Hi all,

this is intended as a thread for any site attendee's of the Intuit roadshow to add their comments on their experience of the event and related thoughts about the Intuit products.

My report relates to the Custard Factory event in Birmingham. Hope that Amanda gets chance to add some comments on the event that she attended.

In my opinion the event was excellent and a real credit to Intuit with all four speakers being strong orators with an excellent backup support team.

If anyone gets the chance I would highly recommend attending both to learn a little about the products and also as a networking event... The free copy of QB 2013 accountant edition at the end of it is just icing on the cake really (also came away with several freebie 30 day trials of Pro, Premier and Payroll).

I think many there were comparing QB to Sage which to my mind QB is the better product with excellent reports, true Excel integration and really good data mining that I would say even beats VT from the perspective of where you can mine the data from (i.e. it appears that any field on a report can be mined back to its origins).

The one thing that I wasn't happy with was that the software is being pushed as the accountant edition yet there is no iXBRL tagging and currently no intention to add it. Alison mentioned that to file accounts you would also need an additional third party product such as VT or IRIS.

I know that many accountancy practices currently use Sage and Iris in that sort of scenario so can see where Intuit is coming from but to my mind that is a serious shortfall in the software for those preparing final accounts meaning that you will need to factor another £238 onto the cost for VT Accounts (I'm assuming here that everyone in this business has Excel) in order to produce proper statutory accounts with all of the add in pages and for iXBRL tagging.

Of course, such assumes that one needs to go that far and I know that a lot of the readers here do not require that functionality of their software.

Quickbooks and VT are both good for at least ninety nine companies.

Where QB seems to excel is in it's user freindly nature.

VT is really not designed for end users but I can see how QB, espechially in it's cloud guise could be sold to others who want to do it themselves and then all brought together by us at the period end.

For clients who want to do it themselves then QB seems a really good and relatively straight forward alternative to VT Transaction+ but there will be more period end work for us moving the QB data to VT accounts in order to produce the statutory accounts if the client is on QB. That would lead me to try and keep as many clients as possible on VT Transaction+ as there is true seemless integration between that and VT Accounts.

That said, transitioning via CSV files through Excel should make that a relatively straight forwards affair... Jut miight take a bit of firking around with to start with to perfect the periodic data migrations.

There was only minor discussion about the Intuit cloud bookkeeping product (more may have been discussed in the post lecture huddles) but one thing that came from that which I found interesting was that flat rate VAT works with the cloud product but is not integral to the traditional desktop product.

Intuit seem to be firmly behind the move to cloud offerings but the way that it works is a little different to their traditional approach in that every client gets (and pays for) their own cloud software the bookkeeper or accountant then has remote access to that software included in what the client pays.

Will clients go for that? I certainly don't think that mine would unless I dropped my prices by what they were then paying to Intuit or alternatively I took on the fee's myself which would result in the same reduced bottom line for me.

The question that I ommited to ask which I should have is if one has both traditional and cloud clients. For the cloud clients do they integrate with the quickbooks Accountant edition? My assumption was that it should be seamless integration and it wasn't until I was on the train on the way home that the penny dropped in relation to the revelation relating to flat rate VAT showing that the cloud and traditional products are quite different and I should not simply assume that they will work together seamlessly.

All in all I was very impressed with the product and those presenting it in the roadshow. I would recomend to anyone who has not already attended that if they can still get in on one of the remaining four events then they should seriously consider it as both a learning and networking event with a lot to consider about what the adoption of QB could do to improve your business.

If anyone is yet to go, please ask about the integration of the desktop accountant edition of the software with clients using the cloud ad post on here.

The remaining gigs are...

Note that this is a thread about Quickbooks and the roadshow rather than Cloud vs Traditional. If anyone wants to revisit that debate we'll open a new thread up.

Ok, batton passed to the next person who attended one of these roadshow events and wants to add any additional information gleened from their session or any corrections to my take on things as detailed above.

talk in a bit,

Shaun.