QuickBooks for Mac 2012
If you’re already using QuickBooks for your business accounting, it may interest you to know that Intuit is about to release a new version for Mac (as others have reported).
It’s too soon to see actual reviews of this application, but I haven’t heard anything about Intuit fixing the biggest problem with QuickBooks: lock in. QuickBooks provides no real export option for your data. QuickBooks doesn’t even share data between its Mac and Windows versions! This means that when your business accounting needs change in the future, switching to better tools is going to be very difficult and time consuming. This is exactly the kind of automation that computers should do better than humans; but Intuit forces you to do it manually. (Alternately, you could hire a geek, like me, to create a customized export tool for you; but this gets expensive.)
However, those of you already locked into QuickBooks might want to upgrade to a more comfortable cage, when this new version comes out in a few weeks. You’ll need a relatively new Mac running the current (Lion 10.7) or previous (Snow Leopard 10.6.7) version of Mac OS X.
