barcodes. There are some that’ll work in the “Item List,” but not in the “Make a Sale” function and some vice versa. Some won’t work in either function. We never had this problem with Microsoft Point of Sale.

Fourth, and worst, QuickBooks drops transactions and changes the quantities of items in inventory. Every night when I do my tallies I have more money in the till than I should have for a number of sales that day as reported by QuickBooks. I’ve seen no rhyme or reason for this happening—the software just decides on its own to delete a transaction or two every day. It also decides on its own to make changes to the quantities of items in inventory, so I don’t really know how many of an item we have in stock without walking to the shelf and counting them myself. I seldom have time to do this, so I frequently order things we already have plenty of, or we run out of things and don’t notice it until a customer complains or we just see a hole in the shelf where something should go.

I’ve tried to imagine a business that would be satisfied with this software. Please don’t recommend it to clients with high product turnover and many transactions to keep up with.